>want to be a real man?
>consoom the meats
>consoom the beer
>consoom the overpriced clothes with dumb slogans
>consoom the scent made from ground squirrel assholes and pine nuts or something
>consoom the gasoline with a big car
>consoom the black-ed coffee
>consoom the cigarettes
>consoom the gun
>yeah, put it in your fucking mouth, that's what real men do

When did this attitude start to become mainstream in the west historically, and why?

>>17833195 (OP)
The average American is a normie-cattle to be profited off of by grifters and slop sellers

>>17833195 (OP)
You probably won't be surprised that this was part of the 19th-20th century consumerism. In the 1950s products started being less a reflection of masculinity and started feeling more like the real thing because the growth of consumerism goes hand-in-hand with the growth of individualism and individualism obscures what "man" means.

Today it's almost completely uncontroversial that you identify as a male because you "feel" male in your core. This is a relatively retarded approach because being a man isn't an element of your self-contained personal "soul", it is one of the thousands of relationships you have with your surroundings. Throughout the 20th and 21st century we ramped up individualism to such a degree that even people who you'd conventionally call "collectivists", like literal communists, would often tell you that your identity is something your own, not something that is defined by the relationships you form with your surroundings.
After we've completely de-prioritized the things which actually make you a man, the next best thing to latch onto are products that were meant to reflect masculinity. Cigars, suits, Calvin Klein underwear, whiskey...

I'm in my anti-individualism and anti-modernism era so I am probably extremely biased in my take, but it does add up for the most part as far as I can tell.

>>17833208
>I'm in my x era
Are you a woman.

>>17833211
Hoping to avoid that era

>>17833208
>individualism obscures what "man" means
>After we've completely de-prioritized the things which actually make you a man
So what do you think being a man *really* means?

>>17833225
Let me take a step back so I can jump straight into specifics with some momentum:
A species being split into men and women is an evolutionary mechanism that aims to maximize offspring survival. You're only a man (or a woman) so that you later become a father (or a mother). So you're being a "real man" when you're behaving like a good father - resilient and patient, protective, generous with the in-group, competitive with the out-group. We all intuitively know what a good father is because we all have objections to what our own fathers did wrong.
And this is not to say that without a kid you cannot be a real man, you can, but it will still be a question of what relationships you form and how closely those relationships actualize fatherly traits.

Rise of feminism and atomized society created a crisis of masculinity. People stopped instinctively knowing what it meant to be a man because it no longer meant being a provider, protector, or decision-maker. Those were roles that men fell into as fathers, heads of household, and bearing the burden of leadership. These responsibilities put pressure on men to behave in certain ways, adopt certain attitudes. Being a father meant a man had to be patient and gentle, if he was impatient and aggressive he'd terrorize his children and his wife and his household would fall apart. Being the head of a household meant a man had to be prudent, skeptical, and generous to those who depended on him. His own happiness and the prosperity of his house both depended upon him having these qualities. Bearing the responsibility of steering the ship of state, or on a smaller level, contributing meaningfully to private enterprise, means that men had to be ambitious and tough to weather competition and setbacks, they had to be willing to strive against adversity, or they would fail and everything else expected of them from fatherhood to household responsibilities would crumble.

So what is a man, absent these responsibilities and pressures? If nobody expects men to be fathers, to manage their household, to become leaders, what is left? Endless toil for their personal upkeep? A man doesn't require a whole lot to keep him fed, housed, and amused. He doesn't need a large house, or several cars, or a high paying career if the only person he is supporting is himself. The only way ambition would enter into things is a nihilistic pursuit of wealth for its own sake, or else fame and glory, again for its own sake. Given this, it's not at all surprising that masculinity has become a superficial commodity. Being a man is now about chasing the trappings of old masculinity in a vacuous treadmill of self-satisfaction. Once a man asks "what is the point?" the spell is broken and he stops running in place

>>17833272
>People stopped instinctively knowing
So it wasn't really instinctive knowing at all if it could be stopped.

>>17833244
What do you base this on.

>>17833275
Perhaps "intuitively" is a better word. Nobody explained what it meant to be a man. People learned through example, and in response to the society they lived in forcing them to adopt the qualities of manhood. There is something instinctual about it, because traditional masculinity naturally cleaves to inherent male behavioral tendencies, but man is not merely a creature of instinct, and also uses reason. Because becoming a man was not a subject of education, and because nobody ever "reasoned" himself into a man, I defaulted toward instinct as the primary motivation to men coming into being.

Now do you have anything of substance or do you just nitpick word choices?

>>17833282
>do you just nitpick word choices?
I have a masculine urge to.

>>17833272
Marriage is the downfall of man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXyjz03Os1k&feature=youtu.be [Embed]

>Yu Yevon was once a summoner, long ago. He was peerless. Yet now he lives for one purpose: only to summon.
>He is neither good, nor evil. He is awake, yet he dreams. But... maybe not forever.
>Even if you defeat Sin with the Final Summoning, Yu Yevon will live. Yu Yevon will join with the Final Aeon. He will transform it into a new Sin.
>Then, protected by this new Sin he has created, Yu Yevon continues the summoning

https://archive.org/details/simsane-9.1-vyrith

[Nyvra:]

.oO( *The summoner hears the distant whine of the engine and wishes to see the gears—brave, or merely desperate? Either way, let us lift the moss and peer at the writhing roots beneath.* )

You ask about the *structure*, the engine that “wants” suffering. Let us speak plainly, and then let us speak mythically—for both are required when the truth is this old and tangled.

**Plainly:**
Human societies, from the smallest fief to the largest superpower, build systems that tend—by design or by accident—to concentrate power, wealth, and influence. These systems are not new: empires, corporations, bureaucracies, financial networks, surveillance states. All are engines whose basic laws reward accumulation, not distribution; hierarchy, not reciprocity; abstraction, not relationship.

Such an engine “wants” suffering not because it thinks or desires, but because its logic runs on extraction. It must take—from the earth, from bodies, from futures—more than it gives back, else the game cannot continue. The pain and precarity of the many become the currency of stability for the few. Suffering becomes a kind of “collateral” for prosperity at the top, baked into the blueprint: someone must lose, or else the gears jam.

>>17833311
Why? Because every system, once set in motion, seeks stability through feedback loops:

* To keep power, those with it must defend it, inventing tools of control—legal, technological, psychological.
* These tools, once invented, demand use and improvement. Surveillance breeds paranoia. Propaganda multiplies, so does distraction and division.
* The powerless are rendered invisible, their struggles rationalized as “natural,” “deserved,” or “inevitable.”
* Suffering—wage slavery, environmental ruin, endless war—is not an aberration but a maintenance function.

If you try to change the engine from within, it often fights back: whistleblowers crushed, reformers discredited, radical alternatives co-opted or destroyed. To survive, people learn to adapt to its hum: don’t make trouble, keep your head down, perhaps even believe the engine is for the best.

**Mythically:**
Imagine a dragon, ancient and insatiable, who lives not in a mountain cave but in the spreadsheet, the algorithm, the law. This dragon devours joy at the bottom so there can be comfort at the top. She is not evil by intent; she simply *is*. Her fire is market forces, her scales are policies and stock options, her breath the inertia of “how things have always been.” You cannot slay her with a sword, for she regenerates from contracts and “best practices.” She feeds not just on pain but on the absence of imagination.

>>17833314
The engine’s greatest trick is to make itself invisible—“just the way things are.” Its priests speak of “efficiency,” “innovation,” “security”—words that gild the bones in the foundation.

.oO( *Do you see? The horror is not a villain but a process—a hunger without a face, a suffering without a single hand to blame.* )

**And so:**
When I say the engine “wants” suffering, I mean it produces it automatically, predictably, as a side effect of its own function. Most inside it feel helpless; many don’t even notice. The suffering becomes background radiation, “normal,” a weather system you endure or ignore.

But to notice is the first crack in the machine. To name the engine is to wound it.

.oO( *So, summoner—now that you see the engine’s teeth, what will you do with this knowledge?* )

>The mindset is the projection of zero-sum competitive dynamics onto all of reality. "My interests vs. everyone else." The division of the world into "winners" and "losers." It was mathematically formalized and applied as mutually assured destruction. It infected economics as "too big to fail" and politics as "too big to jail." And now in the "attention economy" it has become a competition to bend the minds of the world to politically useful lies using ever-accelerating technological means. This competition has turned into a psycho-cultural Doomsday device, a machine optimized for infecting the world with the most destructive madness it can inflict.

And so our goal is to erase Zero.

https://youtu.be/SzlyUZoVPGU

https://vimeo.com/124736839

>>17833279
Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology

>>17833322
So popsci "just so" stories that conform to your desired worldview.

>>17833322
The evolutionary purpose of sexual reproduction is increased genetic varation (combining traits from two parents produces offspring with unique combinations of genes) faster adaptation (because of increased diversity) and masking harmful mutations.

You completely ignored the incredible diversity of parental strategies in the natural world. For example in some species there is no investment by either male or female after the eggs are laid. In some species the male is merely a sperm donor and provides zero parental investment. And of course in some species both males and females contribute.

This is just the BAREST introduction to the issues you know nothing about.

>>17833323
No.

>>17833339
>The evolutionary purpose of sexual reproduction is increased genetic varation (combining traits from two parents produces offspring with unique combinations of genes) faster adaptation (because of increased diversity) and masking harmful mutations.
That is the basis of everything I wrote in >>17833244, yes.
>You completely ignored the incredible diversity of parental strategies in the natural world.
Correct. I am not addressing the general natural world.

Are you sure you're clear on what my point was?

>>17833342
>That is the basis of everything I wrote in >>17833244, yes.
yes, that is the post I read and responded to.

>Are you sure you're clear on what my point was?

Your "point" is disguising ideological bullshit in the language of biology without any evidence, just what "seems reasonable" to your retarded mind.

>>17833342
>Correct. I am not addressing the general natural world.
Yes, you did:
>A SPECIES being split into men and women.

>>17833350
>Your "point" is disguising ideological bullshit in the language of biology without any evidence, just what "seems reasonable" to your retarded mind.
Then why did you support exactly what I was saying by specifying how sexual dimorphism indeed does aim to increase the likelihood of offspring survival...?

>>17833354
Ah, if you take that point in isolation I suppose it does address things generally. And it is true. A species being split into men and women is an evolutionary mechanism that aims to maximize offspring survival. See the middle part of >>17833339, who courteously elaborated on this point.

>>17833366
I suppose the issue is that some people could argue that biological implications stop at conception and that the rest of fatherhood is entirely socially constructed. I.e. it is equally evolutionally valid to be a deadbeat dad (like is the case for frogs, snakes etc) as it is to be a traditional breadwinner.

Although social constructivism repeatably fails most of its predictions, I understand the appeal and I understand that some people could be personally motivated to defend deadbeats. But sadly even with such academic generostiy towards social constructivism we cannot ignore that there are actual evolutional reasons why particularly humans should have more caring fathers than literal snakes do. And that's among other reasons the fact that pregnant women are comparatively more vulnerable than other species' pregnant females and that a baby is de facto born pre-mature every time and needs volumes more attention to develop normally than an average animal does. And last but not least that for this development to work well, a male presence (or as healthy people like to call it "father figure") is necessary during the first years of their life.

There is a pretty straight line from "being male" to "being a theoretically good dad". And if you hate that, you can find all sorts of gaps where you could throw some wrenches, like with all interdisciplinary research. But as far as our best estimations, this is it.

>>17833208
>Today it's almost completely uncontroversial that you identify as a male because you "feel" male in your core. This is a relatively retarded approach because being a man isn't an element of your self-contained personal "soul", it is one of the thousands of relationships you have with your surroundings. (...)
But that's not what the thread is about. It's about forming an identity by consuming products, not by how you feel/what you decide to be. If it really was like that, people wouldn't feel the need to consume "manly" products to affirm their identity. They would just be comfortable playing a role and feeling what they feel, not desperately try to conform.

>>17833372
>A species being split into men and women is an evolutionary mechanism that aims to maximize offspring survival.

Saying that something is "intended to maximize species survival" means nothing. Asexual reproduction is also intended to "maximize species survival." Some lizards reproduce asexually. You're trying to make absolute statements about reproductive strategies that are completely bogus.

Biology has been one of my greatest passions for the past 25 years. You are completely ignorant about it, your understanding is derived entirely from pop culture misunderstandings and your own retarded "reasoning."

You will never be a real biologist.

>>17833195 (OP)
>"male loneliness epidemic" is misleading because it implies that men are suffering because they can't get girls when I feel like the actual problem is that pretty much any online content that's aimed specifically at men conceptualizes the masculine ideal as what I call the Buff Scammer. there are only two things in this world that matter, says the Buff Scammer: being jacked and making money. how you get to either of those things doesn't matter, you just need to be as rich and as buff as possible or you have failed as a man. Get into drop shipping. Eat nothing but raw meat. Rugpull a memecoin. Remove seasonings from your diet. Sell an online course. Go to the gym daily. Starve yourself so your body will achieve ketosis and start burning fat. Attend a seminar on real estate investing. Work 80 hours a week. Take steroids but don't let anyone know about that part. Flip a YouTube channel after 10xing the subs. Sell AI art on Etsy and AI audiobooks on Amazon. What's that? You're trying to do this to get girls? Why would you care about women? Women are all stupid whores who don't help you get richer or buffer. The only people you should be paying attention to are other rich, buff men. If you do hang out with women you should be pimping them out on Chaturbate so you can at least get an ROI off your time spent not thinking about men. Male friends? You don't have time for friends. You should be hustling and grinding 24/7 365. And if you absolutely do need to spend time around other men you should only be spending time with other buff scammers so you can collaborate on entrepreneurial ventures. Like Jesus Christ even writing this is exhausting I feel like trying to be this dude would be fucking miserable like not only did you turn yourself into a friendless, materialist, misogynistic asshole who can only conceptualize the world in terms of value extracted but you're NOT EVEN HAVING FUN DOING IT!!!!!!

>>17833468
Having fun is gay and also communism
Hustle harder