Certified Public Madman. Retired computer networking engineer. Retired Pagan elder. Retired from the boards of several non-profits. Former teacher, former rent-a-cop, former mind-machine salesman. Old-school science fiction fan and tabletop RPG game master. 2 newspaper a day reader since 1964. Proud anti-fascist. Social democrat. Cisgender white heterosexual male (he/him). Lifelong polyamorist, currently single.
I believe that nobody's life, liberty, or property are safe if there is anybody so rich that they're above the law, or so poor that they have nothing to lose.
I believe that government should take over a function only after it's been shown that the free market is either uninterested in or incapable of providing that function to everybody who needs it, at a price that everybody who needs it can afford.
I believe that policy direction should be set by free and fair elections with universal suffrage, but implementation should be in the hands of an apolitical professional civil service. I believe that the resulting solutions should be judged on the accuracy of their predictions and the quality/affordability of their results, not ideology or theology.
I believe in equal justice under law, which is why I will always resist, using all proportional and sufficient methods, the imposition of ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural rule, at home and our support for it anywhere else in the world. I am patriotic but fanatically anti-nationalist.
That's why I call myself a social democrat. Or, on days I'm willing to be misunderstood on purpose by the worst people in the world, an FDR-era "reform democrat." On the current American political spectrum, that puts me slightly to the right of the democratic socialists and significantly to the left of the liberal centrists, in the broad coalition currently described as "the progressives."
If I’ve learnt anything from my contact with the bdsm community, the poly community, the geek community and the atheist community is that any social group who claims to “not to be like other groups” and to be"accepting and safe for all" is going to spend a lot of energy hiding the predators within the community and silencing abuse survivors.
if nothing else, its a basic tolerance paradox: if you are tolerant of everyone, you will eventually become tolerant of intolerance. if you are safe for ‘everyone’ you are by definition safe for predators. its actually really good to discriminate and put rules and lines in the sand down, and expel people who break/cross them.
If I were going to pick one best-of episode of Marketplace podcasts' series "This Is Uncomfortable" for you to listen to? It'd be this one: "Confessions of a former homesteader."
I don't care why you're thinking about moving out of the cities, suburbs, exurbs and going "back to the land." (And if you're not, the interview subject really lays out why she and her husband did.) I don't care if it's because you're a ...
religious fundamentalist
political extremist "doomer"
environmental "doomer" or even just
exhausted by late-stage capitalism
... you really need to listen to the first half of this episode about how much it sucks being a yeoman farmer on your own personal land far away from the evils of the cities, and in ways you never considered. And it's easy to laugh at this particular couple because if you read between the lines, they started out as the worst kind of Quiverfull right-wing nutcases and the schadenfreude, if like me you despise that movement, starts off pretty tasty. But stick around for the denouement, because it's heartwarming in ways that are probably not what you expect.
And that's only the first half of the episode? The second is a recurring segment where the host acts as the accountability-buddy for a younger colleague who has gotten herself way into an unrelated bad financial situation and has been putting off fixing it because her executives aren't exactly functioning, because she's accumulated even more financial panic and aversion than she has actual debt.
And this episode's segment is about a subject near and dear to my heart: I don't care what incentives they offer you, run the fuck away from Capital One (and credit card rewards programs in general). I worked for MasterCard International when this shit was just getting started, long enough ago that I haven't written about just how evil Capital One is (and how credit cards in general are scarcely better) for Tumblr, and I sometimes forget how few of you know. Absolutely must-listen; it may even save your life.
there is nothing a corporation hates more than having employees, but a close second is having to provide a good or service in order to make money. these two reasons concisely explain is why the ai bubble formed in the first place.
Look what the universe got me for my 66th birthday!
I outlived yet another horrible person! That's so nice! I wasn't expecting anything!
Republican senator served in Senate since 2003 and was sharp Trump critic before becoming one of his most loyal backers
Rumor online is that he died of explosive diarrhea, which, plausible, is deadly to old people and circulating widely in his home state, thanks explicitly to disease surveillance that was cancelled by his beloved hero and strongman leader, Donald Trump. I hope it's true. It'll be nice if it turns out that the first known casualty was someone who enabled it.
I'm also seeing a lot of intense argument, especially on the left, about whether or not to point out, while we're cheering his death, that he spent almost his entirely life as a deeply closeted gay man who tried to protect his closeted identity by being as anti-gay as possible in public. At 66, I'm old enough to remember when Out magazine had to explain that they were adopting the policy that their one exception to their otherwise universal rule against involuntarily outing people was for closeted gay politicians and pastors who were either self-hating, or else pretending homophobia to defend their power in a way that hurt other gay people. I think that exception applies to Lindsey Graham.
His death won't make the world much better. The MAGA governor of his state will appoint another MAGA replacement for him. Their state will lose some Senate seniority, but they were going to do that anyway in a handful of months; Graham was planning on retiring even before he shit himself to death. Still, I lived long enough to celebrate the death of yet another awful person, I'll take that small win.
(I'm getting too old to wait until after the funeral to celebrate a monster's death. Can't count on surviving that long, myself. Remember kids: live your life so that good people don't celebrate your funeral, if only for the peace of the loved ones you leave behind.)
Something I need people to understand more is that punishment doesn't create change in the person being punished unless where counting becoming worse as change.
Kicking Val in the face feels great. Nifty stabing him feels great. It does nothing to change the literal physical material condition that Angel and, anyone else effected by him is in.
You know what does effect Angels positively. Giveing him free housing, giveing him a ear to listen and a suport system.
"What do we learn from all this? Mostly the same thing we learned when the crypto bros repeatedly rediscovered financial fraud, or when effective altruists decided the most effective altruism was to buy themselves a castle, or when ride share companies kept accidentally reïnventing the bus. If you start by ignoring everything that we already know, the best you can ever hope for is to accidentally rediscover the already-known."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.
I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood:
That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed:
We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.
So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response:
I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics:
Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on."
At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.
Spoiler alert!
Still with me? OK, then.
In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.
It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.
And then the world moved on.
For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.
The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface – from our world and theirs – creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.
When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life – hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say – with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the fucking end-times.
For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?
Well, yes – and no.
Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.
When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:
There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.
And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company – not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company – get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade":
The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.
I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – "conservative"? What binds all these views together?
Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.
If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.
For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. "Taxes are for the little people":
The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us):
The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we "distort the market," which is literally going against nature:
That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart":
That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover – because the rules that protect everyday investors are "for the little people." Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence:
The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower – antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the "autocrats of trade." The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were "for the little people," that breaking those rules "made them smart."
They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means, "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap
Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it:
In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal:
Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.
When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.
AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.
What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):
It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):
https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:
This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:
This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:
This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business?
The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.
So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.
What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff
Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:
https://utaw.tech/
Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.
really fond of humans just from an appearance standpoint. the long legs. the manes of hair that can come in practically any colour and texture. those crazy high-contrast eyes with the white scleras and colourful irises. the fingers being so much longer than the toes. there's a lot to love. solid 10/10 animal species
hilariously enough, I am probably the most human out of anyone on this entire site. earlier today I was posting about getting "species euphoria" from doing human activities like ecosystem management. I'm the worlds first therian to have a kintype that aligns with his biological species. shirt that says "I ❤️ being a sapient omnivorous primate & bipedal persistence predator" on the front and booty shorts that say "largest gluteal muscles to body size ratio on the planet"
Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.
Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).
[Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang said society will adapt to AI just as it did to automobiles. He said cars were once portrayed as killing children, but the world changed its norms by having sidewalks and crosswalks and stopping kids from playing in the streets.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — whose work helped propel artificial intelligence — is stressing in an Associated Press interview that society has
And the people who said that about cars were right.
The number of kids killed in car crashes has gone up, and up, and up, and Jensen Huang, and the whole AI industry, are betting unfathomable amounts of money that their industry will get their social license the same way. That people will want to use their product so much that they'll look the other way ...
no matter how many forests and neighborhoods get bulldozed and
no matter how many kids, let alone other people, get killed and
no matter how much it adds to everybody's cost of living, while reducing those same people's income.
Y'know. Just like car buyers did.
The same people who lose their minds when tens of people get hurt by vaccines take for granted tens of thousands of automobile crash deaths, and why? Because they love their cars. And because they think that cars are inevitable, that there is no alternative. Will you, and your neighbors, come to the same conclusion about generative AI?
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
And OP is exactly right, and this is what feminists meant when they said, almost 40 years ago, "men need feminism too." Specifically, what men needed for ourselves was what the consciousness-raising movement of second-wave feminism was largely about: examining feminine gender roles of our society, both the mandatory performances they had to do, and the banned actions they couldn't do, and still be considered feminine, and weed out, refuse to go along with, the ones that were actually hurting them and/or the people around them.
Easiest example: mandatory makeup standards for women, from the '40s through the late '60s, included lead-based makeup and once women refused to wear it, the makeup companies were forced to reformulate less poisonous makeup. Some things they just refused to go back to, to this day. The reason you don't hear the term "toxic femininity" as often now is that they spent a decade, maybe decade and a half debating and then throwing out a lot of that, in small groups of friends and neighbors.
And when they suggested that toxic masculinity was hurting men, and the people around us, what we got instead was what I call "Fire in the John." Y'know, Iron John, Fire in the Belly, and The Game. We told each other that the problem with toxic masculinity wasn't that some of the societal standards for masculine performance were hurting us, hurting our families, hurting our friends. It was that we weren't doing them hard enough, that we needed to double down on all of those standards but even more so or else everybody would lose respect for us.
"Deaths of despair," much?
And now Hollywood and the advertising industry have figured out how to sell really self-abusive diet pills, anorexia, and all the horrors of '60s and '70s women's diet culture to young men. So it remains to seen: will men actually do something like the old consciousness-raising circles and support each other in boycotting the most poisonous of this bullshit? Or at least another generation of "Fire in the John" doubling down?
I'm a sick, weak, tired old man. I doubt I'll live to see the answer. But the insecurity industry is a fraud, guys; stop being so fucking gullible.
