Fathers and Sons

Gene Hackman on father loss, Andrew Tate breaks containment and more in this week's digest.

What I’ve been reading: Bring It Out: How to Cultivate the Unique Gifts and Assignments You've Been Given by Ben Pilgreen and Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life by David Bahnsen.

In case you missed it, check out this long and substantial profile of me in the New York Times. It was an NYT “great read,” which is essentially their article of the day. It also got featured in the Politico Playbook.

I also got another mention in the New York Times when Ross Douthat discussed my institutional capture framework in one of his newsletters.

Fathers and Sons

The great actor Gene Hackman died last week. A video of him talking about when his father left the family went viral on X. It’s powerful to see a older, extremely successful man still so powerfully emotionally affected by what happened to him as a teenager.

Family breakdown has big negative effects on children. That’s why men shouldn’t leave their families. When you have a kid, when you get married, that’s a choice and a commitment you can’t just walk away from. If you aren’t happy, you just need to suck it up.

The cover image on this post is from Gene Hackman’s wonderful film Hoosiers.

Breaking Containment

Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are being prosecuted for sex trafficking in Romania, got permission to leave the country, which they used to return to the United States.

I said that there’s a good chance that the Tates face more legal jeopardy in the US than they would in Romania, given our elected and entrepreneurial prosecutors. Sure enough, shortly after they landed in Florida the attorney general promptly announced an investigation of them.

The Tates are notable for being the first pure manosphere figures to “break containment” and gain a big following and name recognition outside of that circle. Most of the big men’s influencers like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson are not manosphere figures.

To me, the manosphere is defined by the centrality of the gender “red pill,” or at least male-female dynamics in general. Pickup artistry is of course big here, but I would also include reactionary movements against that, like MGTOW (men going their own way, or those who advocate against marriage or any involvement with women). The space would include original manosphere figures like Rollo Tomassi, but also things like the Whatever podcast or Vox Day’s new Substack newsletter Sigma Game. Most of this content has migrated to Youtube and I don’t have time to keep up with it like I did back in the old blog centric days.

The Tates are the only figures from this world who have achieved reach beyond that subculture, which is interesting because they are certainly the most extreme examples of the genre. When I originally came across Tate in his interview with David Portnoy, he seemed like a garden variety red pill figure. At it turns out, he openly advocates basically pimping out women, using physical violence to keep them compliant, openly bragging about how he scams the men who are customers of his businesses, etc. I don’t know anyone else who does things like that.

It’s not entirely clear how someone like him managed to get so big, but the story that he essentially hacked the Tik Tok algorithm by having the chumps enrolled at his Hustlers University post clips there is plausible.

There was a time circa his interview with Tucker Carlson that Andrew Tate seemed like he wanted to try to pivot into a more “legitimate” space, but that either didn’t work or he decided against it. Today he seems back in provocateur mode.

Regardless, it seems a big odd to me that someone who is the worst of the worst managed to become the biggest influencer of them all. Maybe that says something about society and social media.

Yes, I Divorced Him

As a follow-up to my essay earlier in the week on Miranda July and the celebration of selfish divorce, I’ll highlight this interesting piece on the divorce lit phenomenon from Hermione Hoby.

In recent years, a kind of Hot Divorcées Club has assembled itself in Anglophone writing via a remarkable proliferation of contemporary divorce narratives. These include straightforward memoirs like The Cost of Living and Real Estate by Deborah Levy, You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, Splinters by Leslie Jamison, and Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler. Others, like A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs and This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz, mix memoir with cultural criticism. Then there are novels with a strong flavor of the autobiographical: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offil, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and All Fours by Miranda July (even if, strictly speaking, July’s novel concerns heterosexual separation rather than actual legal divorce). In addition to the generational overlap of their authors, these books also share a common mood: a wind of emancipation blows about, fitfully, through the genre.

Why, when divorce in the US and the UK is at last widespread, destigmatized, and more legally unimpeded than ever, should it have this literary salience? The question becomes more puzzling when one notes that the books in question are overwhelmingly authored by a certain kind of woman: she is white, straight (or at least separated from a man), cisgender, middle class, and in her thirties or forties—a professional writer before her divorce, she remains one afterward. She belongs, in other words, to one of the demographics whose members are least likely to be socially punished or economically penalized for getting out of a marriage. I’m friendly with some of these women—a friendliness based, in large part, on admiration for their work. But what puzzles me is that divorce has acquired increasing literary significance to the very degree that marriage has forfeited social meaning.

…

How much, after all, can a book about marriage from 1972 tell us about marriage in the 2020s? Feminism as a form of social theory needs to evolve with gender relations in the society that it interrogates. Among the most significant changes for women over the past half century has been our mass induction to wage labor and corresponding escape from housewifery. This epochal, ambiguous transformation (which has by no means spared women from unremunerated housework) furnished the context for writing of the ’70s, an era whose literature seems to have shaped my generation of women writers more than any other. But the steely, newfound freedom that courses through the writing of Hardwick, Adler, Babitz, Didion, and Sontag is now no longer new. As one friend of mine put it, it’s as if we want to wear the ideological clothes of our lodestars—Hardwick et al.—even if they don’t quite fit us.

Above all, the contemporary divorce narrative seems to subscribe to the ’70s maxim that the personal is political—without much clear delineation of what, today, is political about ending a marriage. Rather than face and analyze your own failings—the personal—it might be easier to brandish the old adage and allow the politics part to overshadow the other part, even if the politics you’re invoking are some decades out of date. (A friend of mine in her mid-seventies recently observed the attitudinal reversal she’s witnessed within her lifetime: once, a woman was shamed for leaving her marriage; now she’s more likely to be shamed for staying.)

Click over to read the whole thing.

Related:

Dan Cox: Is America Experiencing an Infidelity Epidemic?

Pro-Life, Inc.

A young woman in the pro-life movement posted the following on X:

I’m 100% convinced that abortion is legal because of men. It’s a tool they use to cover up their crimes or neglect women & children they should take care of or have convinced some women they need in order to be “equal” to them in the workplace.

In my experience, this is the standard line in professional pro-life circles. As I’ve written before, they hold the strange position that abortion is the most evil thing in the world and also that women aren’t doing anything wrong.

There’s something deeply off about “Pro-Life, Inc.,” which combines extreme moral sanctimony with a defective moral compass.

Related:

Why Aren't Effective Altruists Pro-Life?

Best of the Web

WaPo: Is politics important in a marriage? ‘Love is Blind’ breakup sparks debate - The woman refused to marry the man at the altar because he’s not liberal enough on this Netflix show.

Sarah Coppin: Dear Boomers, This is Why Millennials Don't Feel Motivated to Work Anymore - Note: Sarah lives in England

Emile Doak: The Stabilization of Religious Decline Is a Big Deal

Jake Meador: Belonging to a Church in a World with Weak Traditions

Daily Mail: Britain's vanishing churches - More than 3,500 have shut in the past decade and been turned into mosques, nightclubs, luxury homes, pubs and even swimming pools as congregations plummet

New Content and Media Mentions

I got additional media mentions from Rod Dreher, Oren Cass, Patrick Brown and Tim Challies.

New this week:

• When Selfishness Becomes Celebrated - How modern culture repackages marital abandonment as radical self-love, with little counter-narrative from religious voices

• Creating a Permission Space for Men's Issues - How Richard Reeves is making it acceptable for the center-left to address the challenges facing today's boys and men

• My podcast this week was with wealth manager David Bahnsen on work and the meaning of life.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.