Why is there so much gender-slop all of a sudden?

Cartoons Hate Her, GynoPessimism, and the Mood of the Ring

But I think it’s more than that. I think that normal gripes between men and women (specifically about specific men, by specific women) are being twisted and molded into intellectual arguments about The State of Heterosexuality at large, every week a new term I learn that boils down to “nagging broads, amirite?” but for ladies.

~

Cartoons Hate Her

, “I'm Calling For A Total Shutdown of NYT Articles About The Emotional Labor of Dealing with Men”

Nagging broads

Yesterday I was having a chat with

Rohan Ghostwind

about the “nagging broads, amirite? but for ladies,” which belongs to a term I coined but the NYT has rebranded. The Gray Lady calls it “heterofatalism,” making it sound like a “we” problem when it is actually called GynoPessimism which is something inflicted on men by women.

GynoPessimism posits that women demand constant thanks and validation for things they are in the habit of doing but the strength of that gratitude has diminishing returns for them; because their demands for validation grow over time, even if supply that was formerly sufficient stays constant, women get feels about it despite the fact that their husbands and boyfriends also do things regularly for which they don’t demand credit and validation. JK I never wrote that and will not actually sue over this IP infraction but I’m pretty sure this is the general understanding most men come to after reading women’s publicly-posted gripes about them. To be clear, I am talking about the type of women who write op-eds or hang out in support/complaint forums, which is an obnoxious minority of the fairer sex.

You see I was sending Rohan ridiculous gender-slop written by delusional malcontents and he was telling me to stop because he’s trying to curate something into his feed besides “10 Reasons Men/Women Are Causing Whatever Problem You Have.”

I was trying to have a nonpartisan, galaxy-brain take and express something descriptive instead of the knee jerk men-good/women-bad angle so attractive to me as a man. I said that it seemed like gender-slop production was heating up in our corner of Substack but then I went back to saying something that might qualify as taking a side, that it was heating up mostly on the female side. Men might bitch and moan in short-form but women obviously write the majority of editorials talking about the opposite sex being shit BUT there also seems to be an influx of women taking nuanced stances (men are not shit), and yet other women who say that it is women who are, in fact, shit. Men are just not pumping these out at the same rate and when they do write, they’re often reacting to other pieces written by women. In a future piece, I’ll bang out a few words on the pick-me accusations some women deal with when they either actually or cynically agree with the guys but today is not that day.

To quote CHH again (emphasis yours truly):

But at the additional risk of making this non-thing a thing, I feel like there’s a certain script you have to abide by if you’re a woman writer, writing about motherhood, dating or marriage, in certain literary circles. You basically have to embody the spirit of someone who is vaguely put-upon, not only by men but by life, and it’s society’s problem. I’m not talking about man-hating. Most of these women are married to men, and presumably love them. They probably have brothers and fathers who they love as well. I don’t even think any of them would qualify as radical feminists. I’m talking about a general vibe of domestic martyrdom. The default is that they are doing everything, for everyone, and nobody is doing anything for them (even if that’s not true.)

I give my own spin on kvetching in general here. My only addition to CHH above would be to say that it often works in reverse:

Women feel vaguely put upon by society but then want to make it men’s problem. That’s right. The patriarchy, which seems to be an unfalsifiable force, no matter how much women swing on it, they only ever report it swinging on them. Responsible for nothing you like and everything you don’t. A force to behold if only it would let you.

But back to business, my point is not to validate ANY of those arguments regarding who is being a worse group of humans (you all suck). I don’t even pretend to have stats on this uptick and you wouldn’t trust them anyway so I’m just going to post about this general vibe in the ecosystem and describe the dynamics at play with a little bit of evidence before wrapping it up with a tidy conclusion (it’s called writing, bitch). I say this up front because I’m about to pull a pro gamer move and quote the dark lothario and student of seduction himself, the man who wrote all those strange Uncle Yarv dating pieces that could have been reduced to get rich and take Ozempic and yet I think it’s Yarvin’s non-dating screeds that really apply to the birds and bees here.

What can Uncle Yarv teach us about gender-slop?

One of the ways Yarvin defines power is “habitual obedience.” Few equate Yarvin with gender discourse, which is a mistake because the man describes systems and there are only so many types of systems, the system of mammalian chimp-sex working with its own grammar and units, an entire cosmology riddled with dyads arranging into coercion, cooperation, love, hate, and above all horniness.

If I’m right that Yarvin is relevant and his adage about power applicable, then waning power means the amount of obedience between the party who holds power and the party over whom the power is held declines. PWR stonk go down.

One way of detecting waning power occurs when you notice an absence of action at all. A downregulation of commands issued and thereby commands followed. Another is an increase in volatility and commotion at hand, meaning the ratio of commands issued to commands followed grows larger over time. People just stop obeying. CHAOS stonk go up.

Power can be good or bad in its application but chaos is almost always bad since it is by definition antisocial. The only people who enjoy chaos either directly benefit from it or, more likely, are antisocial. Of course, you can be perennially antisocial but many normal, reasonable people need something like chaos to activate their more antisocial qualities. Even the nicest parents will resort to murder if you fuck with their kids. And no one is totally immune from wielding a pick axe and hoisting the black flag on the battlefield of gender-slop.

If the gender discourse (also known as VG or Vindictive Gendercourse) has any power in it at all, it is held by someone and observed by someone else. For instance, if men need to totally overhaul the ways they hit on women, it is going to be the result of women’s efforts which may or may not get a hand from institutions or the public at large. Similarly, if men are going to go all Taliban on women in this country, it would probably require a little bit of institutional tweaking. So I’m going to define who the parties are and describe some of the dynamics so that I can elucidate one of the qualities I currently see.

But before I start, I want to state that I don’t think this power is zero-sum. This isn’t Iraq and the power vacuum you seek may be offscreen. Just because it flows out of one party does not mean it flows to another within the system. One could just as well imagine a scenario in which VG dies down, like a storm, not because power flows from men to women or women to men but because the entire system encounters chillier waters where barrier islands abound and power dissipates before forming another tempest in a separate geography. Perhaps we move on and enter other kinds of vindictive discourse. Maybe we argue cats versus dogs, two enemies known to join forces when it rains hard enough, only to go back to hating each other when the energy flows out of the storm.

Ready, playa?

Pertinent groupings for our parties here are:

• Women

• Men

• The public (individuals)

• Institutions (corporations, polite society as groups)

Women (sugar and spice)

In public discourse, women are represented by upper middle class women speaking for women as a group. Women can spontaneously work together as a group to vanquish an enemy, be it a person they don’t like or a line of argument they don’t like. They do not need premeditation or even formal acknowledgment of their tasks to coordinate, in the same way that ants can be both individuals and flow as a group, the way a drop of water does not evaporate or disappear when it joins a wave or puddle.

None of this is derisive: Being part of a group does not stop you from being an individual. Conversely, being an individual does not mean you always have a wave or puddle to join. This is why men are just grown up sperm forever detached from the fount of youth which begat them in the first place.

Men (sperm, gross)

In the battle of the sexes and elsewhere men are discombobulated individuals attempting but failing to coordinate toward a shared goal. Which is why people like

Richard V Reeves

exist. He would like to turn us into a cohesive nonthreatening office-approved cohort in slimfit slacks, which warms institutions to him but little of the public, female or male. He must deal with guys like me and Rohan being cooler and more convincing to the public, if not institutions. Neither of us claims to tell institutions what to do. We just know Reeves will fail because he isn’t willing to confront any of the obstacles stopping men from flourishing. All of his plans must subordinate to the same Progressive policies that put men into such a bad place in the first place.

Public (a mood-ring, sometimes a referee)

The public is a group in only the loosest terms since it is not possible to exist outside the warm embrace of itself. You can make generalizations about the individuals who comprise it because they’re definitively more generic than every subgroup, the public consisting of everyone. As individuals you can believe in Young Earth or evolution, pro-life or abortion, but the public as a group still has a vibe. The same way a group of people can sing you Christmas carols or form a lynch mob, the same way a mood-ring will always have color but the colors will shift, in this way the public has a vibe and men and women and any other faction can change the overall dynamic depending on how much power they have over the public. Whether wrong or right, the public as an aggregate of say, the U.S., has belief in certain ideas and framing. If one group’s ideas lose purchase or fail to gain purchase as another gains on them, that group can be said to be losing power. It may be up 1,000 points to 1 but if the score was previously 2,000 to 1, someone is still losing power. Referees like the public will often admit this while referees like institutions sometimes get in trouble for throwing the game and obscuring the true mood of the public.

Institutions

Institutions masquerade as what the sum average of political opinion should be, if not what it is. It prefers to present itself as though it is already reflective of the currently held consensus. This is why public polling is just wishcasting with numbers.

Theoretically it’s possible polling could be somewhat accurate, especially on individual issues. For instance, on the VQ (Vibes Question) about the Democrats, I completely buy polling that says they’re unpopular since many of the people they’re unpopular with are themselves Democrats. However, I’ve noticed that presidential polls are not only unreliable, but they are almost always wrong in favor of Democrat candidates such as Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. What you’ll notice is that even when there’s polling indicating that Democrats are unpopular, it’s regularly couched in calls to donate more money and work harder to defeat Republicans. To restore order. Even the bad news gets issued as an injunction and not just a descriptor. Whether good or bad, news has traditionally come from institutions and the very framing used always favors institutions themselves which prefer Clinton and Harris to Trump.

Here’s anecdata on my point that gender-slop has been popping lately.

From the last 2-4 weeks of The New York Times:

• Men, where have you gone? Please come back. (7/15/25 female author).

• Where Have Men Gone? We’re Right Here. (7/18/25 RESPONSE male author).

• The Boy Crisis is Overblown (7/23/25 female author).

• Why Are Young Men Still Struggling? (7/26/25 female author).

• Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of Mankeeping (7/28/25 female author).

• When Men talk about their feelings (8/7/25 RESPONSE male author).

From my personal Substack feed (non-exhaustive!):

There are two people I’m listing but not individual pieces since so much of their content concerns men and women, it would be kind of silly. Both are excellent writers, who are pumping out a lot lately, so this is more of an accomplishment than any attempt at a dis. Those two people are: Cartoons Hate Her and

Archwinger

; although there are others who frequently write about it listed below, even if they are prolific writers, I am restricting this list to pieces which have bubbled up in my personal feed in the last 2-4 weeks.¹

Lirpa Strike

(female):

• Being Hit on by Married People (7/7/25);

• Don’t Lower Your Standards (7/17/25);

• Perspective Differences in Communication Breakdowns Between Men and Women (7/22/25);

• Daring The Boys (7/27/25)

Anuradha Pandey

(female):

• Female competition and the death of merit (7/20/25);

• How to speak with American men (7/25/25);

• Women want masculinity but can’t admit it (7/27/25);

• Managerial feminism and credentialism killed social mobility (8/8/25)

Rohan Ghostwind

(male):

• No, no, I’m not an Incel, I’m a *hetero-fatalist*

• Women’s unrealistic dating standards have been going back centuries

• "We want men to show emotion. But not like that. Or that. Or that."

Not-Toby

(male): The Invisible Labor of Tying Up My Wife

Elise Unleashed

(female): The Unseen Burden of Hermeneutic Labor (7/17/25)

Eurydice

(female):

• No One Knows How Horny Women Are, Especially Women (7/21/25)

• Navigating Male Binary Thinking (7/22/25);

• Social Ineptitude and Intrasexual Competition (7/30/25);

• This Post is Rage Bait (8/5/25);

Walt Bismarck

(male): On Generation X and HR Ladies (7/23/25)

Jill Filipovic

(female): Millennial Feminism Saved Marriage. So What? (8/4/25)

Dana DuBois

(female):

• Middle-Aged Men Keep Oggling My 16 Year-Old (7/20/25);

• I had a Little “r” Relationship (8/4/25)

Virginia Weaver

(female): i (still) suck at talking to men: an ex-misandrist's experience with gendered communication styles (7/25/25)

Okay you get the idea

I didn’t list them on my NYT list, but The Times recently started a cycle both complaining that there aren’t enough men in publishing and that not enough men read. They use titles like: “Where Have All the Novel-Reading Men Gone?” and “Attention, Men: Books Are Sexy!” I’m not even going to link all the many retorts here on Substack as this would be its own Library of Alexandria.

Both Substack and the NYT have published recent articles about the publishing industry not having enough male readers, which I can’t help but notice is more of a problem for publishing houses than men or Substack where they might be reading and writing more so than say, at Penguin Random House or W.W. Norton & Company.

To take a random industry for a counterfactual, I haven’t seen articles about declining attendance of anyone at any of the many aquariums that dot this fine nation of ours or what the demographics of their consumers should be. The main reason there are no articles lamenting the lack of aquarium enjoyers of any sex is that aquariums maintain enough power that they are getting paid no matter what (some by parents, lots by the oil and gas underwriters who destroy so many aquatic habitats).

What women and publishing have in common is that the mood-ring of public opinion doesn’t find their arguments particularly convincing anymore and no longer warms to them. Arguments such as:

• 1/5 women getting raped at college

• 22-35% of female hospital visits resulting from domestic violence

• The “wage-gap” deriving from discrimination and being statistically valid in the first place

• Selective acknowledgment of biological differences according to desired outcome, especially with respect to psychometrics like trait-neuroticism and g factor

Loss of credibility

Women, and institutions (which are required to posture as feminist), have lost much of their credibility, especially since Trump’s first presidency, and later since the COVID epidemic, when so many of the overreactions seemed safetyist, neurotic, hysterical, and catering to the weakest among us. Some of the loony protests and movements that have erupted in the last decade seem to have had much more concern for things that animate female minds over male ones e.g. BLM and the whole pussyhat thing. In fact,

Richard Hanania

’s greatest accomplishment thus far has been writing, Women’s Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas.

Much of the appeal of Trump’s second term is the idea that he will claw back at these overreaches either with real reform or just impotent signaling.

So my theory as to why there are more gender-slop articles now than have been published since Harris lost, my theory as to why the severity of the sins men allegedly commit seems to be decreasing hinges on…

Men’s ability to get screened out of the publishing industry while also not taking enough interest in reading what women want us to read or writing things that won’t get published anyway, to not giving you sufficient sexual attention while giving someone else too much sexual attention, to being too scarce while being admonished for exposing too much of our interiority.

The uptick in the quantity of gender-slop and the decrease in the severity of the offenses that stimulate them stems from these upper middle class women. By their own standards they make out better than pretty much every woman in human history and do better than the majority of the male population on earth but they do so much complaining on behalf of women at large (who may have real problems at scale), that they blow their credibility just as much as the official institutions who pushed COVID maximalism, all gay everything, and buy-black campaigns whether or not you are actually black or the business is actually good.

Enough of the loudest women, a critical mass, parroted dishonest talking points that made them feel morally righteous or else kept their mouths shut when it served their purposes and they made little attempt to reign any of it in so this is where we’re at. When you lose many of the eyes and ears who formerly generated sympathy for you, it’s easy to feel like your losing control and trip the fuck out, making your mental anguish everyone’s problem. As I said, it’s not that women are having bad times with men and making it society’s problem. These women pumping out feckless complaint pieces are neurotics who are discontent everywhere and want to make it men’s fault.

Feminism isn’t over and complaining about men will never be over but in the current equilibrium between women, men, the public, and institutions, it’s men and the public who are gaining power and women and institutions who must either wait for/manufacture a crisis to complain about or accept an equilibrium in which their spasms and tantrums are ignored for the time being. I make no predictions about how long this will last but the current storm we’re in is weak on both sides with women losing more energy than men at the moment. Just because women are losing steam doesn’t mean men are gaining it but they’ll take it out on them anyway.

1. Some of these people I have followed a long time. Some were followed today 8/8/25. Many of these posts were just recommendations from the Substack algorithm.