This was an interesting couple of chapters, but maybe less personally affecting than some of the previous ones. The home I was raised in wasn’t violent or particularly patriarchal. My mother was in her own non-radical way a convinced feminist and tried her damnedest to raise me right. My father was maybe not the highest standard of male/female equality (he never really learned to cook more than a few basic dishes for instance), but he is a very gentle, artistic and somewhat introverted man, who preferred to let my mother take the lead most of the time. This is stuff I took for granted at the time, but I’m more appreciative of it in retrospect. For me, the patriarchal stuff was mostly enforced by peers and the larger culture, which hooks talked about in one of the previous chapters.

“Men of feeling often find themselves isolated from other men. This fear of isolation often acts as the mechanism to prevent males from becoming more emotionally aware.”

I feel this one a lot. I feel a lot of guys have a few safe topics to relate to each other on (sports, cars, kids, if you’re a bit older, etc.) and you’re just kind of left out in the cold otherwise. This by the way is I will always be a sportsball hater. Every time someone asks me I saw the game last night or whatever, it feels like they’re already making a lot of assumptions about me that I don’t want.

The stuff on male sexuality, idk if I can really relate to much of that either. Definitely, I got the messaging as an adolescent that not having sex made you a loser and wanted to experience it, but I wanted intimacy with someone just as much. When I read this the last time, I still identified as a man, albeit a GNC man, and now I don’t, and I’m thinking about where my experiences overlap with what hooks talks about and where they don’t.

“Sexual pleasure is rarely the goal in a sexual encounter, something far more important than mere pleasure is on the line, our sense of ourselves as men. Men’s sense of sexual scarcity and an almost compulsive need for sex to confirm manhood feed each other, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of sexual deprivation and despair. And it makes men furious at women for doing what women are taught to do in our society: saying no.”

She nailed the core of inceldom right here (not that this is exclusive to incels).