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This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry — it's easy to use and free to join.

Click on the link above at the scheduled date/time to log in...

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HOW RAP PREDICTED THE MANOSPHERE:
WHY DID A CYNICAL, ZERO-SUM VIEW OF SEX & RELATIONSHIPS EMERGE IN MALE SUBCULTURES OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS?

INTRODUCTION:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

There have been many recent op-eds & media coverage of a growing “crisis of masculinity,” with young men struggling in school, experiencing worse mental health, facing uncertain financial prospects, and having difficulty relating to young women. These problems are sometimes linked to bad advice they encounter online from the “manosphere” — a loose collection of blogs, podcasts, influencers and forums that often promote a more aggressive masculinity and argue that feminism and changing gender norms have disadvantaged men. However, it's often not clear whether critics think the manosphere is the cause or the effect of the crisis of masculinity - or both.

The inspiration for this meetup comes from Eric Ehigie’s 2023 essay "Hip Hop, Tupac, and Toxic Masculinity". Ehigie points out parallels between some of today’s manosphere advice and the reductive views of women and relationships he encountered as a young black man listening to hip-hop. He argues that one important cause of "toxic masculinity" is a lack of positive male role models, connected to fatherlessness, family breakdown, and broader social and economic pressures. This reminded me of an earlier article from 2013 by a black manosphere blogger, Athlone McGinnis, entitled "How Black America Has Predicted Our Future". He argued that "almost every social problem guys in the manosphere cite as a growing concern within the general population has already played itself out within the Black American community." He went on to list (1) female obesity rates, (2) out-of-wedlock births, (3) female hypergamy in the dating market & "bad boy" worship, (4) fatherless boys doing poorly in school & turning to crime, and (5) anti-male attitudes among women raised in matriarchal households. While both writers stress the importance of underlying socio-economic factors, Ehigie puts more of the blame on men (esp. deadbeat dads & toxic male role models) whereas McGinnis puts more of the blame on women (esp. single moms & radical feminists).

Whether or not you agree with either man's analysis, these two takes raise some interesting questions: Why have different male subcultures over the last half-century repeatedly developed cynical, often zero-sum views of heterosexual relationships, in which men are warned against emotional dependence and masculine success is measured partly through sexual conquests, status, control, and avoiding attachments? And to what extent is this real shifts in marriage, family structure, educational attainment, employment rates, sexual norms and dating markets? Have these forces determined men's & women's behavior or merely constrained the choices available to them? What draws young men to macho male role models who preach a cynical view of sex & relationships? To what extent does their advice "work" - at least in the short term and only if we ignore the negative side effects? Finally, do misogynistic attitudes in pop culture & self-help advice marketed to male audiences act as a feedback loop, i.e. does it make gender conflict more common in overall society?

In the 1st section, we’ll examine the pre-history of hip-hop's pimps & players in the urban fiction of the 1960s-70s. Specifically, we'll look at the cultural impact of the autobiography of Robert Beck, better known as "Iceberg Slim", entitled Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967), and some of his later novels like Trick Baby () and spoken word album Reflections (1976), along with the gritty urban fiction of Donald Goines in the 1970s - notably Dopefiend (1971) and Whoreson (1972). Beck's Pimp sold nearly 2 million copies by 1973 and his total works had sold 6 million copies by the time of his death in 1992, and Goines' novels had sold over 5 million copies in the same period. This is some pretty impressive sales considering their target demographic (U.S. black males under 40) numbered only about 10 million in 1990. These books vividly portrayed the black underworld of "hustlers" - i.e. pimps, prostitutes, drug pushers, con artists, racketeers, gangsters - that had existed in Northern & Midwestern cities since the Great Migration of the 1910s-20s but had rarely been presented so explicitly to a mass audience. Pimp characters soon appeared in “blaxploitation” films such as Super Fly (1972), The Mack (1973), Willie Dynamite (1973) and Dolemite (1975). Between Beck's & Goines's books and the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the image of the "pimp" as a well-dressed lady's man and some of the trade's lingo (e.g. mack, daddy, trick, game, player, simp) diffused into black youth culture. Perhaps it's not surprising that many black men who grew up in the '70s and went on to become famous rappers in the 1990s such as Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Too Short and 50 Cent cited these books & films as major influences.

We’ll look at an important irony: Iceberg Slim later insisted that Pimp was meant as a cautionary tale about exploitation, addiction and imprisonment, yet many young male readers focused instead on its glamour, money, women and street cred. That raises a question that will recur throughout the meetup: why do younger men so often admire the youthful exploits of older men while ignoring those same men’s later warnings?

In the 2nd section, we’ll look at the rise of gangsta rap in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which often glamorized drug dealers, pimps, and gang bangers for a new generation of young Black men — while developing a surprising crossover appeal among suburban white teenagers. We’ll examine how gangsta rap went beyond merely describing sex in graphic terms like the "dirty rap" of the 1980s and developed an antagonistic worldview of "pimps/players" versus "hoes/b*tches" epitomized by song titles like NWA's "A Bitch Iz a Bitch" (1987), Dr. Dre's "B*tches Ain't Shit" (1992) and Snoop Dogg's "G'z Up, Hoes Down" (1993). This was also reflected in the dialogue of the male characters in the "hood films" of this era such as Boyz n The Hood (1991), Juice (1992) and Menace II Society (1993). where the female characters were often relegated to the roles of sexual conquests, tragic victims, the butt of jokes or peripheral characters.
We'll see how Tupac Shakur is an interesting case study, and ask how he could write rap anthems celebrating black women like "Brenda's Got a Baby" (1992) and "Keep Ya Head Up" (1993) to getting convicted of sexual abuse in 1994 and then writing a misogynistic rant like "Wonda Why They Call U Bytch" (1996) that name-checked C. Dolores Tucker, a civil rights leader who'd been campaigning against misogynistic lyrics in rap.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, gangsta rap increasingly gave way to “bling rap" focused less on street survival and more on the fruits of success: luxury cars, designer clothes, diamond-studded jewelry, bottle service in VIP lounges, and groupies galore. The pimp gradually became the “player” — a man whose women were less a source of illicit income than a status symbol. However, bling rap's songs often framed romantic commitment as an emotional & financial trap for high-value men, something they were better off avoiding. Songs that exemplify this mentality include DMX's list of conquests in "What These B*tches Want" (1999), Jay-Z's club banger "Big Pimpin" (2000), Eminem's bitter post-divorce track "Superman" (2002), 50 Cent's pimp anthem "P.I.M.P." (2003), and Kanye West's blues-influenced cautionary tale "Gold Digger" (2005).

However, we'll also see how several famous rappers (Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Ice-T, Jay-Z) embraced marriage & fatherhood later on. We'll use the reality show Snoop Dogg's Father Hood (2007-8) which showed his home life with his wife and their three children, as well as Jay-Z's songs "Glory" (2012) celebrating the birth of his first child and "4:44" (2017) apologizing for his infidelity, as examples of shifts in a former player's mindset. However, it's worth noting that some rappers became bitter after a costly divorce (Dr. Dre, Eminem, Kanye West) or just stayed single and never changed their views on marriage being for suckers - e.g. 50 Cent famously said: "I've made a lot of mistakes, just not that one." And then there's Sean "P. Diddy" Combs who never married any of the mothers of his children and continued hosting "freak-off" parties into mid life until his high-profile trial for sex trafficking sent him to jail.

In the 3rd section, we’ll look at the rise of the online “pickup artist” or "PUA" subculture, made famous by Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005), quickly becoming a NY Times best-seller, with about 2.5 million copies sold worldwide by 2015. Comedy Central's reality show "Keys to the VIP" (2006-8) and VH-1's similar show "The Pickup Artist" (2007-8) further spread these ideas to a larger audience, with the latter reaching about 1.2 million viewers at its peak. The target audience of The Game and these shows was very different than Beck's or Goines' books, consisting primarily of college-bound or college-educated males aged 18-35, so around 20-22 million men in the U.S., so it never reached the same level of market saturation. Unlike the pimp or gangsta traditions, PUA culture reflected the very different world of middle-class men who were somewhat shy or socially awkward, and it told them you didn't have to be noticeably buff or wealthy to attract women - you just needed some verbal "game" and self-confidence. To help their clients achieve this, PUA coaches mixed self-help advice, various strands of pop psychology (notably evolution psychology, sales/marketing & neuro-linguistic programming), and a wide assortment of tactics & gimmicks to systematize ways of attracting women in nightclubs and other public places.

While the direct impact of The Game was more limited than Beck's Pimp and PUAs remained a niche subculture, it was published the same year that Hitch, Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin turned male anxiety about dating, seduction and casual sex into comedy gold. Shortly thereafter, we saw pickup artists & dating coaches appear in more rom-com films like School for Scoundrels (2006) and Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and in TV sitcoms like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (S5:E10, 2009) and "How I Met Your Mother" (S5:E8, 2009). For a brief period, pickup tactics could be portrayed as quirky, mischievous and relatively harmless.

By the mid-2010s, the pickup artist community was in crisis - perhaps partly due to the headwinds for dating outlined above, but also due to its own internal problems. In May of 2014, the Isla Vista killings by Elliott Roger drew attention to an underground of sexually frustrated men on forums like PUAHate who had concluded that “game” could not overcome inequalities in looks & wealth and were boiling over with anger at women. Later that year, there was an international controversy over the aggressive tactics of PUA guru Julien Blanc that led the UK, Australia and Singapore to deny his visa and provoked a mainstream backlash against the entire concept of pickup artistry. And in 2015, ten years after The Game, Strauss published The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, describing his own struggles maintaining a healthy monogamous relationship while repudiating some of the manipulative tactics of the PUA industry. Together, these developments raised 3 different criticisms of pickup culture: (1) it did not work for many less attractive men, (2) some of its tactics were morally objectionable & borderline illegal, and (3) even successful seduction often did not produce satisfying long-term relationships.

In the 4th section, we’ll look at what emerged from the fragmentation of PUA culture and the broader growth of the online “manosphere” during the 2010s. Websites such as Chateau Heartiste, run from 2008 to 2019 by James C. Weidmann (a.k.a. Roissy in D.C.), A Voice for Men, founded in 2009 by Paul Elam (still running), and Return of Kings, run from 2012 to 2022 by Daryush Valizadeh (a.k.a. "Roosh V"), as well as George Miller (a.k.a. Rollo Tomassi) and his book The Rational Male (2013) and its website, became early focal points for the so-called "red-pill" philosophy. This red-pill manosphere combined the PUA ideas about seduction strategies with older ideas from "men's rights activists" (MRAs) into a broader theory of female hypergamy leading women to chase "alpha males" and ignore "beta males", "gynocentric" educational & legal systems that favor women over men, and the resulting social pressures on men that drive down marriage rates and drive up rates of male unemployment, loneliness, depression & suicide.

While the "red pill" philosophy emphasized how to come out a winner in this sort of dog-eat-dog world and become a "high-value male" that can still get lots of sex from various women, different parts of the manosphere offered very different responses to similar anxieties. So-called "black-pill" and "incel" (involuntary celibate) communities became increasingly fatalistic, arguing that immutable traits like height & facial structure place severe limits on romantic success even for men who are financially successful, leaving expensive cosmetic surgery (a.k.a. "looksmaxxing") as the only alternative. Meanwhile, the "white pill" and MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) movement often urges men to avoid women & either subsist on porn or embrace "monk mode" celibacy to avoid being ruined by false rape claims, paternity fraud, divorce settlements or child support. There's also a Christian conservative corner of the manosphere - known as the "God pill" - that rejects the promiscuity of the PUAs/red-pill gurus and the celibacy of the incels/MGTOWs in favor of traditional marriages where the man assumes his natural position as authority figure & breadwinner and the "trad wife" is a stay-at-home mom. There's even a cluster of more moderate figures sometimes called the "purple pill" which consists largely of reformed PUAs like Neil Strauss, Mark Manson & Tucker Max, as well as some "heterodox" academics like Geoffrey Miller & his wife Diana Fleischman, that acknowledge that aspects of the dating *can* be zero-sum but suggest methods for seeking out positive-sum interactions.

By 2017, Jordan Peterson emerged as an adjacent influence on young men through his lectures and his self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018), which sold 10 million copies worldwide by 2023. He opposed "wokeness" but also pickup tactics & hookup culture, emphasizing instead the importance of honesty, personal responsibility, finding meaningful work, and achieving traditional adult milestones like marriage & child-rearing. But by the 2020s, he'd hemorrhaged followers to a louder manosphere developed around self-proclaimed “alpha male” influencers such as Andrew & Tristan Tate, Justin Waller, Adin Ross, "Sneako" (Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy), "Myron Gaines" (Amrou Fudl) and Walter Weekes, who combined red-pill ideas with conspicuous displays of wealth & physical fitness. The content of Andrew Tate in particular saturated the online media consumed by Gen-Z men & Gen-Alpha boys in the early 2020s (esp. TikTok), to the point that a YouGov poll in 2023 found that 93% of UK men aged 18-29 had heard of Tate, but only 27% said they had a favorable opinion of him - although 35% said they agree with "the sort of things Andrew Tate says". A follow-up poll found that 60% of UK boys aged 6-15 had heard of Tate but only 17% had a positive opinion of him, but the numbers for the 13-15-year-olds were closer to their older peers. (Unfortunately, it's hard to find similar polls of American men/boys, but since they're consuming much of the same English-language media online, the numbers may be similar.)

In some sense, the current manosphere influencers have fused the PUA views on sexual attraction and verbal "game" with the ideas from rap music about the need to project an image of success through conspicuous consumption and earn respect with tough guy rhetoric and sometimes physical violence. Some of these influencers merely court controversy to increase online engagement with their content, but others have a business model that revolves around selling young men a mix of dating advice, workout tips, and various "get rich quick" schemes. With the Tate brothers we've come full-circle to Beck's pimp racket, since they not only imitate the lavish lifestyle of rappers but also made their fortunes as "webcam pimps" in Romania controlling a stable of women who stripped online. They helped their cam-girls milk "simps" (lonely & desperate male fans) for money with fake sob stories, and then marketed this business model to the subscribers to their "Hustler's University" courses as a way to achieve financial independence. This ultimately what led to the Tate brothers facing charges in multiple countries for sexual abuse and human trafficking, since multiple women have alleged they were assaulted and held against their will.

RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:

Way back in July of 2017, we had a meetup entitled "The Economics of Sex" which addressed some current political debates surrounding sexual norms, dating & marriage from an economic & game theoretical perspective. We looked at how birth control split the dating & marriage markets, why the odds of finding a suitable mate declines over time, and how one's "sexual market value" is affected by 4 factors: beauty, age, socio-economic status, and race.

Then in Aug. 2017, we had a meetup entitled "Sex, Demographics & Declinism" where we discussed concerns over how marriage & child-rearing has been delayed for white collar workers, how the marriage rate has declined for blue collar workers, how the divorce rate has declined but remained relatively high, and how birth rates in the US are teetering on the brink of sub-replacement rates, leading to a demographic decline that can only be prevented through mass immigration.

Back in July of 2019, the Skeptics had a meetup entitled "Debunking Cyber-Sex Panics" and the 4th section fact-checked some of the sensational media narratives about "incels" becoming mass shooters. In this context, we briefly discussed the connection between online forums for incels and the red pill manosphere and PUA blogs.

In Aug. 2021, we had a meetup entitled "Has the Internet Ruined Romance & Relationships?" We covered debates over the social effects of internet porn, online dating, sexting, and "raunch culture". We also contrasted media narratives about a rampant "hookup culture" among young people with stats that show an overall "sex recession" - i.e. a decline in sexual activity & teen pregnancy - among Millennials & Gen Z.

DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of the major debates over the rise of the "red pill" manosphere and where its ideas about the "sexual marketplace" & adversarial gender roles originated, i.e. from the hip-hop subculture & rap music or from broader socio-economic forces that pit men & women against each other. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 63 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I've listed some questions under each section to stimulate discussion. We'll do our best to address most of them, as well as whatever other questions our members raise. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. THE RISE OF THE PIMP SUBCULTURE IN THE 1960s-70s AMID THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION & BREAKDOWN OF THE BLACK FAMILY:

  • Was the emergence of pimps in the black community related to the so-called "tangle of pathology" left by the decline in two-parent black families described in the 1965 Moynihan Report, or did they emerge earlier due to urbanization under segregation after the Great Migration in the 1910s-20s?
  • Why didn't black pimps end up in the dustbin of history after the end of segregation gave blacks more economic opportunities and the Sexual Revolution made casual sex more acceptable, as Robert Beck expected?
  • Was the fantasy of the "pimp" lifestyle (i.e. de facto polygyny combined with male financial freedom) in the 1970s related to strands of black radicalism that portrayed criminals as anti-establishment underdogs, the growth of an urban black consumer market hungry for masculine heroes, a reaction to the women's lib movement, frustration with limited job opportunities even after integration, or other factors?
  • What did the pimp lifestyle appear to offer young men that conventional masculinity did not? And how should we interpret the reversal of the traditional provider ideal in pimp culture?
  • Beck intended Pimp partly as a cautionary tale, yet he complained that younger men often admired the lifestyle and believed they could avoid his mistakes. Why is this?

1a) Elexus Jionde (Intelexual Quickies), "The Pimp American Dream" (video - 14:14 min, listen to 9:45)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSIM-exCB7c

1b) Robert Beck, "Iceberg Slim explains being Street Poisoned" (video - 0:53 min)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/woD0dPGXByY

II. FROM GANGSTA RAP IN THE 1990s TO BLING RAP IN THE 2000s & THEIR PORTRAYAL OF "PIMPS" & "HOES":

  • How much of the overt misogyny in gangsta rap was due to borrowing from the "pimp" craze of the 1970s versus later developments (e.g. crack epidemic, deindustrialization, urban decay, mass incarceration) that had further reduced the supply of eligible black bachelors and hurt black family formation?
  • Was there a reckless hookup culture in some black communities by the late 1980s, judging by the peak in teen pregnancy rates and a surge in HIV infections that hit especially hard in the early 1990s? Or was this limited to those in what Elijah Anderson called the "street" subculture", whereas those in the "decent" culture avoided it?
  • Why did hip hop's player/gangsta image appeal to young men far outside the black urban communities in which it originated, often to suburban kids who grew up in middle-class, two-parent families?
  • Did songs about “players” and “hoes” merely reflect distrust between men and women, or did repeated exposure help produce more of it?
  • To what extent were male rapper's complaints about women being faithless "gold diggers" who are constantly looking to "trade up" answered in female rap songs like TLC's "No Scrubs" (1999) & Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" (2006)?
  • What should we make of rappers who later emphasized marriage, fatherhood, fidelity, or regret after spending their youth celebrating player culture?

2a) Tupac Shakur, "Interview at 17 Years Old" (video - 1:42 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_6joGcy9XI

2b) Tupac Shakur, "Wonda Why They Call U Bytch" (video - 4:18 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5VL2sgjPjM

2c) Jay-Z feat. UGK, "Big Pimpin" (video - 5:13 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVQFZU_P0LU

2d) Jay-Z, "Glory" (video - 4:01 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL_imScBuqo

III. THE RISE OF THE PICKUP ARTIST (PUA) SUBCULTURE & ITS ROM-COM COUNTERPARTS AMID "PEAK HOOKUP CULTURE" IN THE 2000s:

  • To what extent was the PUA subculture emblematic of "peak hookup culture" on college campuses and urban nightclubs from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, driven by factors like a good economy, receding fear of AIDS, and the rise of cell phones & "sexting"?
  • Is the growing gender imbalance in college attendance making eligible male bachelors in shorter supply and driving women to compete for them with sex, as Jon Birger described in his book Date-onomics (2015)? How does this compare to the dynamic in the black community described by Ralph Richard Banks in his book, Is Marriage for White People (2011)?
  • What problems did PUAs correctly identify about attraction that conventional dating advice (e.g. just be yourself, be a gentleman/nice guy) may have obscured?
  • To what extent were PUA gurus teaching men how to manipulate women rather than merely flirt? Where should we draw the line between becoming more confident and social versus deliberately manufacturing insecurity, scarcity, jealousy, etc.?
  • Did treating seduction as a learnable system mainly just improve men's ability to initiate hookups rather than stable relationships? What does Neil Strauss’s later repudiation of much of his earlier lifestyle tell us about the limits of PUA?
  • What sort of headwinds did typical PUA advice run into in the 2010s that might explain its decline, e.g. dating apps with a swipe feature like Tinder that puts more focus on looks, smart phones & social media distracting people from face-to-face socializing, growing political polarization of young men & women, men's fears of being seen as creepy after PUAs were demonized in much of mainstream media?

3a) Jimmy Kimmel w/ Neil Strauss, "Neil Strauss Picks Up Jessica Alba" (video - 8:53 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC0hrqbhx5M

3b) CBS Morning w/ Neil Strauss, "Pickup artist reveals his struggle with monogamy in 'The Truth'" (video - 5:33 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eVDNtXmiXM

IV. THE POST-TINDER "DATING APOCALYPSE" & THE RISE OF THE MANOSPHERE'S VARIOUS "PILLS" IN THE 2010s-2020s:

  • Did social and technological changes create a “dating apocalypse” that led to a "sex recession" in the 2010s and 2020s, as many op-eds would have us believe? If so, did this play a part in the rise of the manosphere?
  • Why has the decline of face-to-face socialization produced a "loneliness epidemic" that's often worse for men? And to what extent has the manosphere provided a partial solution versus made it worse?
  • Why did the same dating environment produce such different “pills”, i.e. why does one man conclude “increase your value” (red pill), another “looks determine everything” (black pill), another “withdraw from women” (MGTOW), another “return to religion and traditional marriage” (God pill), and another “keep some manosphere insights but reject its hostility” (purple pill)?
  • How do Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson's criticisms of Andrew Tate reflect a split in the manosphere? And why do many left-wing critics lump them together?
  • Are the "God pill" and/or "purple pill" genuine alternatives to the rest of the manosphere's zero-sum view of a gender war, or do they preserve the same adversarial assumptions about relationships inside a traditional conservative or moderate liberal framework?
  • If red-pill-type messages resonate not just in the U.S. but in Latin America, Africa, India and elsewhere, does that suggest a universal male psychology, common effects of modernization and changing courtship systems, American cultural exports—or some combination?

4a) Chris Oath, "The Very Dark Side of Andrew Tate (as an ex-fan)" (video - 12:53 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dldgHPwsYcw

4b) Joe Rogan & Jordan Peterson, "On The Narcissism Of Andrew Tate" (video - 5:01 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrbYQjjQdUQ

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Related topics

Dating and Relationships
Feminism
Hip Hop
Men's Issues
Sociology

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