I was hired to critique a popular video in the manosphere, Traditionalism and Feminism, the Great Gynocentrisms of Our Time. It’s 12-years old but still being commented on and at 60,000 views and counting. Its host, Barbarossa (or Barbar), is no longer active online—because, as a black man, he was getting uncomfortable with the increasing intersection of the manosphere and white supremacism (which makes an irony of his moniker though surely he meant something else). But Barbar was a close colleague of Stardusk, whom I’ve critiqued before, and is effectively one of the founders of the MGTOW movement, and this video is seminal in that regard.

I’ve written a lot on the male supremacy ideology that typifies most of the manosphere. And we see this here, too, but with a twist. But more than just critique, my objective is to use this as an example of how to detect delusional ideation, and what a non-delusional argument would look like. Note the difference in methodology between them. It will help you self-check and perhaps escape any delusions of your own, or spot or respond to others’.

Is This Even Plausible?

This video’s thesis is that modern (Western) society is dominated by “gynocentrism,” the belief that women are superior to men and societal and legal rights and privileges should serve women over men. No doubt some rare randos are into that. But you will struggle to find them; and they absolutely won’t be “dominant,” anywhere—not even over a local school board, much less any government, even less “society.” Androcentrism, however, does qualify for this description. Especially outside the West, but even in the West, where substantial gains toward equality have been made over the last hundred years or two, yet we remain a male-centric social system: most people in charge (of governments, corporations) are men, and men enjoy a lot of latent privileges. I can bar hop an urban quarter at midnight by myself without half a thought; people will hear me say a thing after just ignoring the woman who did; and if I screw something up or aren’t qualified for a job, it won’t be blamed on “men being bad at that.”

Our culture assigns men all the roles of power: moneymaker, protector, decider, “the rational one”; while women are often looked at weirdly, or even mocked behind their back, if they claim these, yet it “feels right” if they get assigned the role of homemaker, caregiver, supporter, “the emotional one.” This is why the worst insult to a man is to call him a woman, while the worst insults reserved for women refer to manly things such as liking sex (starts with s) or having a commanding personality (starts with b). When you use the d-word of a man, people don’t think of their being a man so much as their being mean; while using the c-word of a woman, people don’t think of their being mean so much as their being a woman. The one tarnishes an individual; the other a group. And solely because of culturally installed assumptions and attitudes, not for any rational or coherent reason. I discuss this point a lot more (with many more examples) in So, What Then? You can find several more at Everyday Feminism.

This is why “acting like a man!” carries positive connotations of “doing better / being better / earning respect / being strong and taking charge” while “acting like a woman” carries negative connotations of “doing less / being less / losing respect / being weak and submissive.” No one wants to be accused of acting like a woman. Whereas being accused of acting like a man is more often taken as a compliment—unless it is said to a woman as an insult which only proves the point. Likewise that we frame violence as good conveniences male-sexed bodies in a position of power, while framing childrearing as good inconveniences female-sexed bodies in positions of subordination. That we struggle to see it the other way around is what makes our culture still male-dominant. Androcentrism is prevailing.

To see what the reverse would actually look like, the ancient Iroquois system put mothers in charge of all civilian government and property and subordinated to them men in charge of war, diplomacy, and debate. It de-emphasized violence as the core function of government in favor of childrearing, treating violence as the subordinate task. The system was balanced, but not egalitarian, nor androcentric. One could legitimately call it gynocentric, as long as one allowed that term to refer to any balance of power and privilege favoring women and not just a full black-and-white division of power and authority (like women masters, men slaves). But we don’t live in a system like that. If you allow any balance of power tilted to one gender over another to count as a gender-centrism, then if the Iroquois system can be described as gynocentric, our system can only be described as androcentric.

Hence in our society, high-income or high-power positions that require no particular physical strength are still male dominated (by twenty, thirty, or even forty percentiles: example, example, example) more than any sex differences can explain. Because apart from physical strength, nothing else differs between men and women by more than ten percentiles (example, example, example), or less than a quarter of a standard deviation, or even none at all; while even those nonzero deviations can be cultural, not biological. For example, before 1974 women were about ten percentiles worse than men at math; after 1974 that difference halved; and by 1990 it was gone (Macintyre, “Gender Differences,” 388). The same trend was observed even for “mental rotation,” the one thing supposedly men excel at: Macintyre found that over decades men’s advantage went from around two thirds of a standard deviation to around one third; and now Wang et al. (“Gender Differences,” 8) show that training can pretty much erase it altogether. And it appears this is due to what kinds of toys boys and girls are pressured or encouraged to play with. So male-centric culture starts advantaging men already as children; and continues through adulthood.

So we can definitely talk about androcentrism dominating society (even if its dominance is receding relative to past centuries or more backward countries). But gynocentrism?

The Pitch

Barbar’s video isn’t all bad. Its opening pitch, really, is in favor of the ERA. The reasoning is manospheric but still correct: it’s unfair, for example, to ship men off to war and not women (we should all have the same risk of being drafted to suffer or die). Which of course most feminists agree with. But its frame is ironically off, as he tries to build an equation between anti-feminism, i.e. “traditional” women’s advocacy (i.e. conservative values), which his opening represents with Phyllis Schlafly (whom indeed most feminists loathe as a destructive enemy, not their ally), and (liberal) feminism, which his opening represents with Dr. Ann Scott. Their equivalence? “Both” are “gynocentric.” His case for the conservative side is actually close to correct (though for the accidental reason that conservative ideologies are bad for everyone); while his case for the liberal side is nowhere near.

There are idle groaners in here, like his offhandedly claiming feminists only want the ERA “for their own selfish reasons,” which is just an eyerolling way of saying they want human rights for themselves—which is like accusing slaves of wanting abolition “for their own selfish reasons.” And there is definite sexism, as when Barbar simply “doesn’t believe” the feminist in his own video who says she wants women to be as eligible to the draft and combat service as men (pro tip: she does, and she even explains why). Manospherics simply can’t believe feminists already brought up and defended every real men’s rights issue before they did. And there is outright misogyny, as when he says women raising kids on child support just “sit on their ass” all day, and that doing all the cooking, cleaning, and wrangling of kids for an entire household is “a life of leisure” (indeed, that all that isn’t “legitimate work” but really just enjoying “hobbies”). Likewise that women’s hobbies and interests consist of the “plasticky extraneous bullshit” of “the female collective’s materialistic fancy,” while men’s hobbies and interests are important vectors of happiness. Those are actual quotes.

But I’ll set aside idle rhetoric that Barbar never develops into a point, and only evaluate the actual arguments in this video, including what I call “pseudo-arguments,” where he makes an assertion to establish a point but never argues that the assertion is relevantly true (already a red flag).

Are Sentencing Disparities Evidence of Gynocentrism?

A good example of that shows up early in when Barbar says the ERA would end “men” facing “more jail time on average for committing the same crimes as women.” That could be true only if the disparity actually exists in the sense intended. Sentencing is based on severity, not equality of crime—for example, two people can get busted for “grand theft” and one can get one year and the other ten depending on aggravating factors (like whether you used a gun or roughed anybody up), and when we account for those factors, we might end up finding no disparity between men and woman—just that men are more violent and get sentenced accordingly. Or the sentences being compared may be the result of plea bargains (which tend to get lower sentencing) and women just choose more often to plead out. And so on. So you can’t just say “studies show” a gender disparity and not even cite the study you mean, much less never explain how it actually shows what you mean, and not something else (like disparities in the choices made by these women and men). And of course, things change—so how things were then might not be the case anymore now.

Case in point: after the ERA failed, a famous 1987 study came out showing the reality then to be a bit complicated. For example, “preferential treatment” by sex in one county in Arizona for a few years either side of 1980 was “more likely to be observed in the less severe sentencing options, whereas fewer gender differences are found when examining variation in the more punitive sentencing outcomes” and “for some violent types of crimes the sexes were approximately equal in their likelihood of receiving long terms of imprisonment.” And even when women seemed to be treated more leniently, the study admits it was only barely so (a difference of mere months, to sentences years long), and that their study could not control for prior offenses, which can affect sentencing (particularly if prior offenses were violent), and yet “it is more common to find career or habitual criminals among men” and “men tend to be more violent than women,” which could explain the only large gendered disparity the study found (sentencing to mere jail time, not prison, averaging a month for women and six for men). So this study’s results were not actually capable of establishing the point Barbar needs. But it’s also…old.

I couldn’t find any studies that control for the correct variables, but the data have certainly changed in various ways in the last forty years. Maybe some exist (cite any you find in the comments—but only if they use the correct controls, and don’t just “report a disparity” without accounting for its actual cause). But regardless, look around for five minutes online and you’ll see that countless people in the system (from scientists to policy makers) are concerned about such disparities and would like to do something about them—if they exist. So no one really disagrees with Barbar here. But would the ERA do anything about that? The CRAs didn’t do it for people of color (whose sentencing disparities remain massive compared to white people, and to any disparities by sex). So why would the ERA do it for women (or men)? And if it did, what would change? Would men’s sentences get reduced—or women’s increased? If the latter, it won’t really be benefitting men at all, but it would enact a more fair society.

To be relevant to Barbar’s gynocentrism thesis, though, the question we want to answer is, first, if there really are disparities in sentencing (and that hasn’t been shown yet), and, second, what are they and what causes them? For example, is it a matter of different choices (women plead faster, use less violence, resort to crimes under more mitigating and thus excusable circumstances) and thus not really a matter of gender bias at all? Or is it a matter of judges’ gender bias (the “weak woman / chivalrous man” effect) when applying discretionary sentencing? So, is the problem “discretionary sentencing”? Can a more objective system replace it? If so, that might be an improvement not just for gender, but also race and class. Though there are also arguments it would make things worse; so I leave that up to the evidence. Here let’s just assume for the sake of argument that it’s been proved to work. In other words, we should just do that. Or if it doesn’t work, then if something else does better, we should do that. Or maybe the cause is not bias at all, or not entirely that. And so on. Barbar isn’t touching any of these questions, yet they have to be worked out first, before you can claim they indicate anything. He’s just emotionally reacting to a datum he hasn’t critically examined. That is emotional, not rational methodology.

But even if it all checks out and after all is said and done we can prove there is at least some degree of bias favoring women in criminal sentencing—where are we seeing “gynocentrism” in this?

The reason women get “softer treatment” in patriarchal systems is more likely because they are already disempowered and viewed as weaker, more easily cowed by punishment, and potentially (or actually) in the charge of men who (it is believed) can “keep them in line.” Those are not gynocentric reasons. It’s the same thing with chivalry generally: “women and children first” is not gynocentrism, it’s men (who invented that rule) protecting their property (progeny and wombs), and counting on their merely being “tougher and stronger” getting them through, while “the weaker and more useless” should get a head start. This is not a worldview that centers or empowers women, even if they occasionally benefit from it (in a life wherein mostly they don’t).

So to get “gynocentrism” out of “small sentencing disparities” you need more than the mere existence of those disparities—indeed, more even than bias-generated disparities (which is what you actually need, but is not the same thing as mere disparities, which as just explained might not be a product of gender bias at all). Because even bias-generated disparities can be a product of androcentric, patriarchal systems of thought. “But that hurts men” is no objection to this point, because androcentric patriarchies always hurt men. They are not designed to avoid misery or death. They are designed to get men into hierarchies that are controlled by other men—and keep women out (and under). They are designed to “buy” men privileges at the cost of some condescending chivalry or even their lives and bodies. Like the captain of a ship: they get all the money, power, respect, glory, and even a better room and grub—but in exchange, they have to go down with the ship. That’s the deal. And even then they get accolades in memoriam for their selfless heroism. No one would describe this as “cabin-boy-centrism.” It’s obviously captain-centric.

So where is Barbar’s argument here?

All the same happens when he mentions “affirmative action for women” but never explains what he means. That phrase can mean a hundred different things, and you have to get into which thing you mean, and whether that specific thing exists, and then whether the ERA would even end it (since, for example, certain kinds of corrective affirmative action can preserve rather than violate equality), much less all the way to whether that evinces any kind of dominant gynocentrism—rather than just another patriarchal trick on men, or just another inept policy that isn’t effecting the equality it was supposed to, which even feminists would want to correct. In other words, you have to do a lot more than just “say” things to make a point. If you watch this video, you’ll catch a lot of this, like a passing reference to “hypergamy theory” (which I already debunked last time) and the like, which I’ll spend no more time on here. Just follow a general rule: he gets no points for merely saying things. If he presents no argument for it, he has already lost that argument.

The Problem of Delusional Ideation

To stop “the two great gynocentrisms of our time, traditionalism and feminism,” Barbar proposes we need some ways to raise boys to not become “bluepilled white knights” (i.e. chivalrous conservatives) and “male feminists” (i.e. feminists). Is any of his ensuing advice evidence-based? No. There’s a massive scientific literature on parenting and child development. If you are ignoring all of it, your advice on parenting and child development is probably going to be bad. Just like a flat earther can’t invent GPS, an uninformed medieval mind is not going to outdo even obsolete specialists like Freud or Piaget, much less up-to-date empirical science, in matters of child rearing and socialization. But let’s trudge on and see.

Barbar starts with sex as an addiction. Yeah. Antisexuality. That always works out. His first example (?) is Harlow’s Monkey Study which, generally agreed to be brutally unethical (on a scale approaching Mengele), nevertheless did “prove” that parental touch is essential for the functional psychological development of children (and thus touch deprivation is effectively a kind of traumatizing abuse). Which has nothing at all to do with sex or sexuality. Touch starvation has ample nonsexual causes and solutions and in fact usually does. It’s also not gendered (touch deprivation exists for both sexes and has the same effects and cures). Barbar calls the Harlow results “male-mother need” but that wasn’t demonstrated by those studies, which found the same effects for male and female baby monkeys, and didn’t test the effect of child-father-contact (because monkeys aren’t people and thus don’t have the same behavioral ethos). To the contrary, studies of touch deprivation since Harlow find the opposite result: which parent is affectionately touching a child doesn’t matter, nor the gender of the child (likewise his other points about isolation and fear: no gender bears on this at all, as boys and girls suffer the same, and mothers or fathers produce the same relief). So the only science Barbar ever cites in this video has no relevance to his point. Yet he wastes a ton of clock on this. Getting nowhere.

I’ve made the point before that delusional people are delusional precisely because they are bad at this. Manosphere ideologies are no different than Christianities or conspiracy theories like flat earthism: people get trapped in them, like a hall of mirrors, because they are not critical thinkers and cannot formulate a coherent argument; they thus jump from non sequitur to non sequiter on a basis of emotion rather than reason, but “frame” it all as rational, and thus convince themselves (emotionally) that it is. And the even greater danger is, maybe they convince others of this, too, and thus trap them. And either way, once trapped, they can’t get out, because the ideology they have trapped themselves in comes pre-packaged with defense mechanisms designed to prevent them ever responding rationally to the evidence that would lead them out of it. For example telling them that all opponents to their worldview are the delusional or malicious ones, and “therefore” all information against their worldview is fake or fraudulent; or motivating them to avoid honest tests and confrontations (and pursue instead echo chambers and straw men). We can see all of this in Barbar’s video. He actually thinks the Harlow studies are relevant to the point he is making, when they aren’t—even as-is, much less in the context of half a century of cumulative science on the subject of touch deprivation since, none of which Barbar seems to even know exists.

A critical thinker not trapped in a delusion would get a different result here. They would, first, not lean on an ancient study that emotionally affects them into misunderstanding it, but rather investigate the current status of touch deprivation science. They would, in result, then know that touch deprivation is not a gendered problem and has non-gendered solutions (like a culture of respectful touch), and has nothing to do with sex. Normal parental touch is not sexual; and adults have many possible avenues of nonsexual touch available to them, if only they’d cultivate a social acceptance of it, which means not trying to game it for sexual ends—for example, we could live in a culture where men and men, men and women, women and women can cuddle and hug and touch simply for its own pleasure and benefit without fear of sexual goal-seeking (much less fear of “catching the gay”); but who do you think is getting in the way of creating that culture? It’s not the attitudes and behavior of women; it’s the attitudes and behavior of men. Men are why we can’t have nice things. They are the ones who need to change (a point I thoroughly went over last time). Women are mostly already there, awaiting men’s arrival—but not holding their breath for it. This is what a critical thinker would discover. Barbar is not a critical thinker. Instead he sees bugbears everywhere, because he is trapped in a bugbear delusion. Men’s selfish and abusive attitudes and behavior toward women are the problem (along with homophobia); but Barbar illogically blames women for this. Hence, as we can expect, he never presents any evidence of that. He just “believes” it.

You can sort of reverse engineer Barbar’s mistake here. He had an emotional reaction to the Harlow studies’ focus on mothers (due to the limitations of monkey ethology which has no relevance to human ethology) and spun out a delusional conspiracy theory about boys’ dependence on their mothers—which resembles the crank psychology of Robert Glover, whose delusional manosphere ideology I already thoroughly critiqued. There is no logic here; and the science is all impertinent or obsolete. Barbar’s reasoning is purely driven by emotion, not actual reason (as in, nonfallacious argumentation) or evidence (as in, contemporary science); yet he frames it all to sound like (and thus emotionally “feel” like) he is making a rational, evidence-based argument. That emotional feeling then comforts him into believing he really did make a rational, evidence-based argument. And his delusion will prevent him ever realizing he didn’t.

For example, if Barbar ever reads this article, I predict he will react emotionally with rage, fear, or contempt, and a singular drive to straw man and thus ignore it, and in result not actually get a single point it makes. He’s trapped in a hall of mirrors, which doesn’t want him to realize any of this, and thus equips him with tactics to evade it. (For a discussion of this dynamic in respect to Christianity, see Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? and Theism, Naturalism, and Explanatory Power—because all the same tactics and devices are deployed for every delusion.)

To be fair, Barbar brackets the rest of that argument over to another video I won’t review here (on “male mother need and civilization”), but you can apply the same principles I just did to vet that yourself if you are so inclined (though I suspect you are more likely to have better things to do with your time). But he has burned almost half of this video on no substantive point towards its thesis: the supposed domination of gynocentrism over the developed world. Instead he waxes on about how rich men should just acquire harems rather than pursue monogamous marriage, because they miss their mothers. This conflation of “monogamy” with “gynocentrism” is a theme in the manosphere I already debunked before. As is all the pseudoscience of male psychosexual development it’s being anchored to here (which just replicates the nonsense of Glover).

But Barbar is delusional. Hence he has spun all this fallacious reasoning and pseudoscience into the claim that men have a “biological predisposition to remain servile to the human female.” The dehumanizing reference to women here, in contrast to its humanizing reference to men, typifies misogynistic delusions. But let’s look past that to try and find anything resembling an argument here. He fallaciously concludes that because children (regardless of sex) need protection and affection from someone (of any sex) while growing up, that therefore specifically men are biologically engineered to be groomed in childhood to depend specifically on mother-figures as adults, and “therefore” they monogamously marry their mothers. But he presents no argument by which these conclusions follow from those premises, much less any scientific evidence of the conclusion—which there should be by now, if the phenomenon were real.

So, for example, around when Barbar made this video there was a craze for claiming men marry women who look like their mothers, but even then the corresponding studies over-claimed (they made small effect sizes sound like universal behaviors when in fact they indicate fringe behaviors, a fact Barbar would have noticed had he checked), and since then, some studies were even retracted, while more powerful studies have refuted the entire concept. What pans out is that men and women raised by affectionate and safe parents are more able to identify affectionate and safe partners. Which is a completely different conclusion than Barbar’s. Obviously experience with a reliable companion upskills you to find more. That’s not a bad thing.

So a critical thinker—someone not trapped in a delusion—would work out quite the opposite conclusion: a childhood need of affection and safety crosses all sexes and genders (it is not distinctive of boys and men, and is inherently rational and useful, not a “biological defect”); it does not produce any desire “to marry one’s mother” but to secure the companionship of someone affectionate and safe—because affection and safety can also come from fathers, and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and friends and neighbors, and even society as a whole. For Barbar to “blame women” for his need to have affectionate and safe friends, family, companions, and peers, is literally insane.

Are Love and Sex a Maladaptation?

Barbar concludes that delusional rant by declaring a desire for love, affection, and sex is a “maladaptation.” Which of course is a scientifically illiterate use of that word. Obviously these are highly adaptive functions, which is why they exist all over the animal kingdom, and especially in sentient primates. The MGTOW delusion is that somehow “love, affection, and sex” are obsolete in a modern civilization, therefore men should abandon all three. That’s a toxic ideology. It ensures a pathological outcome—maladaptive behavior, malignant delusionality, even suicide.

So the unfortunate irony is that Barbar’s delusion has caused him to declare adaptive functions maladaptive, in order to promote a behavioral paradigm that is actually maladaptive. Indeed Barbar’s attitude here looks disturbingly like psychopathy, and I do have to wonder if he is a psychopath and has merely made an ideology out of it. Regardless, a less toxic approach would be to promote behavior that drives one toward affectionate and safe relations, which means becoming a person worthy of being loved (someone who is affectionate, safe, and reliable), and then seeking a companion who earns your love in turn (or more than one, because open polyamory is a thing). Of course, you should even more learn how to enjoy being by yourself first, and then (your shit duly together) seeking out companionship in whatever form it can be found—hence not just sexual relationships, but any other kind (friends, family, colleagues).

All that advice is as true for women as men, and thus has nothing to do with biological sex at all, much less “gynocentrism.” But as I already cover all this in my critiques of Glover and Stardusk, I won’t belabor it here. Barbar is supposed to be getting to advice for raising boys to “fix” them so that they no longer need love, affection, and sex and therefore are never “enslaved” by a woman. Already we can see he’s on to bad advice—really, really bad advice. But what specifically does he recommend parents do to effect this delusionally desired outcome? He segues at this point to what he calls a “five monkey scenario” that I won’t bore you with, just note that it’s a crude delineation of one way cultural systems can get locked-in despite being obsolete, resulting in maladaptive or self-defeating behavior being “normed.” Which is indeed a thing. For example, we have “normed” the gender-pipelining of children by similar unconscious parenting and peer-signaling of girls and boys into playing with certain kinds of toys, which sets them up for particular kinds of careers and preferences in adulthood that are deemed “appropriate” to each gender. We then falsely attribute the resulting deviation to “biological differences” between men and women.

But Barbar wants to use the model to support his ideology. So he claims that “traditionalism and chivalry” are examples of this, and though he never argues for this (he presents no evidence or science), it is a viable hypothesis that I believe could be proved, with even abundant evidence. The problem of course is that these are actually waning norms. “Traditionalism and chivalry” are reactionary culture now, not mainstream. Insofar as Barbar is arguing we should phase them out in child rearing, mainstream society already agrees with him. And they are right to. One can infer that Barbar means to criticize and “correct” his viewers who are clinging to conservative values here (remember all those white supremacists he didn’t realize were devouring his videos?), because he explicitly says that at several points in the video up to this point. That is indeed his primary thesis: that traditionalist anti-feminism is as toxic and obsolete as he claims feminism itself is. Worthy point. But he still never argues for it—as in, presents evidence establishing premises that he can derive a valid inference from. He just “says” it, which is pretty ineffective.

But then he turns for the worse when he immediately conflates “traditionalism and chivalry” with “love” and then by equivocation fallacy says his premise (that conservative culture is toxic and obsolete) entails love itself is toxic and obsolete. This is the first time in this video that we get a stock description of the MGTOW delusion (in minute 29):

With traditionalism we created the lies of romantic love and chivalry because men needed to believe in women being with them because they loved them instead of because they needed them, and when women figured out that they no longer needed men, that they could work for themselves or rely on government to extract wealth from men, that little fantasy was shattered.

This is all the nonsense I already refuted from Stardusk. But again, Barbar presents no evidence for any of this, nor even any argument for any of this. He just “declares” it. It is of course false, historically and scientifically. Love is not a “lie,” and chivalry isn’t even a fact statement but simply an etiquette, and women do not have relationships with men merely because they “need” them and thus only “pretend” to love them, and women could always get by on their own (especially as collectives) if they had wanted to; likewise women pay taxes and men receive services too, so even his little dig about governments extracting wealth “from men” “for women” is delusional.

We could have had a fruitful analysis here of what “chivalry” is and how it manifests (or did) in modern societies and how and why that happened and what we should replace it with and why that would be better. But Barbar’s delusion has ridden him right past any useful thing he could have done here and instead triggered him into spewing misogynistic bullshit (up to and including declaring that woman can’t innovate or invent anything). Which may have something to do with why good women aren’t interested in him. He has a plank to remove from his own eye before he can remove a splinter from anyone else’s. But his delusion has tricked him into not even believing there is a plank in his eye. He thus can’t fix his toxic self, the same toxic self that convinces him the outcome of his toxicity is everyone else’s fault. Hall of mirrors.

The only good thing to come of this is Barbar’s resulting hostility to (particularly American) conservative values, since he sees in that all the evils he sees in everything else. For example, he derides the “woman as homemaker” cultural norm, just as feminists do; though he attacks it as enslaving or holding back men, while they attack it as enslaving or holding back women. Although in every respect that his frame is true, feminists already argue that too (they agree egalitarian relationships are better for men). And in the rest, his frame is false. Statistically it is not usually the case that women who say they love a man are deviously just selling overpriced housemaid services to him.

Barbar’s account of child custody decisions is similarly divorced from reality—that actually follows evidential logic and the behavior of the parents, not, as he claims, “traditionalism” or “presumption.” For example, when men seek custody, they win it 60% of the time, which evinces no gender bias in the system; whereas presumptive custody follows decisions already made by a married couple before they separated, which judges simply recognize until challenged. Barbar has one thing right here, though: that men who choose a conservative gendered family structure are dooming themselves to lose custody more often than to sharing custody, owing to the conservative structure’s very uneven distribution of caretaking; and therefore (if they don’t want that outcome) they ought to abandon that structural norm from day one (even if that requires making different life and career choices). As all the fathers who didn’t adopt conservative family structures prove (with the rise of joint custody and of paternal custody).

Another example is when Barbar says that we should challenge both traditionalists and feminists, who claim women are more nurturing than women, as spreading a sexist falsehood, which is true depending on what this hypothetical feminist actually said—and not what he might have falsely concluded they said. For example, it would be true to say that woman are trained to be nurturing more than men, and thus it ends up the case that they tend to be more nurturing than men. But that is not the same as saying women are biologically predisposed to be more nurturing than men (much less that every woman is more nurturing than every man). The cause here is not gender essentialism but toxic masculinity (which abuses boys away from caregiving behaviors) and toxic femininity (which abuses women toward them); in other words, traditional sexism. I don’t trust Barbar’s competence in distinguishing these two things, and thus I do not trust his judgment in telling me what any feminist actually said. I suspect Barbar will delusionally “hear” what he wants feminists to have said, and thus not learn anything. And thus he isn’t teaching anything here. He is just repeating standard misogynist misinformation.

Case in point: Barbar thinks he can “rebut” this “feminist” claim that women are more nurturing than men by reporting that “he” is just as nurturing as any woman. Set aside the fact that I do not trust he is a reliable narrator by now and thus I would question any self-report he makes. Even if his statement were in every relevant way true, it still cannot rebut the claim he is targeting. The existence of outliers cannot prove a trend, and what was claimed was a trend. So what he needs is a survey of scientific evidence showing statistical trends between men and women along the metric in question. If he had bothered to do that (the thing a critical thinker would do), he might find just what I said: that in fact men do tend to be less nurturing (and caring and compassionate and emotionally intelligent); but that this was because of the traditionalist culture Barbar rightly wants to attack, not biology. And feminists agree with that. Yet he wants to attack feminists. So he attributes to them a straw man that he thinks he can rebut with a single dubious anecdote. This is terrible argumentation. But it is very emotionally driven and perfectly in aid of his delusion. And it completely fails to make any productive statement on the subject at all—unlike an actual feminist, who correctly reports the role of culture in producing the disparity. But if you can’t identify the problem, you’ll never identify a solution.

Instead, Barbar goes on about how women with traditional enculturation or gender essentialist ideas are “inferior stock” with whom you should not “breed,” thus devolving into dehumanizing misogyny, crediting individual women’s cultural and intellectual failures as literal genetic defects, and characterizing all women as mere breeding machines and not people. And still we have not heard any advice for how parents can change this by any child-rearing behaviors. Barbar seems to think that we just need to ideologically indoctrinate boys into his toxic misogynistic ideology—as if that’s all “raising a child” means: forced indoctrination into a self-harming delusion. And so he is just rambling off his false ideology, with nothing even resembling an argument for it. I am having flashbacks here to The Breakfast Club and “Aaay! Smoke up, Johnny!!” The analogy is, Barbar is just advertising what a shitty father he would be. Yet delusionally thinks he is schooling society on how a father should be.

I already covered much of this last time. For example, Barbar goes on a rant about how men being made to work 70 hours a week so they can’t share time with their kids is “women’s” fault (it’s not) and he seems to think “feminism” made it worse (to the contrary, it made it better). Likewise, he thinks the only value to having kids is to “instill” in them “values and legacy and culture,” in other words, to indoctrinate and control them—rather than seeing children as entirely new human beings, a benefit to society and the children themselves, whom you get to enjoy the company of, share growing with, and train to think for themselves. So even when he credibly criticizes men who have kids (and he means those who duly pay to support them) just to boast of reproducing (in other words, fire-and-forget dads, like Elon Musk), he does it from this toxic, twisted, misogynistic delusion, rather than learning what it really means to be a dad. Instead of teaching kids virtues like discipline and responsibility and empathy, he wants to inject them with ideologies of hate that will only make every aspect of their lives worse. His delusion is thus crippling him.

Hosing History as Well as Science

Ideological misogynists have bizarre ideas about history, too. So they not only suck at science and critical thinking, they suck at history as well. As with every subject, they just “assume” that whatever they happen to believe is “what happened.” They never think to actually check. I noticed this quite jarringly after Barbar spent half the video getting nowhere and defending no premise that would support his gynocentrism thesis, and then randomly attacks “welfare moms” and “women, infant, and children’s programs” (WIC) as (supposedly) a gynocentric effect of “feminism.” Actually, that dates back to the Roman Empire, which is hardly describable as gynocentric. Similar programs launched in the US in the 19th century under the label “mother’s pensions,” and those were subsumed under Aid to Dependent Children by the Social Security Act of 1935. Hardly gynocentric eras. Remember, women only got the vote in 1920; feminism was fringe until the 1960s; and women couldn’t even get a credit card without a male co-signer until 1974. You can’t blame feminism for Roman alimenta and antebellum mother’s pensions.

Of course, it’s already trending psychopathic to be against welfare for the starving. The whole welfare mom myth is, of course, made up. Complaining about public welfare because of occasional welfare fraud is like insisting insurance companies should be banned because of insurance fraud. Statistically welfare doesn’t work the way Barbar thinks, doesn’t produce the outcomes he thinks, and is widely granted to men (and couples) on the same conditions, and so is not “gynocentric.” It’s not gendered. Even WIC, the only American program for helping specifically mothers maintain nutrition through pregnancy and early motherhood, is widely taken by couples—not just single women, but mothers living and sharing expenses with the father. Because poverty, not marital status, is the only criterion. Moreover, WIC only gets you basic foods (and that means basic; not sodas or lobster). You can’t pay rent or dine out with it. And you know how much you get? Forty bucks a month. Per dependent, but still. You go try living high on the hog in the United States for just forty bucks a month. If you have a kid, you get a whopping eighty bucks—but still have to feed them (and clothe them and change them and get them care and every other thing). If you have four kids, sure, now it’s $200 a month. Wowza. Same problem.

To understand things like this, you simply have to examine the history and the causes. Why did private solutions fail, necessitating a public solution? Who actually gets it? What does it actually do? What does it actually cost? (If cost is what you are going to complain about.) In other words, you have to know why something exists and is the way it is—as well as what it actually even is—before you can even bitch about it, much less wax philosophical on it. And apologists for delusional ideologies take very little interest in ever actually understanding anything they are talking about. Which I personally find extremely annoying. But beyond my annoyance, this is serious societal problem. It causes millions of delusional uncritical fools to tank our entire economy and government.

Half of all the human evil in the world is ultimately caused by the rich. The other half is ultimately caused by people like Barbar, who let themselves get trapped in delusional worldviews that cause them to make phenomenally stupid decisions about how to vote, or how to influence anyone else to vote. And everyone else suffers. (And yes, the first half, the rich, are often “using” the second half, the rubes, to do all this: Barbar’s ideology has long been appropriated by the wealthy elite to keep him busy chasing nonexistent bugbears like “welfare queens” and “cultural Marxists” while they double his hours, stagnate his pay, and take a massive tax cut.)

In reality, “welfare” does not exist because of feminists (since it long predates their influence and has always existed to serve the poor, regardless of sex) or traditionalists (who, being conservative reactionaries, tend to oppose, not support it). So it can’t have anything to do with “gynocentrism.” So we still haven’t gotten any evidence for his thesis.

It’s All Bad Advice

We’re over halfway through Barbarossa’s video now and we have seen no evidence for gynocentrism, nor even an argument for it, but instead a bunch of disparate crank theories and emotional non sequiturs. He is supposed to be telling us at this point how to raise boys to ditch women, but instead all he is doing is listing a bunch of conspiracy theory claptrap that you’re supposed to “teach” boys, with an interweaving suggestion to somehow not work 70 hours a week so you can get your kids away from the wily evil witch-hands of their mothers so as to prevent them being “wrongly indoctrinated” (a.k.a. raised to be a moral, considerate, and critical human being). But he never gives any advice about how to do any of that. Conjure a magical job that let’s you survive and raise kids on forty hours a week? Sounds like he should be befriending the witches—since he apparently needs spell-magic. Or maybe a better understanding of labor union politics.

Part of the cult ideology Barbar says we are supposed to coerce into our boys is an emphasis on “external male virility” (practically a Poe of toxic masculinity now), but I already tore that up as really bad advice last time. Especially since he is talking about solving the problem “of civilization” which is actually that “external male virility” does not have all that much marketable value anymore. Those kinds of jobs are shrinking and being overcome by office work (coding, admin), healthcare work (doctors, nurses), and service work (restaurants, transportation). Intelligence (emotional and general) has more labor market value now. Very few men can trade on “external male virility.” So suggesting all men pursue it is not particularly good advice. That’s niche market now. Boys should be working on their IQ, EQ, and RQ. They need to focus on being skills-adaptable and time-disciplined. That this is the same advice we should be giving girls only illustrates that the gender divide he’s complaining about is already fading.

Another part of this cultish ideology is that men should be “selfish,” literally never sharing anything, and never forming cooperative enterprises or partnerships. This is really bad advice—because as all relevant science will tell you, coops and partnerships are safer and more successful (have you ever heard of insurance, corporations, governments, unions?). Obviously families that pool resources do better than families that don’t. Even friends who share resources fare better than friends who don’t. Hence the reason marriage still exists is that it is not possible to go it alone. You do far better with a combined income. You do far better when you don’t have to do everything. If you have to work, and wash dishes, clothes, floors, shop, make meals, ferry and tutor and referee children—that will be a lot easier if you can split the labor. That’s just common sense. Sure, monogamous marriage might be an obsolete and dysfunctional way to do that, but the solution to an uncomfortable saddle is not to shoot the horse. There are lots of better options (see Poly Family, Poly World…and Poly Among the Poor). Barbar is recommending none of them. He’s telling you to shoot your horse. The saddle will just magically float on its own and mysteriously become more comfortable. “Trust me.”

It’s advice like this that is dooming too many men and boys to the lost valley of toxic worldviews that keep them miserable and low while they blame everyone but themselves for following bad advice and doing stupid things. It’s a scientific fact that you will be happier with at least one good companion that you share life’s labors and costs with (whether friend or lover, it doesn’t matter). It’s even better with more. Being selfish is exactly the wrong advice. Of course, so is “being a doormat.” But the wise path lies in the golden mean between these extremes. As it does in almost every other aspect of life (see Your Own Moral Reasoning and in respect to men, my Review of Robert Glover and A Barely Thinking Ape).

And Now for Some Own Goals

There’s a bit near the end where Barbar praises another manosphere website’s critique of “traditional women’s rights activism” (code for “conservative patriarchalist”), which doesn’t advance any relevant point, because those people are currently the losers culturally—clinging to remaining levers of power by hook or crook rather than popular demand. Tradwifery is a joke now, not the mainstream norm. And their political machinations are consistently anti-women, not “gynocentric.” Worse, almost all the things he lists as on a “traditional women’s rights activist” wish-list don’t exist (like the “tender years doctrine”; so why are we complaining about it?), and aren’t supported by most conservatives or feminists. So how does some random whackadoo fringer represent societal gynocentrism?

Why is Barbar wasting my time with this person’s dumb ideas? …

That’s a real screenshot. Yes, he is arguing with someone who after a decade has amassed a grand total of two followers on Twitter and follows only one other. This looks fake to me. You can explore their deleted website and decide for yourself, but I get a strong vibe of “a man forged all this” (it was also built almost entirely in two months and deleted only a few months later). So why does Barbar burn so much time on this? The only answer I can think of is that he scraped the internet for any cherry picked item of evidence he could, because he couldn’t find any real evidence to establish his point with.

This is especially sad because Barbar wants to argue that traditionalists and feminists are making society gynocentric, when his prize example of the “tender years doctrine” shows exactly the reverse: the idea that children should stay with a mother during their “tender years” existed under far more androcentric periods of history; and since feminism started tearing it down, it has declined into almost no sway in modern courts. So shouldn’t Barbar be using this as evidence that gynocentrism is in decline? Think this through. By his argument, gynocentrism is represented by the “tender years doctrine.” Yet the evidence shows that’s basically gone now. So, there went “gynocentrism.” Moreover, when it was legislated, society was far more androcentric (women didn’t have the vote, and couldn’t own property apart from their husband, or sit in any position of public authority at all, and were excluded from most professions, and generally societally scolded into house slavery). So how could the existence of a “tender years doctrine” be evidence of a “gynocentric” society? It would appear that it is a product of androcentric society.

Remember our examples earlier, whereby cultural norms that appear to occasionally benefit women actually stem from patriarchal interests, not feminism. How might that be? Well, a clue is that when “tender years” laws were enacted, divorce was de facto illegal. Only the very rich could procure one. So the “tender years doctrine” was not a societal action at all. It benefited only a small minority of elite women—the kind of women who have a lot of men in their corner, like, say, Members of Parliament. The point of getting these women the kids was more in furtherance of inter-male competition: it provided a way for men to punish other men who embarrassed their society with divorce proceedings, since to warrant a divorce there had to be cause, and hence scandal. In a case when the scandal was the woman’s, the law allowed the father to win custody.

So the only times the woman got custody is when elite men did not believe the father deserved it—for having committed some offense against them or their ordering of society. The same situation prevailed in the United States: “tender” laws were used by men to punish other men who authored scandal against the patriarchy. It is probably no accident that as divorce became more accessible, “tender” laws began to decline as now dysfunctional, since they were designed for a nearly-no-divorce system, and when that went away, “tender” laws started to backfire against men’s interests, and so men’s interests prevailed in removing them. And they prevailed because feminists backed their abolition.

As Victoria Miller recently wrote in “How Social Movements Have Influenced Child Custody Standards” (citing a study by Laura Sack for the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism):

Feminists criticized the stereotypical nature of the Tender Years Doctrine in regard to women. Feminists argued that the Tender Years Doctrine reinforced traditional gender roles within family life. Automatically favoring mothers as caregivers limited women’s advancement in society. [And] the maternal presumption depicted women mainly as caregivers and mothers rather than equally capable professionals, which limited their opportunities. This automatic preference in custody disputes made it difficult for women to balance work and family roles.

In other words, “tender years” laws were actually evidence of patriarchy. They represented androcentric views of women (as merely subordinate caregivers) and men (as more fit for action outside the home, and responsible for upholding public values that were believed to maintain the social order), and they served the androcentric views of elite men. Feminists fought to get rid of them, not create or sustain them, producing a more egalitarian society. So contrary to Barbar’s line of thought, the actual history of “tender years” laws refutes his video’s thesis.

We get the same when Barbar shifts into an anti-war, anti-militarism tirade that is entirely what feminists have been saying for decades already (indeed even Ann Scott does at the top of his own video). He wants to spin this as gynocentrism, when in fact it’s androcentrism (everything he says has been true since the Roman Empire), and all feminists agree with him: the draft should be egalitarian and war should be extremely rare (and not a vehicle of state politics and corporate greed—and that soldiers should be paid better). So how does this illustrate his thesis? Patriarchy has always seen women as protected property and men as disposable. Feminism wants us rid of both. Likewise Barbar wants men to emulate women in taking better care of their health. Yeah. That’s what feminists have been saying for ages now. He is arguing against toxic masculinity here, but mistakes himself as arguing against “gynocentrism.”

Why? Because he is too incurious to even investigate why things are the way they are (why are men disproportionately less careful of their health than women?). He simply plugs in his delusional bigotry as “the reason,” evidence be damned, and then argues from evidence he just invented. Here his theory is standing in for evidence and then used as evidence for the theory. Circular argumentation. Which merely looks like a rational argument. It’s just funny that in this case, if he checked, he’d be stymied by the fact that marriage benefits men’s health (because it improves mood and shares labor, and thus reduces stress; even improved diets are a result of sharing labor and improving mood). Which argues directly against his claim that men should avoid marriage for their health. Again, he subs his bigoted armchair belief in for the actual evidence (which turns out to be exactly the opposite), and uses that as evidence for his bigoted armchair belief. Round and round it goes. The deluded are always chasing their own tail and calling it progress.

It’s most sad when Barbar comes close to getting it when he admits men’s disinterest in their own health (including, he honestly admits, mental health) is “a choice” that they are to blame for (and not women for a change), but never gets his own point. He never realizes this positions the problem with men, not women, and thus it isn’t “gynocentrism” he should be arguing against, but the very toxic masculinity he is himself promoting. But it’s also sad that in all the rare cases he does get something right, it’s for the wrong reasons. As here, he finally recommends that boys be taught more about men’s health and physiology, and diet and exercise, which is finally good advice—but he means that they should be told this so they can avoid some vague dependency on supposedly parasitic women, rather than simply because everyone benefits from doing it. Conversely, his answer to the problem of men neglecting their mental health (owing, we know, to toxic masculinity culture) is to have men take over schools to protect boys from some sort of contrary feminist propaganda that doesn’t exist, and imbue instead the very toxic masculinity that is the actual cause of the problem. His bigotry thus prevents him from ever getting to any solution that would actually work for any problem, even when he accurately identifies a problem. Again, his delusion is crippling him.

The Problem with Living in an Alternate Reality

Eventually Babar goes entirely off the rails by claiming that women’s control of education has led to over-punishing and over-medicating boys. He is living in a fake reality here, constructed by his own bigoted delusion. And that causes him to not only fail to produce any real solution to anything, but also to fail to even comprehend what the problem actually is.

• First, he misses the point that the gender disparity he is complaining about is actually a product of androcentrism, not gynocentrism: underpaying teachers, thus signaling it’s “women’s work,” and patriarchally assuming handling kids is not a man’s province thereby culturally discouraging men from pursuing it. So he identifies a problem (a gender disparity in educators), but not its actual causes; and thus he can’t propose a solution. He merely “insists” men solve it, but that is the absence of a solution; he is merely expressing a desire for one. Confusing the two is a sign that you don’t really have a handle on the problem at all. Worse, he insists men solve it by invading schools and teaching toxic misogynistic delusions, which is guaranteed to prevent any such men getting hired, and thus is guaranteed never to work. That’s worse than having no solution. This is a most glaring example of how his delusion is crippling him, and thus harming society.
• Second, he is repeating urban myths about boys in school, rather than checking so as to understand what’s really going on. There is no mass medication issue (that’s a myth), and the actual medication issue is more complicated than he makes out. But the problem of boys falling behind girls in education is real and very well studied. Yet the reasons for it are not because boys “don’t learn the pathetic way that women do—you know, they fidget, they clamour, they explore, they discover” and so teachers identified this as “a mental health problem and proceeded then to medicate away everything good about boys.” None of that is happening.
• First, fewer than ten percent of any kids are on “mental health” medication of any kind, and there is hardly any difference between boys and girls (less than two percentiles). For ADHD specifically (and Barbar means this, not, e.g., depression or other disorders), boys get diagnosed twice as much as girls (nationally, 15% to 7%) but the same percentages then get medication (roughly half of diagnosed boys and girls), and (here is the kicker) in more progressive (vs. conservative) states, these percentages are substantially less. So feminism looks more like the cure even to this problem, not its cause. Drugging boys appears to be a harsh patriarchal move, not a gynocentric one. And yet even in the patriarchal condition, too few boys relative to girls are being treated this way to explain the divergence in academic performance across all boys and girls.
• Second, Barbar failed to burn test his theory here. For example, in Japan, boys and girls are performing more or less as well as each other and outperforming Americans. Yet Japan does not have some gynocentric freewheeling education system; its schools are notoriously more demanding of discipline and focus from students than Barbar is deriding American schools for. So his explanation of what’s happening in America cannot be correct. Forgetting to check what is happening in other countries (and thereby testing their theories against controls) is a textbook example of crank methodology. And so is ignoring nuance. The gender disparity in education is not as simple as Barbar avers. In childhood it tracks standard sexist assumptions about male and female roles: by the end, boys do better at math, girls at reading; while men are simply choosing not to continue their education; they are not being medicated or barred from it by “women.” The cause here is, again, toxic masculinity (harmful sexist ideals), not feminism (much less “gynocentrism”).
• Finally, It is not possible to learn at all if you cannot focus on what is being taught and do not have an interest in excelling at it. Discipline is not some mere gender aesthetic but an essential human virtue. Notably, Barbar’s calling discipline “pathetic” and insulting it by calling it “girly” is not only a textbook example of toxic masculinity, it is distinctive of a psychopathic personality. At any rate, this isn’t about fidgeting. It’s about passion and effort; and learning how to follow rules in order to make progress in a cooperative environment. Toxic masculinity teaches that nerds are girly and to be bullied, which pushes boys away from wanting to “be nerds” and thus excel academically. Girls, by contrast, are being taught focus and discipline at home, and so show up in kindergarten with the requisite discipline and skills to succeed. Boys are not being taught that, and so start behind from day one. And then they have no incentive to catch up, because that entails “being a nerd.” And then they react to their resulting failure by acting out—in other words, boys’ behavioral discipline problems are a product, not a cause, of their academic failure; while the cause of their academic failure is their deficiency of cognitive discipline.

There is no evidence of gynocentrism here. And Barbar’s advice for fixing it is all wrong because he doesn’t understand what’s really happening. He has substituted for reality his own delusional alternate reality, which blinds him to all the real problems and their real solutions, while triggering him to suggest completely destructive ideas intead that would make everything worse.

Barbar also confuses SSRIs with ADHD meds. They are not even related. And too few kids get SSRIs to affect national metrics anyway. And it is girls, not boys, who are disproportionately receiving SSRIs. And none are receiving them to treat behavioral or academic problems. So his entire side-rant on SSRIs is completely off the rails and has nothing to do with any point he wants to make here. Even what he says about SSRIs is inaccurate, but you can research that elsewhere. For example, this article in the NIH database corrects what the (now defunct) crank website he cites says about the rare condition of tardive dysphoria. But this has nothing to do with his video’s thesis anyway. And I also won’t bother critiquing his crank pedagogical theories, since everything he says about ideal teaching and learning methods is true of boys and girls, and is how things are already being taught in schools now anyway, so it’s entirely moot.

We see the same divorce from reality when Barbar angrily argues that because marriage licenses don’t “say” property becomes communal that therefore men “don’t know” that’s the contract they are signing, which is patent bollocks. Everyone knows what the laws are on this. And everyone is responsible for knowing that. That’s why you can’t claim “I didn’t know what the law was” to get acquitted of a crime. So this is simply a dumb winge about a non-problem. Women aren’t hiding marital law from men. So there can’t be any evidence of “gynocentrism” in the fact that the complex contractual terms of a marriage (which can be altered, as everyone knows, by prenuptial agreement anyway) are written in public law, not pointlessly on the license (which we know men would’t read anyway even if it were). Men aren’t being tricked into signing away their property. They well know what they are doing—and what they could do differently. So it is just dumb to complain about it after the fact.

I sense here the same kind of lame ignorance of why marital contracts work the way they do as I debunked from Stardusk last time. Indeed, Barbar goes into a similar crank narrative about how “alimony” and “child support” are “slavery,” which is exactly the bollocks I refuted from Stardusk. By their logic, any contract you agree to is “the same thing as slavery,” which means that in the United States the 13th Amendment would have outlawed all contracts whatever. And then even corporations could not exist—nor 90% of all business and trade. Goodbye insurance. Loans. Leases. Severance. Banking. Credit. Partnerships. Franchises. Easements. Settlements. Shipping. Treaties. Basically, modern civilization. This idea of not having to honor agreements (calling them “slavery”) is another psychopathic quality of manosphere ideology. Yet the contrary idea of honoring agreements is not gynocentrism. So why are we talking about it?

Conclusion

Surprise! Barbarossa never gets to any argument for gynocentrism. He just keeps saying uninformed, fallacious things. For example, he goes on a lot about alimony (which Stardusk confused for child support), but does not mention how rare it is. Alimony barely even exists; “child support” is more common, but, at any given time in the U.S., goes to only 4 million people. In a population of over 258 million adults, that’s less than 2%; and fewer than half of over 10 million single parents (who care for only a third of all children in the U.S.); and a fifth of those recipients are men. So this does not appear to be a viable income path for your average woman. It’s last-ditch. This topples Barbar’s entire narrative, which seems invented just to winge about men losing custody of their kids and having to pay for them; not “gynocentrism.” And from my analysis of Stardusk on that same winge, these guys probably should not be getting custody of their kids. They are angry bigots with really bad parenting skills. Which means they can’t serve as poster boys for a broken system, because for all we know, they are poster boys for a working system.

But the takeaways should be these: delusional ideology operates on distinctive behaviors you can flag in others and look for in yourself, the first step in any successful escape plan. In short:

• First, a delusional person frames emotional arguments to appear rational-evidential. This can be checked by vetting an argument’s actual rationality (is it fallacious or logically valid) and fact-checking its premises with critical care (don’t just try to prove a premise; try to refute it, as if you were sure it were false—and only believe it when a genuine effort to refute it fails: see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking). For example, do “sentencing disparities” or “tender years” doctrines match gynocentric or androcentric causal narratives? Just assuming one and not the other is fallacious—and thus grossly unreliable. If more than one argument in a video, essay, or lecture fails these tests, especially if their proponent does not correct them when pointed out, they are probably delusional. Unfortunately, you might still be the delusional one, if you convince yourself an argument is fallacious when it’s not or its premises don’t check out when they do. So you have to always be monitoring your own counter-arguments for the same defects that you think you are finding in others. It’s neither easy nor emotionally comfortable to do this. But you need to make a habit of it nonetheless.
• Second, you need to keep track of what a video, essay, or lecture’s thesis is and keep testing the arguments in it with respect to that thesis. Don’t be misled into forgetting what the argument is supposed to be by a rambler continually changing subject and ending up just running through a winge-list rather than systematically arguing for a thesis. The latter requires mentioning and addressing counter-arguments to the thesis, and explicitly validating the premises with non-cherry-picked evidence, and making clear how (why) a conclusion follows from those premises. Arguments lacking this structure are probably unreliable and you should dismiss them, and instead look for someone who does it properly—or admit there is a reason no one can.
• Third, always ask “Why am I being shown this?” rather than something more fitting the point. For example, why Harlow’s monkeys and not a survey of current science on touch deprivation? Why is a fringe “women’s rights activist” being used as an example of the state of mainstream society? Why are assertions being made about what “feminists” say but none are being quoted actually saying it (so we can check to ensure the quote is not being taken out of context, and that the “feminist” is not another fringe case rather than representative of mainstream feminism)? Why are we talking about “tender years” doctrines but not discussing when and why they were enacted and when and why they are being phased out? And so on. What is the actual history of the thing being discussed? What is the actual science now on the claim being made?

In other words, there is a set of portable skills here, that you can learn to apply to any video, essay, book, or lecture (like those I also teach in Shaun Skills). The reason the world is so full of false ideologies believed in with such unmovable confidence is that people are not using these skills to protect themselves from being trapped in such halls of mirrors, even less to escape them—which requires first realizing you are in one, yet these false ideologies are engineered to prevent you realizing that, with pseudological tactics that play on your emotions (especially anger, contempt, and fear). This is why those ideologies spread: by coming packaged with internal defenses against your ever realizing they are false, Darwinian selection ensures these are the ideologies that survive in the wild, and thus can spread (by true believers, or indeed even entire propaganda machines, “arguing” others into them). Christianity and Islam are just the most successful of these ailments to date, though even they are declining in favor of secular analogs to the same madness, like Q-Anon and MGTOW, and for reasons I explain at the end of my mother of all examples: That Jordan Peterson Is a Crank.

In the end we have to respond to the rational truth of a thing.

Barbar asks for sympathy for all his feelings (which means, mostly, his anger and hate) and complains that feminists are unsympathetic to him. But they are unsympathetic to him (and to every man like him) because he does not yet deserve their sympathy. His rage, anger, and hate is all irrational. It is generated by a delusion, not reality. And he won’t listen to anyone trying to help him out of it. In this way he bites the hand of everyone reaching down to help him, and then complains that they hate him for it. It is entirely possible he is reacting to some particular individual women who were awful people in some way or did awful things of some kind, for which we could have sympathized with him—except that instead of blaming those individuals, he constructed a virulent hatred of all women, and spews an ideology that harms both women and men.

It is the latter that makes him unsympathetic. Not his being victimized in some way, but his now being a victimizer. And yet, being delusional, he mistakes our reaction to his villainy as our reaction to his victimization. But in reality we are unsympathetic because he allowed a few bad actors (or his belief therein) to trigger him into becoming an irrational and dangerous hate-monger. His delusion prevents him ever seeing the difference between bad women and “all women,” and thus ever discovering all the harm and wrong he has done to the entire world by spreading his poison throughout it. He has to answer for that. And until he escapes his delusion, the answer cannot be our sympathy. He’s burned that. He could rebuild it. But that requires change.