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Discover the True International Masculinist Movement

By Emmanuel
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Fake masculinism has turned into a real plague that rots our societies, poisons human relationships and turns millions of men into pathetic cartoons of themselves. But maybe you think you already know what real masculinism is? Don’t count on it… So we’re curious to hear where you land on this once you’ve read the whole thing.

Feminism is more than legitimate, it’s necessary!

First things first, let’s be very clear! Zero ambiguity on this one: feminism exists for a reason, because discrimination and violence against women are real, massive and thoroughly documented.

For the knuckle-draggers who still doubt it, the numbers speak for themselves. Most women carry the bulk of the household mental load. One woman in three goes through physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. Street harassment is everyday life for them. Femicides run into the hundreds every year. In most countries they got the vote less than a century ago. Their bodies are still the object of restrictive laws. And their word gets doubted as a matter of course, especially when they report a rape or an assault.

Work is its own scandal too, because a kind of glass ceiling exists. Management jobs, for one, stay mostly male. So-called “women’s” jobs get systematically underpaid. Women earn 15% less than men on average for the same work. And the list of injustices goes on and on… So no, feminism isn’t some ideological fad, whatever certain people want you to believe. Feminism is a vital fix for centuries of structural oppression. Period.

And on our side, we men who are at peace in our own heads have to back that movement hard by pushing back fake masculinism and patriarchy. For the simple reason that they wreck our lives as much as they wreck women’s. It plays out differently sometimes, but it’s just as violent to live through.

What does fake masculinism look like?

Fake masculinism is the ideology that claims to defend men and actually locks them in a mental cage built out of moronic stereotypes and toxic behavior. You could almost laugh about it if the fallout weren’t so tragic for everybody.

In practice, fake masculinism sells you a dumbed-down package of what a “real man” is supposed to be. According to the self-appointed alpha males, a human being with XY chromosomes has to be strong, dominant, rich, jacked, violent when needed… and above all never vulnerable. Same guys will tell you a real man never cries, never shows what he feels and settles every one of his problems with brute force. Plus he treats women as trophies to inflate his ego.

Basically a fake masculinist is the updated Cro-Magnon, hauling meat back to the tribe with his chest puffed out, convinced it entitles him to any woman he wants. Meat itself is a whole macho symbol, by the way. Just watch a backyard barbecue: hubby chars the slab of meat while the wife makes the salads. Same with the guys who hunt on weekends to prove they’re real men by shooting defenseless animals with a rifle. It’s all part of the ridiculous folklore of toxic masculinity.

So what are the standard models? You run into them everywhere, at every level of society. Start with the Harley guy in his fringed jacket and his three-day stubble, dead certain his rebel look makes him one of a kind when he’s a carbon copy of ten million other dudes in the exact same costume. Then the MMA fan who mistakes an orgy of extreme violence for actual sport. That sorry spectacle is the opposite of the noble martial arts like karate, aikido or kung fu, the ones that teach respect and self-control. And the fake masculinist knows all that perfectly well. Too bad if MMA is dangerous, as long as you pass for some modern-day gladiator. Too bad if watching two guys physically destroy each other is butchery and immoral, as long as the show supposedly spikes your testosterone.

Then the rappers, self-appointed icons of modern manhood. Wealth waved at the camera in fistfuls of cash, big flashy luxury rides parked in front of millionaires’ mansions they don’t even own, ultra-rigid dress codes, women flattened into decorative objects, cast as dumb submissive bimbos whose only job is making him look good. Plus the verbal hyper-violence they call “punchlines” and the physical violence they own proudly, occasionally all the way to murder, just to read as a genuine tough guy. Supposedly that’s culture. We call it blowing out the brains of every kid who plays that shit on repeat. Yeah, we know all rap isn’t like this. But let’s be honest, we’re still talking about at least 90% of the mainstream output. And fake masculinist propaganda doesn’t only run through rap. Certain strains of rock, country or electronic music carry the exact same toxic values, just dressed differently. And as surprising as it sounds, some classical music with martial overtones props up a few self-styled alpha males in their cultural misery too.

But fake masculinism goes way past the obvious caricatures, because it soaks through the whole social pyramid. It starts at the bottom with the petty tyrant boss. The certified incompetent who terrorizes his open-plan office because the scrap of power somebody handed him feels like omnipotence. You also get the patriarch who turns his family into a permanent war zone, screaming at his kids and his wife to cover for his total inability to talk like a normal person. The higher you climb, the more sophisticated it gets, and just as violent. See the executives and CEOs on LinkedIn, using hypocritical pleasantries to paper over daily psychological brutality: humiliation, groveling to the boss and pathetic little power games.

And at the very top of this pyramid of stupidity sit the billionaires. Guys who think they’re above the law, above taxes and flat out above humanity itself. In their heads, money buys every right. Including the right to be violent in their words and in their acts. Why would it stop, when they never eat the consequences of anything they pull and millions of people admire them anyway? Don’t forget the politicians either, the far right especially, whose machismo leaks out of every speech. Kicking the poor, rejecting anyone different and spitting contempt for a whole rally to look bigger to the gullible is supposed to prove how strong they are… and therefore how fit they are to run things.

And now here comes a new generation of politicians stuffed to the gills with these idiotic codes. Mandatory three-day stubble, tattoos, gym five times a week because a real man is obviously ripped. And of course the same rage-soaked rants on social media as their elders, just far more violent and vulgar in the delivery. So no reason to expect change any time soon, because the whole thing is unfortunately trending up.

Especially since fake masculinism has its grip on absolutely everything! Television gives the game away best. Proof: turn on your TV at any hour and you’ll get a parade of movies and shows built on violence and hard gender lines. To drive it home, between two suspense-free action scenes, you eat commercials that are flat-out sexist, made by ad people who know their target audience cold. The wife does the laundry and swoons over how white it came out, the husband tinkers in his garage with his big tools, cars get sold with hypersexualized chicks attached and men’s fragrances promise to turn any simpleton into an irresistible sexual predator. The most sickening part is that you find all the same macho stereotypes in kids’ programming. Nobody’s fooled. Under the fake inclusive, progressive coat of paint that passes for modern, TV content is still shaped by men to legitimize patriarchy. That explains everything.

And in the end, the real tragedy of the fake masculinist is that he poisons himself around the clock, in a downward spiral he can’t climb out of. Look at his environment and everything is calibrated to keep him in his mental cell. He’s got masculinist buddies who rubber-stamp his behavior, he eats masculinist with his steak and his beer, he watches meathead action movies where “real” men settle everything with a gun and a fist, he catches his guy sports like MMA or soccer, his hobbies are hunting or “sport” shooting, he reads masculinist books that explain how to become a super alpha under a self-help wrapper and he listens to nothing but masculinist music that glorifies violence and turns women into objects. So in the middle of that mess, how is he supposed to work out that he’s a total relic locked inside his own codes when nothing in his ecosystem offers him another view? Serious question.

Why do fake masculinists wreck our lives?

We’ve just gone through the standard fake masculinist profiles and how omnipresent this toxic ideology is in our societies. Now let’s look at exactly how it literally wrecks everyone’s daily life.

First, it locks the men who take that road into a suffocating emotional prison. From childhood, boys hear that a man doesn’t cry, that showing what you feel makes you a little girl, that being vulnerable is weakness… Result, millions of boys grow up burying everything they feel. So they can’t talk about their problems, can’t ask for help, can’t even say out loud that they’re scared or sad. And that inability to handle emotions leads straight to violence, addiction, depression and even suicide. Men kill themselves three times more often than women, and that’s no accident. It’s the direct consequence of a toxic masculinity that forbids them the full range of their own humanity.

Then violence as the only way to settle a conflict. Fake masculinism teaches men that physical force answers everything. A problem at work, a fight with your partner, some random frustration, and the obvious move is to yell, hit and crush the other person. Women are the first victims, with domestic violence hitting tens of thousands of them every year. But men destroy each other too, in this permanent race to prove who’s strongest, who dominates who and who has the biggest dick. Because “small dick” is the ultimate insult among fake masculinists. Shows how little it takes to rattle them.

Manspreading is another one, and it isn’t just about guys splaying their legs on the subway. It’s a whole attitude, taking up all the space physically and above all intellectually. In practice the fake masculinist talks loud, cuts you off without bothering to apologize, delivers his opinions as absolute truth and works to tear down anybody who dares contradict him. And that kind of violence hits everyone, not just women. Normal men, the ones who’d rather listen than dominate, get steamrolled too by these bruisers who mistake volume for a good argument. Watch what it does in work meetings, in public debates, in conversations between friends. As soon as a fake masculinist is in the loop, same pattern every time: he raises his voice to prove he’s right while most of the time he’s talking nonsense.

Then the whole freakout about appearance and idiotic dress codes. A boy who wants to wear pink, play with dolls or just be gentle and creative gets called a deviant on the spot, or worse. Men end up boxed into hyper-rigid codes where the smallest deviation gets punished hard. No bright colors, no jewelry that might send the wrong signal, no makeup… Everything is built to smother individuality and creativity in favor of a deadly conformity. Just look at how viscerally fake masculinists hate drag queens and you’ll see how big the problem is.

The relationship to money and wealth is rotten too. For the fake masculinist, money is power. So it’s the final proof of his worth. Hence the idiotic race for visible signs of wealth: the big car, the luxury watch, the villa with a pool… Anything that displays his supposed superiority. This obsession with domination through money justifies every piece of filth: exploiting employees, tax dodging, corruption, keeping your partner financially dependent… anything goes as long as it pays and puts you above other people.

The link between masculinism and conspiracy thinking isn’t an accident either. Fake masculinists need to feel like rebels. So they compensate by deciding they’re smarter than everyone, thanks to half-baked theories that back up the positions they already hold. That way they’re not in the herd of the weak among the wokes anymore. No, they’re the enlightened ones who found the truth all the sheep are missing. Conspiracy lets them turn their mediocrity into imaginary superiority. It’s a permanent revenge on the eggheads, on the people who actually studied, actually thought and actually understood how rich diversity is.

The useful idiots serving fake masculinism

We’ve just seen it, fake masculinism is a genuine disaster. But boiling it down to some kind of gender war is a serious failure of nuance and risks missing the whole problem. Feminism doesn’t mean every woman is a feminist. Being a man doesn’t mean you’re automatically against feminism. The truth is that some women, far more than people think, carry their own share of responsibility for toxic masculinity. Not only do they back it because it looks normal to them, they raise their boys to reproduce the exact same pattern.

And I know exactly what I’m talking about, because I was unfortunately raised in a deeply reactionary environment with old-school values that matched all of it. Sorry, none of that was my doing. I was just born somewhere. It took me a while to open my eyes all the way, work out that it was shit and change. It wasn’t easy, because that’s the kind of road you start walking alone.

Until I was 20 I coasted. Then one thing led to another and I started asking myself things like: those biases popping into your head, is that really you, or is it what got stuffed into your skull back when your brain was a sponge? The biases faded bit by bit and finally went away over about ten years. Now stuff that felt almost normal to me at 20 shocks the hell out of me. Do I hold it against my parents? The answer is yes. No hesitation.

That moment of honesty was to make a point: trad wives are no better than grim fake masculinists like Putin, Trump or P. Diddy. I’d go further and say they’re worse, because they’re traitors to their own cause, feeding their present and future oppression by keeping patriarchy alive. And at the end of the story, thanks to these women, the whole society pays for the tyrants they built with their toxic parenting. So fighting fake masculinism isn’t a war between women and men. It’s a job for clear-eyed people who decided to take it apart by exposing its huge weaknesses and its destructive side, unmistakably fed by nihilism. And to win that fight it makes no difference whether you’re a man, a woman or someone who fits neither box, because the only thing that counts is pushing patriarchy back until it’s gone.

So what does being a real masculinist actually mean?

Now that we’ve taken apart everything wrong with fake masculinism, time for the real question: what does being a real masculinist mean? Because yes, a legitimate masculinism exists and it deserves a serious conversation.

A real masculinist is a man who claims his right to be fully human. A complete being, with the whole range of emotions and sensitivities that come with it. He cries when he’s sad, says he’s scared when he needs to, asks for help when he needs it and shares what he feels freely. Living your emotions all the way is what real strength looks like.

Real masculinism also means cultivating your feminine side. The soft, creative, empathetic part that makes you a balanced person. Sensitivity is a quality, listening is a valuable skill and creativity, artistic or intellectual, makes life much richer. So a complete man takes on all these parts of himself without any hang-ups.

Real masculinists try to build calm relationships with everyone. Honest exchanges built on mutual respect and actual dialogue. In that model, women are equals you build rewarding relationships with, based on how your personalities complete each other. Other men are potential partners to move forward with, not rivals.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about that complementarity. The real masculinist isn’t chasing equality as an abstract concept, because it already exists in his head. He’s after complementarity. Not that idiotic setup where the man is supposed to be strong and open the jam jars while the wife does something else. Real complementarity means recognizing that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, gender aside. You’re better at this task, I’m better at that one. It happens consciously or not. A good couple runs on that, not on a power struggle. Which is the secret of couples who grow old happy: they’re a team moving together.

Looking for that takes constant, intelligent adjustment. If both of you work, both of you handle the baby. If dad takes a year off to raise the kid while mom works, the split isn’t the same during that stretch. What matters is finding the compromises that work for each situation, knowing situations keep changing. No ready-made formula for this, no dumb 50/50 rule. You just have an understanding to reach, and between decent people most of it happens without a word.

The real masculinist can obviously flirt and voice what he wants sexually. He makes a move, because that’s how couples and casual things get started. But he gets it right away when it isn’t working and moves on. It’s not hard to tell when somebody isn’t interested. Either way, yes means yes and no means no. And maybe means I need time. So respect and a bit of subtlety sit at the center of every interaction in real masculinism. And none of that has anything to do with being emasculated! Not being a giant asshole is easily the best qualification for attracting a partner.

A real masculinist keeps evolving, because he listens to the world. He questions what he’s sure of, he learns, so he grows. That openness to change, that willingness to reconsider, is what lets him get better by exploring every way of being himself instead of locking into stereotypes.

Bottom line, the real masculinist is trying to live as full a life as he can. Not full as in everything is perfect, because perfection isn’t a thing on this planet. Full as in he’s at peace with himself and with other people, as much as that’s possible.

But careful! Being a real masculinist doesn’t mean being naive or letting people walk all over you. Preaching dialogue and listening doesn’t turn you into a doormat anybody can wipe their feet on. So if force is what it takes to protect yourself or hold off an aggressive fake masculinist, no problem at all. A real masculinist or a feminist can get angry too. Anger lives in every human being. Let’s not kid ourselves that we can all go calmer than a Tibetan monk. So the real problem is managing it: knowing who or what it’s aimed at, working out whether it’s legitimate, learning to express it constructively instead of destructively and above all not making it your permanent operating mode.

That’s real masculinism: a movement that frees men from the patriarchal straitjacket so they can become complete human beings. And that’s exactly why feminism and the real masculinist movement point in the same direction, toward more humanity, more freedom and more authenticity for everybody.

How do you get out of fake masculinism?

What if the key to wiping out fake masculinism was hiding in a line from a 90s movie? In Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, the main character, Mark Renton, drops this prophecy: “1,000 years from now there will be no guys and no girls, just wankers.” At first it sounds like pure cynicism, but dig a little and maybe that vision of the future holds exactly what we need to move in the right direction?

Picture a world where parents did their job and raised their boys without cramming toxic masculinist biases into them. A world where school actively taught kids to take toxic masculinity apart, starting young: jobs don’t come in girl and boy versions, no color is off limits and no way of being a man or a woman is mandatory.

Picture a massive public conversation about this, with adult men figuring out that their toxic masculinism is wrecking their own lives and the lives of everyone around them. Picture them agreeing to see a therapist if that’s what it takes, to undo what got shoved into their heads as kids. Because it’s never too late to change. Whether you’re 25, 40 or 60, you can still choose to become someone better. The only brake is in your head.

So if we pull all that off, feminism and real masculinism will slowly lose their reason to exist. Not because we gave up the fight, but because we won it. No more men and women locked in idiotic roles, no more nonbinary people pushed to the margins for not fitting a box. All that’s left is human beings, every one different, all the same in their right to be themselves. Nothing left but wankers, happy to be wankers. And honestly, that would be beautiful.

Conclusion – let’s win the battle of words first

Words mean something, words have power. So is this whole fake masculinist versus real masculinist thing just cheap provocation on my part? Absolutely not!

Every time I see big backward morons calling themselves masculinists, as a male human being I feel deeply insulted by these pathetic characters. So I refuse to let reactionary concepts dirty my healthy masculinity. Same thing if anybody tried to twist my feminine side and drag it through the mud.

So, fake masculinists, machos, toxic males, self-styled alphas, violent guys, far-right poseurs, trad wives… get this through your heads: the words “masculinist” and “masculinism” aren’t yours anymore! They belong to every progressive who understands what good human relationships should look like. From now on, find yourselves another label. Something like “voluntary mental defective” or any other name that spells out exactly what you are. And leave real men in peace. Thanks!

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