Thread by @arctotherium42

Alaric on 2010s feminism and sexual norms. He sees it as a concrete, sharp break in 2014 alien to anything that came before. which almost overnight made anti-male sentiment the most pervasive cultural force in the Western world.

2014 saw a huge top-down feminist media campaign both motivating and caused by government initiatives and international institutions. This was the true start of Woke as a feminist and internationalist movement, before it became more racialist and parochial.

2014 redefined consent and made rape and street harassment, low and falling for decades in the American mainstream, centerpieces of American social consciousness.

The feminist revolution quickly became very silly (remember manspreading, mansplaining, phallocentrism?).

The gender war permanently warped many young adults' ability to interact with the opposite sex (COVID lockdowns hitting in the transition to adulthood made this even worse).

Discourse on the deaths of marriage and dating norms ignores that these were not abandoned but are actively being killed.

Men have become framed as rapists-by-default; this message is implanted in schools, universities, and workplaces, with the result that men's motives in all interactions with women are considered suspect. To avoid this, many men infantilize and feminize themselves.

Gender war myths dominate media - types of men (frat bros, musicians, nerds) are defined in terms of expected sexual crimes, and a white knight narrative (sexually aggressive [white] man, innocent girl, outside actor protects girl) became a standard [extremely contrived] trope.

This fictional white knight narrative killed the sexually-loose hookup culture of 2000s college campuses and was completely new, not an organic evolution of pre-2014 American media.

If the post-2014 gender war rendered male sexuality borderline criminal, it did the opposite for female, providing unconditional support for female sexual expression, even prostitution. Sexual desirability became men's chief virtue.

The one bit of female sexuality not celebrated is sincere attraction and love for men; genuine, mutual love between a heterosexual couple went from commonplace to rare in media [cf, Frozen, Modern Family.

Trying to appeal to men has become taboo for young women, hence the bizarre sexual aposematism of zoomer women.

I don't think the 2014 revolution was as unprecedented as Alaric believes; here's Scott Aaronson talking about how he wished he'd been born a woman and tried to castrate himself (in the 90s) out of horror that a woman might realize he found them attractive.

Links to Aaronson's comment and Alaric's essay.
scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#commen…,
counterfeitsunset.neocities.org/Schizoposting.…