While I don’t usually use Journal of Cogency as a blog where I make self-referential statements, my choice of topic here is bound up with my current work, so I will start there. If you’ve been following me on Bluesky or keeping an eye here or on my newsletter/patreon, you’ll be aware that I’m currently working on a partial commentary on Ellul’s Propagandes; recently, I completed a second treatment about the propaganda machine (separate from the one posted earlier to this site) and those ideas are fresh in my mind. Today I watched a very good video by Brigitte Empire on YouTube, titled “Why Conservatives Can’t Get Dates”. In this, Brigitte goes over a lot of the recent history in American dating as it relates to politics: right-wing social media, right-wing dating apps, and the failures inherent to those.
In the concluding statement of the video (prior to a song), Brigitte says the following about conservative men who run into rejection when dating:
These people don’t see how off-putting they are because they have surrounded themselves exclusively with people who agree with their horrifying opinions, or at least don’t challenge them enough to make them consider how off-putting they are. And the thing is, I don’t know if, in their heart of hearts, all of them believe in this stuff? How many of them say this stuff because they think it’s what a strong man should think? That’s what it means to be a good Christian? Both of these things are wrong, obviously, but there’s a lot of messaging from the political right but also from the media reinforcing these beliefs. If they could come out of their radicalization chamber for a second and get some oxygen, if they talked to women openly about this stuff and took in the actual reaction people have and consider it instead of getting defensive or ignoring objections… would they all stick with this hardline, anti-woman, racist, queerphobic worldview? Some of them would, for sure, but I think we tend to overestimate how many people on the right are not true believers, but just sheep who have followed their herd into a very dark place. Maybe I’m too optimistic about that, but I don’t think so. I think we can reach some of these people.
To a significant degree, I do agree with Brigitte. I think there are more people who are not true believers than are often assumed, and I think many right-wingers can be reached. I do think there is a significant amount of naiveté in the assessment, however. The idea that conservatives men “don’t see how off-putting they are” for instance, or that a lot of them would change if they would just “come out of their radicalization chamber” and “get some oxygen”; these ideas don’t really hold up to scrutiny.
As evidence of this, I want to talk about a comment left on the video. I will try not to give any details (being posted in public does not mean the person wants it shared everywhere and linked back to them), but here is the gist: The commenter was having a conversation with their brother who they knew was already far-right and had an interest in sex tourism. The commenter said they preferred it when their partner enjoyed the process of having sex with them. The brother said that the fact the partner wasn’t enjoying it is what the brother liked about the situation.
There is no society on Earth where it is actually acceptable to say or think that. I know that conservatives often make arguments that reduce to the idea that it isn’t important if a woman consents, but the arguments are always framed in such a way that if consent is not given, this is simply a “failure” on the part of the woman. It is never stated that a man should enjoy the fact that a woman is not consenting. Now let me be clear, I’m not saying that men have never talked about enjoying committing rape against unwilling people, they certainly have. What I am saying is that it is never portrayed as a publicly moral feeling. In this case, my point is that we can’t say that the brother didn’t know what they said was possibly offensive. It just can’t be true that the brother thinks what he’s doing is normal.
The argument that Brigitte Empire presents is pretty similar to Ellul’s concept of total propaganda: her “radicalization chamber” obviously implies a kind of surrounding, which is one of the key features of total propaganda. A submerging is probably better, though Ellul doesn’t use that terminology; surrounding and penetrating is what he says. The suggestion is that these people are just pushed into these right-wing strains and overcome by them, and that’s why they simply follow along with the herd. But one of the reasons that I am writing my commentary on Propagandes is to dispel this idea of total propaganda. In that vein, I want to explore the divide between “conservative men” and “the rest of society” which the video establishes.
I will admit in being a bit provocative in describing Brigitte Empire’s argument as showing naiveté; my comment was much more directed at the perspective than Brigitte herself. I’ve got myself into a corner here and there’s no way out without sounding a bit condescending, but since I can only dig: it’s likely that Brigitte doesn’t believe that the issue can be reduced to just “conservative men need to open their ears”. However, the fact of producing a timely video for YouTube constrains both the breadth of the explanation and of specific research, so that likely constrained where the argument was going to go; this is especially true if her video was meant to possibly de-radicalize some of these people. I don’t have experience in de-radicalization so I can’t be sure about that. I can, however, give evidence for my own time constraints in research.
I say this very frequently, but one of the most important books I’ve read in my life is The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner. Much of my analysis, in many areas, is based on insights I gained from that book. That said, it has been a bit since I’ve read it, and it isn’t the kind of book that you can just mine for quotes whenever you want. So while there should be quotes from The Creation of Patriarchy here, there won’t be. But you should read the book and if you have read it you will probably understand a bit better where my arguments are coming from.
The major problem with the conclusion that Brigitte presents is the assumption that what conservative men want is for women to like them. I think this is plainly disproven by the evidence she presents in the video, such as one little creep talking about how women automatically reject conservative men because they assume they’ll be racist while giving off the vibes of the most racist man in his time zone. That particular person was fairly clear that what they were after was someone who would agree that their place was to serve him. This oppression of labor gives a hint at what the alt-right worldview is really about: domination.
In mainstream discourse, I usually see people ask what “the manosphere” offers to young men. This is a good question. Unfortunately, too often the conclusion is that the manosphere offers men belonging and validation. This does play nicely with the common “crisis of masculinity” narrative, and the observation “men fear women will laugh at them; women fear men will kill them.” That is, if you believe that what men are “lacking” is belonging and validation (the primary conclusion to draw from these two ideas), then it makes sense that the success of the manosphere lies in the fact that they offer belonging and validation.
It strikes me here that a Deleuzian turn, viewing desire not as filling a lack but as a productive process, is somewhat helpful to understanding the problem with this line of thought. More pressing, though, is the way that Lerner ties patriarchy not to subjective feelings like belonging but to more objective concepts like power and labor. Patriarchy and the manosphere don’t succeed because they make men feel good about themselves, they succeed because they offer a framework for men to gain what they want: unrestricted access to the bodies and the labor of women and children.
Patriarchy is an unconscious conspiracy. This is not to say that it’s a conspiracy which emerges out of the unconscious of men, or that men are not aware of their desires. By saying that it’s an unconscious conspiracy, I mean to imply only that men are generally not inducted into any formal conspiracy. I do believe there are such conspiracies which exist from time to time in order to reassert patriarchy; this is how I would explain the historical shifts back to regression from times of more robust rights for women and others who were not adult men. In general, however, the conspiracy of patriarchy is upheld through cultural means, and each person’s relationship to patriarchy evolves for their own purposes.
What makes patriarchy into a conspiracy, despite the fact that there isn’t a grand organization or a newsletter or anything like that, is that it is understood that it must be held up by collusion. Husbands and patriarchs must all agree to enforce certain standards of behavior in their wives and children, standards which leave husbands free to do whatever they want. Consider the fact that being “henpecked”, or “intimidated” by your wife, used to be a crime in England; both to do and to suffer without struggle. Another piece of evidence here is the fact that people still argue that rape cannot happen within marriage, something which defies both common sense and rational analysis.
While it’s going too far to say that most men were not considered abusive throughout history, in that it’s a claim that would need evidence, I think it’s appropriate to say that not every man was interested in every type of abuse. Certainly, there were men who would have approved of the idea that a man cannot rape his wife even though they themselves would never do such a thing. Behavior like this is the purest expression of patriarchy-as-conspiracy. Such a man may agree that actually committing marital rape is horrible, but they will never allow a law or general rule to be passed that outlaws it because that would necessarily constrain them as well. They might not wish to do it but it is important to them that they have the power to do it if they did wish to.
This is also the source of the seemingly natural solidarity that many men feel, the “locker room” or “boys’ club” feel which is inherently hostile to anyone but adult men. It isn’t that they share the interests of sports or cars which primarily unites them, it’s the fact that they know they have an audience for their complaints about women and children, an audience which will reinforce their presumed right to power over those people. It is their shared investment in this conspiracy of power. It should also be clear that the desire for this patriarchy is not an innate quality in men; it’s not genetic or epigenetic. Not every man gets this desire, and not every man who does get it will do so at the same time in their lives; usually, when it is not burned in by culture when one is young, the turn to the conspiracy comes after some failure, rejection, or inability. Desire for patriarchy comes out of a desire for power over the world. As a man, I obviously have a stake in removing patriarchy from innate qualities in men, but I make the argument because I think a focus on social structures is what will allow us to break down the patriarchal conspiracy.
The problem is that a person’s relationship with patriarchy is multifaceted. If, as Brigitte’s conclusion presents, the issue is simply that conservative men are not relating to women well, then the solution would be simple, and would likely run along the lines of her conclusion. But this isn’t the only reason that conservative men support the patriarchy, and it cannot be the reason that conservative women support the patriarchy. For some of the conservative men it absolutely is about the fact that they can’t get a date, and they turn to patriarchy because it effectively promises them help in capturing a woman. Usually, especially in the United States and similar countries, this isn’t an active help but simple establishment of norms and behaviors: get this kind of job which is largely reserved for men, get the approval of men which counts more socially than the approval of women, do what is expected of a man so that any woman in a relationship feels guilty for not falling in line, etc. Sometimes, especially with localized and intense conspiracies such as college fraternities, men will actively help one another in procuring women to exert power over.
Sometimes what patriarchy offers is not a way to capture a woman but a way to cover over abuse. Sometimes it offers a way to extract labor from one’s family. Sometimes it simply offers a network to other powerful people; for non-men who are aligned with conservative politics, this aspect is the primary draw, but it also draws in many men. Sometimes all that a person wants out of patriarchy is a feeling of power, an association with the line of thought that those who have power are emanating.
One of the problems that patriarchy presents on an interpersonal level is something that Brigitte talks about earlier: when someone moves so far into the right, when they get so far radicalized, they cut themselves off from other people. But why does this happen? Why is it that one horrible belief often entails others, especially when the belief is about exclusion or superiority? Why do people who display highly intense misogyny also tend to care little about the world around them, about the suffering of others, about the actual future? I don’t have a firm answer, but the comment which I talked about earlier got me reading a few articles and I started forming one.
This section might get a little hard to read, as it will likely concern sexual abuse. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to write yet because the argument itself isn’t about sexual abuse, but I know what I read for background and you’ve seen my relation of the comment. I’m putting the trigger warning here now because I probably won’t come back to edit this out, so I just wanted to cover my bases.
Sex (sexual activity) has a utility, in its broadest sense. Now utility has to be understood in terms of utility-for-someone, so it can’t mean that sex has the same utility for everyone; instead, the statement means that sex will most likely have some utility for most people. The most obvious kinds of utility that sex serves are pleasure for the participants and the creation of babies. Another utility sex has is the performance of gender, or the subversion of that performance (by which I mean not homosexuality in any part but activities like pegging, female domination, sexual roleplay, etc.). Another is as an expression of love or affection between people. And still another is as an expression of power. While I am sure that explorations into why sex is so culturally and personally important for people have been made, this isn’t my forte; I say that only to say that it’s obvious, regardless of why, that sex is very important to most if not all people, in one way or another.
When I say that sex may have a utility as an expression of power, I do not mean this in the sense of penetrating partner compared to penetrated partner, top partner against bottom partner, or anything of the kind. This expression of power is directly related to the importance that sex holds. I make the point of importance because I locate the expression of power not in the kind of act engaged in but in situations where some party is less willing than others and is being coerced into the act. All such coercions are expressions of power, of course: forcing someone to do your work, to eat something they have refused, to go places they don’t want to go. It’s just that sex, for whatever reason, is one of the most intense things one can be made to do. Not only does someone who has been sexually victimized tend to be more emotionally affected than someone who is victimized in another way, a person who enjoys using their power over people will often value sexual abuse more highly than other kinds of abuse.
When I think back to what the brother in the comment said, all I can think is that what the brother is describing is not pleasure, it is the utility of power from sex. It does not make logical sense that committing sexual abuse would be more pleasurable than having sex with an engaged and interested partner. There’s no other shared activity in which that would be true, that you would get a better result if one person was unwilling. It can’t be the case that the brother wants to go to these places and engage in this sex with people who he has power over because he believes that the sex he gets will be more pleasurable than the kind of sex that the commenter prefers. It must be the expression of power primarily that the brother is interested in.
Using sex to feel powerful in this way, where the feeling of power is derived from breaking the partner’s consent (in law or in spirit), is inhumane and anti-social. This is not a personal or narrow opinion, this is the general opinion of polite public society in every society that I have heard of. Even patriarchalists do not actively promote the idea of using sex to feel power like this. In order to continue indulging in this kind of behavior, one has to become distant from other concerns. The abandonment of more social values such as sympathy and tolerance happens, in part, because such ideas conflict with the inhumanity inherent in seeking to feel power through sexual abuse. It also pushes them away from experiencing the other utilities of sex. They are no longer interested in sex for pleasure, or procreation, or for love. To the extent that they are expressing their gender, it is as an expression of power: men usually as an affirmation of their presumed correct role, women likely as a subversion of their expected role. The fact that many rapes, especially in punishment situations, do not happen with sexual parts but with objects further support the idea that the expression of power becomes paramount for some people.
In these ways, people who become obsessed with the feeling and exertion of power will naturally become separated from the rest of society. But this is not simply sheep following the herd. These are people making specific choices for specific reasons. Why they decide they want power over connection is not something I think I could answer at this moment, and certainly not as a few extra paragraphs in this piece. But we can’t take conservative men at face value when they say that what they want is to be successful at dating. What they want, by and large, is to exert power over women, over their partners more generally; haven’t a couple of Thiel’s boyfriends allegedly fallen out of windows?
Do I think there are conservative men who can stop being conservative and “join society”, as it were? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that people will simply be convinced that they need to be more tolerant in order to get dates. These are not people who I think it is possible to reach with rhetoric alone, as important as I think rhetoric is. Messages like Brigitte’s should keep being made but I believe (without evidence; I haven’t looked deep into de-radicalization) that such work is largely to act as a bridge for people who have already decided that they want to turn back from patriarchy. My work is also not going to convince people to turn back, but I am not attempting to do that; I’m just trying to analyze power and relationships.
But I don’t put much weight on rhetoric or propaganda changing these situations. There will have to be a revolution. We can talk about what society can look like afterwards, but there’s no point in me trying to figure out a grand theory as to why conservative men are like that. The main thing is that patriarchy exists already and is powerful, so there is clearly something to be gained by joining it. There’s no propaganda I could make, or anyone could make, that will defang patriarchy or whittle it away into nothing. Patriarchy defends itself. It always will. It simply has to be smashed, and we already know how to smash things. And if we’re talking about after the revolution, we can start just by theorizing how to keep the new society safe from patriarchy emerging again.