Part II: It Came From Something Awful Book Review

If you missed part I, start there and read threads 1-3.

Thread 4: Patriarchy demands an active role. 

Gentlemen, I beseech you to do your part.  I'm not saying women don't have power to  make change, but in the manosphere, where women are often pushed into regressive roles, viewed primarily as  housewives and valued for their reproductive capacity to create a white ethnostate, women are sidelined in the broader conversations. 

I have used my own platform to speak about the rise of the trad wife phenomena and the role women play in fighting brainwashing (see  GOP Drama & TradWife Trauma or Tradwives Explain How Feminism Tricked You). 

Our young men need non-crazy role models. I know you don't want it to be your labor, but they're more likely to listen to you than a woman they consider physically and mentally inferior. 

Thread 5: Parenting choices matter. 

Every single one of these wild stories of a 12 or 15 year old starting, managing, and running a site begins with what's going on at home.  Consistently the story goes, a tween has unfettered and unlimited access to the internet and has now built _________ (fill-in-the-blank with whatever cesspool platform/app/program/website you would like to).  While I’m not a parent, I’ve had parents express how powerless they feel despite holding the purse strings and making the rules at home. Autonomy and independence do not take priority over red pilling. Yes, young men will make their choices and they can rebel against your strict rules, but there are concrete norms you can adhere to in our own family. Keep tabs on what your kids are playing (you're still paying for things). Put the gaming device in a public place. Engage in convos about the online communities your kid is using. Get your kid plugged into a community better aligned with values like hard work, empathy, and respect. Maybe that's church. Maybe that's sports. Maybe that's playing an instrument. To be clear, I know some amazing young men who live much of their lives online, but their kindness, compassion, and empathy started at home and continue in both the online and real worlds they exist in. 

Thread 6: Honestly it's not even about young men. 
Throughout the book, Beran drops some subtle (and not so subtle) remarks about the stifled growth of men, the childish mentality never grown out of, the immature approach to relationships, etc. 

This is the problem now. The Italian dude next to me on my flight last week was listening to Joe Rogan. I recently had a root canal and my Lebanese dentist was listening to Joe Rogan while working. Each episode of The Joe Rogan Experience gets approx 16 million downloads. Taylor Swift’s largest attendance record came in at 96 thousand while Beyonce brought in just over 240,000 fans. Clearly, Rogan is resonating with young and not-so-young men all across the globe. I don't have the time  to dig into the Andrew Tate nonsense, but the issue of the manosphere is not just an American problem. I also don't have the fortitude to lay out an argument about the rise of the right and fascist ideologies sweeping the globe (highly recommend the podcast Popular Front with Jake Hanrahan). 

All those 4chan young men may have grown up (technically), but they are still thinking and acting like children (honestly, it's an insult to children because I teach 17 yr old students who are far wiser and more savvy). Now we have 30 somethings uniting forces with 70 somethings at the junction of insecurity and toxic masculinity. That is our voting block. That just might explain the 2016 and 2024 elections.  

What Now? I don't know. 

While I don't have any background in formal trolling and I personally found my sense of self through my faith community and music, I'm old enough to have a majority of the stories in this book in my peripheral view.  

In retrospect, I saw many of the implications of the ideologies explored in this book come to life when I started teaching high school in 2006, working with young men searching for their sense of purpose and belonging . More significantly, I felt a direct impact when I became a founding member of TAN (Tacoma Against Nazis) organizing against the local Nazi affiliated tattoo parlor in my city.  I won't forget being doxxed or the fear I felt worrying that my loved ones might be targeted due to my activism. That didn’t stop me from speaking out-–and fortunately, my trollers were too stupid to realize that they didn’t have the correct info or that I was a public school teacher and many of my details were easily accessible online.

Today, I am acutely aware of the messages of hate and misogyny bombarding our young men, luring them into creepy forums, and promoting violent behavior.

At the risk of making a listicle and essentializing a complex topic, I'll end with some recommendations and a call to action. 

• Read this book. 

• Men, please step up with your colleagues, your friends, and young men around you.

• Read or listen to some of the sources I’ve embedded here.

• If you have any nephews, sons, or brothers,, please start engaging them and offering a counter to the brainwashing they are receiving from the manosphere. 

Part I: It Came From Something Awful Book Review

Y'all, it's been far too long since I've taken to the keyboard. While I have pages of scribbled notes and ideas to flush out, I just finished reading It Came From Something Awful by Dale Beran and feel compelled to share some reactions and evolving thinking on the ideas explored in the book. 

I'd venture to say Nate wasn't exaggerating when he pressed the urgency of grabbing a copy in a recent Takes & Typos newsletter “A Syllabus for the Manosphere”. This might be the most important book of the last ten years (up there with Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny). I wish folks were reading this book with the obsessiveness in which they’re consuming The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. It does a far better, fact-based job of explaining what's happening with social media, echo chambers and the identity crisis facing young people today. It doesn't pander to over-anxious parents or those who want to blame phones and social media for everything. However, it’s less palatable, facing an ugly, gross truth about the pursuit of belonging, validity and self-worth in online spaces. 

Beran’s writing is precise and methodical, guiding readers through a dense web of historical and cultural currents. While the book tackles many urgent questions about toxic online spaces, I want to highlight a few threads that struck a personal chord—shaped by my time in online forums, the books I’ve read, my teaching, and ongoing conversations about toxic masculinity and the manosphere.

Thread 1: Yes, our current version of fascism meets white supremacy is real. The step by step walk down history lane in this book is 🇮🇹🧑‍🍳💋. At first glance you might think linking 4chan to 8kun to Charlottesville to the Trump administration is hyperbolic until you read this book. While depressing, you can't ignore the facts. There is a clear through line, a cause and effect sequence of events that bring us to where we are now. I think we all want to believe that key historical and cultural events are not connected to each other, but Beran forces us to face reality. 

Thread 2: Consumerism, capitalism and misogyny are bedfellows. 

Y'all have probably read Naomi Klein's No Logo (cited frequently in this book) and maybe some other arguments about manufactured masculinity and femininity and the evolutionary ideal that attraction, identity, and social validity come from economic power. The way Beran unpacks this complex dynamic, though, is really remarkable.

The idea that toxic masculinity and misogyny sell isn’t new, but I don’t think it’s analyzed or critiqued enough in public spaces. I immediately thought of Rogan, Tate, and so many other misogynists fomenting bitterness and promoting their men’s rights nonsense . When I read this section of the book, I was reminded of the PBS documentary Merchants of Cool. I used this documentary in my classroom to help students explore the relationship between consumerism and dissent, teaching them to be more critical about the ways in which marketers are manufacturing what it means to be cool in order to make money off of their angst or rejection of “normal.” Today, at the crossroads of discontentment, male fragility, and misogyny, big business sits waiting to take your hard earned cash, not giving one iota about who is hurt or marginalized in the process. Corporations don’t care if we bicker about what is/isn’t true about PizzaGate or whether or not women are inferior to men and should be subservient to their every whim and need. They care about lining their pockets.

Thread 3: We long for human connection & belonging even if it comes at a cost. 

At our core, we want to be part of something–be it a small group of friends, a club of weirdos who take a spin class at 5am, or a band of unathletic people playing indoor soccer on a Sunday night (shout out to my teammates on Icepak FC). Since the term “identity politics” was created in 1973 and jumped into mainstream discourse in the 80, folks have wrestled with the benefits or limitations of intellectual debate around identity. To be clear, some folks build their entire identity on the deconstruction and rejection of identity politics. 

I knew that 4chan, 8kun and similar sites thrived on creating a collective identity by rejecting the concept of identity, but I didn’t really really understand the extent of it until this book. Two examples from the book–the LGBT board and another board I can’t remember the name of right now. In these spaces, participants posted messages that revealed a deep sense of self-loathing and disenfranchisement. On these boards, others echoed those sentiments and, through the rejection of their identity, found belonging and community. Another example is when folks, struggling with mental health and depression  shared suicide ideation, eventually saying goodbye to the community and taking their lives. Those stories really break my heart and yet I can’t help thinking about the way in which those people experienced human connection. 

Just after I read this book, Nate and I watched Dear Kelly in which Andrew Callaghan follows the story of an older gentleman he meets at a “White Lives Matter” rally. In that documentary, Callaghan postulates how people join extremist/far right movements because they want security, significance, and connection, confirming the human desire for belonging.

To Be Continued…