Dec 31, 2025 08:24 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 31, 2025 08:29 PM by C C.)
RELATED: How "femcels" differ from incels
- - - - - - - - -
The Masculine Mystique
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-ma...-mystique/
EXCERPT: But of course Frankenstein was written by a woman. Today, most writing and reading are done by women, and a great deal of that is about sex. Lowbrow fiction is good sex and highbrow fiction is bad sex. There’s something perverse in using the consumption of such writing to conclude that most books are now for women, as though watching a lot of porn would make men into cinephiles. But the trend goes beyond erotica. It is deep in gender polarization, which affects everything from TikTok content recommendations to voting patterns to dating practices.
Many of my most beautiful female friends are self-styled “femcels.” Well-admired but confoundingly dateless and sexless, they are exposed to virtually no “content” that adequately represents male perceptions and experiences, and are protected by contemporary social etiquette and by men themselves from conversations and interactions that would forcefully get such things across. On a date, one might hear about Taylor Swift concerts and astrological charts; afterward, one might become a character in a story of beastlike sexual control, hearing the rattle of antidepressants on a bedside table.
Perhaps all that has happened is that women of this generation simultaneously believe their elders about what men are and yet have continued to desire men. If men are monsters, if masculinity is a monstrosity, but women keep desiring men, and the more masculine the better, then women must desire monstrosity. This has a certain intuitiveness, and it helps to explain the seeming contradiction in the desires of ambitious self-proclaimed feminists like Romy being aroused by domination.
It also helps to explain the virally popular New York Times article "The Trouble With Wanting Men" from this summer about “heterofatalism,” in which the author Jean Garnett suggests that heterosexuality might be doomed, and that it might be men’s fault. Turned down for sex, she writes: “We all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to ‘man up and [expletive] us.’”
When one is so convinced that male appetites are insatiable carnivore engines of carnal enmeshment, it is only logical to see men’s refusal to [__] them as a loss of masculinity -- a failure of men to be men... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - -
The Masculine Mystique
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-ma...-mystique/
EXCERPT: But of course Frankenstein was written by a woman. Today, most writing and reading are done by women, and a great deal of that is about sex. Lowbrow fiction is good sex and highbrow fiction is bad sex. There’s something perverse in using the consumption of such writing to conclude that most books are now for women, as though watching a lot of porn would make men into cinephiles. But the trend goes beyond erotica. It is deep in gender polarization, which affects everything from TikTok content recommendations to voting patterns to dating practices.
Many of my most beautiful female friends are self-styled “femcels.” Well-admired but confoundingly dateless and sexless, they are exposed to virtually no “content” that adequately represents male perceptions and experiences, and are protected by contemporary social etiquette and by men themselves from conversations and interactions that would forcefully get such things across. On a date, one might hear about Taylor Swift concerts and astrological charts; afterward, one might become a character in a story of beastlike sexual control, hearing the rattle of antidepressants on a bedside table.
Perhaps all that has happened is that women of this generation simultaneously believe their elders about what men are and yet have continued to desire men. If men are monsters, if masculinity is a monstrosity, but women keep desiring men, and the more masculine the better, then women must desire monstrosity. This has a certain intuitiveness, and it helps to explain the seeming contradiction in the desires of ambitious self-proclaimed feminists like Romy being aroused by domination.
It also helps to explain the virally popular New York Times article "The Trouble With Wanting Men" from this summer about “heterofatalism,” in which the author Jean Garnett suggests that heterosexuality might be doomed, and that it might be men’s fault. Turned down for sex, she writes: “We all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to ‘man up and [expletive] us.’”
When one is so convinced that male appetites are insatiable carnivore engines of carnal enmeshment, it is only logical to see men’s refusal to [__] them as a loss of masculinity -- a failure of men to be men... (MORE - details)
