That second link is actually great

It’s really easy, on the left and just in politics generally, to think of things as being zero-sum. So there’s this fear that if we start helping men, then we’ll just have forgotten about women and there won’t be space or time for women anymore. I think that’s a mistake. We should be able to do two things at once. We can recognize that both women and men are members of our society and we should want to help everyone.

100% this is how I see it.

There’s also the fact that because progressives in the mainstream have not really taken up the masculinity question, the people who have taken it up tend to be on the right and often they tend to be problematic figures. You see incels and men’s rights activists and Ben Shapiro burning Barbies, and there’s a fear that if you speak up for men, everyone’s going to be like, You seem too interested in this. Are you one of them? It’s a branding problem.

I really hate that “men’s rights activist” is automatically a bad thing, and is even written here as bad. When you push that it’s sexist to put forward men’s issues, it feels inevitable it will turn men away. We have issues, we suck at building community lately, but we need to be able to talk about them without being shamed or chastised or branded. To the point above, it does not take away from women, at all, to let men have a space too.

We kind of created this space where the good men were too scared to talk, and the ones who did are Andrew Tate types pushing the most vapid interpretation of masculinity.

i.e. Tate exists because he’s such a piece of shit he wasn’t worried about speaking out. Tate thinks his counter culture is good and truthfully it’s why he’s been successful. He’s effectively a voice in an empty space which gets him lots of ears.

With Tate, unlike Peterson, there’s no pretension to anything virtuous. It’s just, Hey, the world hates you. The world wants to make you weak, wants to make you soft, so take what you can get, crush your enemies, abuse women, double down on everything they hate about you. It’s the weak person’s vision of a strong person. It’s the 19-year-old Nietzsche reader who didn’t make it past the preface.

That’s exactly how I feel. It’s empty junk food masculinity.

Masculinity to me is to build and mold yourself, to care about the right things and people, to be confident in your own inner strength, and to be supportive to those around me. It’s a perspective rooted in archetypes yes, and also Augustan stoic philosophy.

It’s okay to want fast cars and hot girls, but I think it’s pretty weak to make those outward rewards the core of yourself.