Hegelian dialectics and please shut up about "men in crisis"

I studied Hegel in grad school. I remember nothing about Hegel. (AI, write Hegel for me. Thanks). AI: “OK. Hegel blah blah dialectics, something.” I vaguely recall the concept visually, though, as forces (or contradictions) of history pushing against each other like tectonic plates.

No idea if this is remotely applicable but every damn movement in the past ten years has triggered a backlash and the backlash has flung us to almost the exact opposite of the movement’s intentions. “Defund” became Joe Biden shouting “fund fund fund!” from his podium. MeToo disappeared, as a cultural force, and now there are 55 takes a day positing that “men are in crisis” because incels can’t get laid and women do better in school.

“They have lost an empire but not yet found a role,” David Brooks opined last year in the New York Times, likening the American man’s predicament to the British empire following WW2. Brook’s absurd formulation is indicative of the “men in crisis” narrative pushed by everyone from Jordan Peterson to Tucker Carlson. It suggests America is teetering on the edge of collapse because US boys and men have been castrated by feminism and wokeness, leading to professional underperformance, leading to not being able to get laid. “The result of fewer men in college? Fewer men that women are interested in,” professor Scott Galloway argues. “This is good for nobody.”

I’ve tried to be sympathetic to the plight of the male incel, I really have. But the ones who decided to kill people, like Eliott Rodgers or that dude in Canada, were not only entitled psychos—they were perfectly average looking, which I imagine is true of many “incels.” If you’re an average or even below-average looking guy and you can’t get a girlfriend, stop watching Andrew Tate and go to therapy (it’s a different issue if you can’t get a girlfriend because you’re waiting for Margot Robbie or the Romanian teenagers trafficked by Andrew Tate, but in that case, also, go to therapy). It’s actually women that get pegged as officially “undateable” for any number of infractions, from weight to being “crazy.”

It’s not news that social change—from literal, bloody revolutions to just regular old protests—inevitably trigger a backlash. But has the Internet just made it happen at a dizzying speed?

A few years ago everyone was worried that dating was over because crazed harpies would accuse men of rape if they asked them out. Such was the awesome—and awesomely viral—power of #MeToo.

That … didn’t happen. To be clear, it’s good that never happened! Dating is nice. I’m just pointing out that the zeitgeist was so intense we thought we were headed to a brave new world of completely altered relations between the sexes. What happened was, a few drunken holidays party were cancelled for liability reasons (in media, bad things happen when alcohol and nerds mix at a holiday party). A few big guys got fired and, in extreme cases, jailed.

Hopefully, younger execs will think twice about discriminating based on looks and using the workplace as a sexual hunting ground. See, my old media boss literally said the words, “You don’t HAVE to be attractive to work here, it just really helps,” to me. It was a fucking online news site, not a movie studio, or even cable news. A visual component was not necessary. This, by the way, fucked men over too, since my boss’s rules of attraction only applied to women and so he didn’t hire qualified men if they were too good-looking. This is why I wish MeToo had morphed into a labor movement.

But instead it feels like we just got … bored.

At the height of MeToo, a few women and I MeToo’d that former boss (If anyone’s wondering I applied my OCD to the situation and made sure that everything was fact-checked and nothing taken out of context or exagerated). It turned into a This American Life episode called “5 Women” that was universally beloved. So much so that we’ve gotten thousands in life rights payments because a movie house wanted to turn it into a Netflix series. As the glacially slow process of getting a story to the screen was further hobbled by the pandemic, interest waned, then fully vanished. “We already had a MeToo story,” one place sheepishly told producers.

It’s for the best! We were all wary of the whole thing. I hated how, when the TAL episode was getting buzz, I’d try to talk to people about my criminal justice work and they just wanted to talk about sexual harassment. Around that time, I interviewed for a job as politics editor at a big national magazine. The (all men) who interviewed me wanted to gossip about MeToo a lot more than they wanted to hear my thoughts on Andrew Cuomo’s budget. After having me go through three stressful interviews, they hired a man.

No sour grapes, I doubt people on their death beds regret missing out on an underpaid job in a dying industry. I’m just using it to make the point that we—myself included—seem to treat social movements, as, well, Netflix content. We binge and then we move on to the next. I guess the current viral sensation is fretting over “men in crisis.” I think Liam Hemsworth should play a tortured teenager who’s in crisis because feminism and society are emasculating men and he can’t get a date.