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So in my last post I talked about a shocking whitewash of the manosphere from the official UK communications regulator Ofcom. The agency’s new report suggested that the dangers of the manosphere were vastly overrated, drastically downplayed the misogyny central to every manosphere subgroup, and informed its readers that many of the denizens of this poor maligned movement were actually upstanding young men with “a strong commitment to equal treatment and fairness.”
Which raises the question: What color is the sky on Ofcom’s planet?
But I didn’t have room in that post to get into one of the strangest things I discovered while researching the post: the reactions of some in the manosphere to the report, or at least to the weirdly uncritical reporting on it in The Guardian. I found threads on the subject on Incels.is and on the Men’s Rights subreddit, and, well, the boys weren’t exactly able to recognize the giant favor that Ofcom had done for them.
The incels, remarkably, responded more soberly to the report than the MRAs. One commenter reacted to the report’s conclusion that the dangers of the manosphere were exaggerated with sarcasm: “Turns out real people aren’t two-dimensional cartoonish villains. Who would’ve thought?”(Many incels are in fact two-dimensional cartoonish villains, but never mind.) “Wow, I can’t believe that lonely virgins aren’t a significant threat to society!” commented another. “Next thing you’ll tell me, sexually active men are the majority of cheaters and domestic abusers.” (Don’t try to parse the logic of that last sentence; your brain might explode.)
Of course, this being Incels.is, other commenters used the report as an excuse to drop some cartoon villain misogyny. One suggested that he would only accept the new report “if they realize that women are responsible for the growing dislike towards women. Then again, they’d never have the balls to conduct such a study to see why men actually dislike women. They’d rather blame Andrew Tate instead of women’s actions.” Another added: “Now they just need to realise the violence foids deservedly receive is by men they choose to have sex with.”
Just another day on Incels.is, I guess.
But it was the Men’s Rights Redditors who really surprised me with their loopy, conspiratorial logic. “Why do they suddenly speak about the manosphere in more positive (not overtly slandering) way?” asked the MRA posting a link to the Guardian article. “What is the agenda? Especially when UK is one of the most men hating country in the world.”
The top comment offered this, er, explanation:
They’re trying to downplay support for Men’s Rights. By doing so, politicians will believe they can get away with more misandrist policies. They can stamp down on men and not lose votes. That’s the narrative The Guardian are pushing.
Another commenter suggested that the powers that be in the UK were using the report to push conscription. “War is coming and they want men to fight,” a third commenter added. “Problem is they’ve spent so long telling men how shit they are, so men won’t fight their wars.”
Someone called Gmotor offered a similar theory, and a stirring call to arms:
They have realised men have had enough AND they need our support AND without white males society is going to collapse. Oh, and the coming war that women really don’t want to have to fight themselves and the establishment realises they are going to lose badly thanks to their stupid policies
Don’t accept it. They have spent decades in a “Battle of the sexes”. Now they want to sue for peace? Nah… we can wait a bit and the terms won’t be anywhere near as favourable. We just need to make sure Gen Z get a proper education on what women are really like and the poison the Left has injected into society for decades. Don’t throw the next generation of men into the military woodchipper.
Ok, then! I guess that this is what “a strong commitment to equal treatment and fairness” looks like.
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Are you sure? People who are secure in their gender identity don’t typically feel the need to shout “I am a man!!1!” over and over in ten thousand varied and elaborate ways. People who are in denial about something … sometimes do.
On the other hand, maybe you’re more like one of those kittens who gets all angry, puffs up, and starts swatting at people thinking that it’s succeeding at being intimidating while actually just being cute?
If so … what is it that has you so angry? Maybe you feel your future has been stolen from you?
Guess what: A lot of people’s futures have been stolen from them, but it wasn’t by us, or by immigrants and people of color. The reason your job takes all your time but pays shit, your apartment costs most of your income, and you’re in student or medical or credit-card debt up to your eyeballs is because rich people have been rigging the system for fifty years so they stay rich and everyone else is willing to work in their factories for peanuts.
And that’s mostly rich white people who identify as Christians, by the way. They want everyone else divided into camps by gender, race, and geographical origin and fighting each other to keep us distracted from the people who are really picking all of our pockets.
Spoken like a rattlesnake, or someone who desperately wishes to be one.
But that’s a very lonely life. Are you sure that’s what you want? There are other paths available. But they require giving up the right wing macho-posturing ideology and doing some deep and possibly painful self-examination.
But you know what your weightlifting coach told you, right? No pain, no gain.
@Hawk
Kindly fuck off, immortal engineer.
@Victorious P
It was no mere fantasy, but rather a prescient diagnosis of your husband’s reality, one that I am able to discern readily through the analysis of your writings. Through pure psychologizing alone, I am able to reach these conclusions about things, and I am seldom wrong.
@other person
Prose isn’t purple just because its complexity lies beyond your ability to parse it; consider some form of remedial English class and get back to me.
@Sylvia
I am not shouting that I am a man, I think that the very strength of my argumentation proves it. I am bringing into question that nature of and extent of the masculinity of your dear moderator, and all those who would read his effeminate ramblings.
The only people who think I am not intimidating are those who have the luxury of being anonymously sequestered on the other side of the screen from me, no one would be so cocksure as to question my puissance should they have the opportunity to regard my being in person. I am probably the leading cause of soiled undergarments in this town, the frail, flailing bubbleboys I have the dishonor to classify as neighbors can attest to that.
My future has not been stolen, you cannot take from me something that only I have the power to shape. I do not fall prey to the cult of victimhood that so often defines those estrogenized weaklings on the left, I am not some ineffectual bitchmade rocketboy, squealing with delight at the prospect of his momma letting him walk to the mailbox all by himself. Masculinity is associated with truth-telling, the truth, like real men, is often hard, and as a man who is as real as he is true, I cannot be confined by this world of insincerity and feminine lies.
@Makroth
No.
Don’t be too hard on trolly. His(?) emotional maturity, moral maturity, and social skills peaked during his(?) middle school edgelord phase, and sadly it’s all been downhill from there. He can’t help having temporofrontal degeneration due to having been exposed to the hypercringe incident.
@Full Metal Ox:
Reminds me of a demonstration where I watched a woman slowly inserting a 13-inch dildo which was unreasonably thick, though not as thick as a 2-liter soda bottle. All the way in. Complete with the sort of abdomen bulge as one might see in ridiculously over-the-top erotic art. I winced at that, as it did not seem at all safe or comfortable. I doubt I’d ever try it myself, even if it doesn’t require an awful lot of training (it probably does). But I eat ghost peppers for fun, so I shouldn’t judge.
titter
tee hee
So, “all of them”, then. snicker
Finally, you made a statement with a non-negligible probability of being true! That’s a rather unfortunate and common side effect of being full of shit. You might want to consider rectifying that, before turning to the addressing of the deep roots of your fear.
Which would be that deep down you don’t feel masculine in the way that you think you should; the way that perhaps your peer group, or online influencers like Tate, have told you you should.
And that’s perfectly all right! It’s okay to not be that kind of man, or even to not be a man. Most people are not big, tough Ahnold type men and over half of people are not men at all. And the majority of them find ways to be happy, friend groups who will accept them as they are, and even lovers, if they want such.
I ask you to think carefully about all of this, even if your knee-jerk impulse is to reject it all out of hand. Because, based on the way you are acting, genuinely being the tough, Ahnold type is just not for you; you don’t seem able to put on that mantle and feel secure in having done so. And again, that’s perfectly okay! If you have impulses to just be a quieter man who doesn’t take up all that much space and who is more content to follow than to lead, as long as you’re being led somewhere you want to go, that’s a fine way to be. If you have impulses to femininity, even, that’s a fine way to be. Gender nonconforming men are a thing. And so are non-binary people and trans women.
It doesn’t matter where a man peaks, so long as his peak is still high; I peaked early, but I also grew at an accelerated pace that more than makes up for my (according to anonymous clowns on the internet) having peaked early. Truly comical that you think that my having reached maturity at such an early age while you are yet still in the spiritual and intellectual plane of trying to shove the triangle into the square hole and crying at your lack of success is some kind of insult. Enjoy suckling the rancid and nutritionally deficient teat of decadent skullduggery, skeleton.
@Sylvia
Yuk it up, you only prove that you are but a clown in my court.
Do you imply that I rot secluded in some dank basement, never to brave the sun? Unlike you lot, I actually touch grass, often and willingly. I have the sort of strength that can only come from performing backbreaking labors in the hot sun, putting my arms to work in such a way that only a man who could crumple up the people around him and toss them into the can like the breezy trash they are can. I could jump right into any situation and take control over it.
You know exactly what I meant, you are saying that I do not intimidate others in a way that isn’t masculine. You might as well suggest that the Pope is a T. Rex.
I take up all the space I need, I can find a better use for such space than the effete fancy boys who insist that I share it with them.
@Latest Troll
Oh, you are comedy gold, sweetie. You really do think that your florid proclamations make you sound all smart and intimidating, don’t you?
They don’t. They make you sound like a twelve-year-old with a thesaurus. Needlessly complex writing doesn’t prove education, because someone skilled at a language knows how to communicate in it clearly and concisely.
Whereas you are doing neither, in part because you probably aren’t actually skilled enough to do so (see my thesaurus comment, above), but mostly because you yourself are clearly intimidated by intelligence and education, and so trying to imitate them, and we can all see it.
That is why some of us are having fun “playing with the troll” instead of just asking Dave to ban you. Your insecure posturing is entertaining, for the moment.
I’m pleased to report that Mr. Parasol made a classic bemused face at the latest troll fantasy. The rolling pin is still in the fridge for now, though I’ll be getting it out later this week to make naan:
https://www.recipetineats.com/naan-recipe/
A few useful notes – given the current price of eggs, I don’t think it’s very sensible to throw unused egg portions away. Instead I started buying the eggs in a carton, and it’s very easy to measure out exactly “half an egg.”
A cast-iron skillet is a must, but if the prospect of seasoning and/or cleaning one gives you the collywobbles, I’ve found that an enameled cast-iron skillet is easier to maintain and works perfectly for anything I want to cook in it.
@Allandrel
He’d be better off with a dictionary than a thesaurus. Plus I had my usual reflex about a layperson recklessly flinging around the word “diagnosis”.
@Take a Hawk, Dawson
Yes.
@ Vicky P
You reminded me of this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy8ozGfpSq4
Willi was quite the character. When he shuffled off this mortal coil, his ashes were pressed into the band’s last record.
https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/1780666.wild-willis-ashes-are-pressed-into-service/
@Alan
Ha! I’m going to have to see if Mr. Parasol has heard that. (Wouldn’t be surprised – he loves a song you can pogo to.)
@Allandrel:
I mean, hey, I’m a published writer myself. When a character’s dialogue is overwhelmed with unnecessarily polysyllabic diction, my authorial intent is to indicate the speaker is overflowing with pretentious twaddle.
(I need to look up that ‘William Satire’ writing guide again, the one that had lines like ‘Always avoid awkward and affected alliteration.’ Self-demonstrating articles are fun!)
But yeah, when I took technical writing courses, the rule for writing for a general audience was ‘write for a fourth-grade vocabulary if possible’. The purpose of documentation is to actually communicate a point; often the only point communicated by overuse of long words is ‘the person who wrote this has an inflated view of his own intelligence and importance’.
Now, if you’re writing within a field, that’s different. Every field has its jargon that can be used to make things more specific within the field but often more confusing to anybody outside of it. It’s not obscure on purpose, it’s just parallel language development with specific meanings. (‘Legalese’ being probably the best-known example.) But knowing what audience you’re writing for is always an important part of writing.
Sadly, the audience the troll is writing for is one that only exists in his own head and doesn’t match the reality of who’s here.
@Jenora Feuer
I recently became aware of the word “thrasonical,” which describes our new acquaintance perfectly.
Oh yeah, I am currently in the beta of a miniatures wargame, and my battle reports would probably make no sense to anyone who did not know the game. But for the developers and other testers, they are a lot more concise than if I was writing for a general audience.
@Take a Hawk, Dawson:
Ahem. Where’s my bombastic insult? I take it sarcastic fawning wasn’t part of your anticipated reader reaction flowchart?
@Alan
Mr. Parasol says he knows of the Psycho Surgeons’ last record, adding that it would be illegal to sell it in Texas due to laws related to the purchasing of human remains. I’m assuming that’s related to some Texas-style Burke and Hare activity (though with murder as an optional service).
@ Vicky P
I keep meaning to do a video on that. “There’s no property in a corpse” as the legal maxim goes. It’s all quite fascinating; especially some interesting if a bit gruesome art law cases. But it used to be that you couldn’t steal a body, or body parts, as in law they can’t belong to anyone. That is still the law, although modified so that you can own bodies or parts that have been somehow ‘worked’ on, so as to add value. So you can’t just waltz off with one of those Gunter von Hagen’s Bodyworks pieces. Or specimens prepared for research etc.
But that’s why B&H were done for murder. Bodysnatching itself not being a crime.
I remember in the 90s a piece of Burke’s skin came up for auction. Was momentarily tempted, but I was in a de-cluttering phase.
Huh, it’s got to be nearly a decade since I last saw an oldschool “needlessly verbose Reddit Atheist prose + Internet Tough Guy posturing”-style MRA in the wild. I wonder if he still has the neckbeard and undersized pinstripe trilby.
@Allandrel:
Sounds about right.
One of my favourite personal moments about ‘jargon’ involved a friend of mine organizing a get-together when he was back in town visiting family back in the late 1990s; we ended up with a dozen or so friends of his all together at a restaurant. Not all of us had known each other all that well previously, though the friend who organized things knew everybody’s interests and encouraged seating based on that knowledge.
In particular, he got two friends who had both studied geology sitting across from each other at one end of the table. Once they both realized this, they started chatting, and the discussion got gradually more technical and jargon-laden over the course of the dinner. I knew enough geology (one of the two was my roommate for a while) to keep up about halfway in.
Eventually I turned to a friend of mine on the other side of me and said, “Ahh, I see. So this is what it sounds like to other people when I start talking about computers.”
@Alan, Victorious Parasol:
Handling of human remains is one of those things for which the laws are absolutely all over the place across jurisdictions; I suspect that it was more a matter of custom than of law until late in the Industrial Revolution, mid-1800s, which would have encouraged more formal rules to actually be set. When you’re in the middle of a city of over a million people at a time when people were starting to get scientific evidence of how epidemics worked (and there was a big one going on), you really can’t afford to not have rules.
Let’s just say, without naming any names, that I knew a local celebrity who had as one of her last requests that her ashes be buried around a newly planted tree behind a building which contained rooms that had been named for her. That was actually in contravention of a city by-law regarding handling and respect for human remains. (The law was mostly a case of ‘if we allow one person to do it, lots of other people will want to do it too, and that’s a potential health hazard’.)
There was a whole lot of pretending that nothing was going on the night after the memorial service.
@Pope of Discover
Nothing that I have said up to this point can be described as “needless,” and there is no posturing going on here, I have been hardened in a way that you could never fathom. I have seen things before that would never recover from, you’ve had an Easy-Bake Oven life, I have had the sterner stuff of which I am made reinforced by such blows as would come from God himself. This is not an empty boast, it’s just a verifiable fact, something which I understand that you, a purchaser of feminine lies, would have difficulty accepting. There is not system big enough to contain me, there are no empty customs and regulations of our effeminized “civilization” that can put a leash on this junkyard dog.
@Jenora Feuer
Reminds me of how on one of our trips to Big Bend, Mr. Parasol pointed me to the signs warning people not to scatter cremains there, but added that it’s pretty much an open secret that it happens anyway – just don’t do it where the rangers can see you. The most exciting thing we saw that day was a rattlesnake, though we kept hearing about a bear near the trail. I would’ve preferred seeing a covert scattering of ashes.
For our own end-of-life plans, we’re donating our corpses to one of the university body farms here. The selected body farm will let us decay FOR SCIENCE! and then will place our skeletal remains in a sort of mausoleum where family can visit.
I see the latest troll is blathering again about all sorts of claims he can’t back up. What a sad existence.
And still this intense need to self-portray as somehow superior to everyone else.
It will take a while, and some willingness on his part, to get to the root of those deep-seated insecurities. Speaking of which:
Not to mention that women who don’t fall for his act seem to especially get his dander up.
I think you have that backwards, given that the laughter was being directed at you.
Sure, Jan.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I saw C-beams glitter in space by the Tannhauser Gate. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in rain.
Yeah, no, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples did it better.
I have to wonder why you have such a knee-jerk hostility to everything feminine. Perhaps it is to mask a deep and, you feel, unmanly attraction to the same? It didn’t escape my notice that you didn’t address any of that portion of my previous comment to you.
That sounds like a way to describe a dangerous criminal who would need to be exiled or executed because they couldn’t be safely contained even by a supermax. Is that really what you aspire to be? That sounds like a very lonely and antisocial life, culminating in a miserable death alone in a wilderness somewhere with no one to comfort you in your final hours.
The people who are selling you this “lifestyle” as an ideal are selling you a bill of goods. And quite likely taking you to the cleaners while they’re at it. You need to quit, cold-turkey, these manosphere influencers and masculinity coaches and what-nots and, as you yourself put it, “touch grass”. Get in touch with your feminine side, much as the prospect may frighten you. Maybe find some normal friends in your area to hang out with to, I dunno, play video games or touch football or jump rope with, whatever floats your boat.
@Full Metal Ox
What makes you think you’re worthy of being insulted? All you did was show up, spout some inane gibberish which I’m sure you thought sounded intelligent, and then act as though you were entitled to a response. Well, you’re not. If I could turn my nose up any further at you, I could probably smell my own anus.
@Sylvia
I didn’t respond to your comment in its totality because there was nothing there to respond to; you are making a number of assumptions of dubious veracity, insisting that I am secretly in some way lacking in masculinity, or that I am actually feminine. Neither of the previous statements are accurate, no one has sold me on any kind of lifestyle, I make my own rules and devise my own values, as I have no need to submit myself to the false value systems of weaker men. All systems that would pose themselves as universal value systems are but expressions of the desire for control by those who push them, and as a man who would no prostitute himself to these fiends, I reject these lies and dishonest attempts to suppress my being and substitute my own understanding in their place.
Not assumptions; inferences.
Straw poll: has anyone here ever seen someone like this for whom the above statements were true, rather than them having been radicalized by some part or another of the manosphere?
Also, if we for the sake of argument provisionally stipulate to those rather questionable statements, how then do we explain how strongly many of this guy’s self-assertions resemble those “sigma male affirmations” that were showcased here a few months ago during David’s brief but dubious flirtation with video? Coincidence?
False to fact. Many proposed value systems (e.g. epicureanism) and political systems (e.g. anarcho-syndicalism) not only reflect no desire for control on the part of their proponents, but in being enacted tend to diffuse power to the edges of the system rather than concentrate it in the hands of some oligarchy.
Unfortunately for you, your substituting of your own understanding (if, indeed, that is even what you are doing, regarding which see above) appears to be having roughly the same result as a sea captain substituting a kaleidoscope for a sextant and a tarot deck for a GPS.
I would recommend finding a healthy, non-toxic peer group (likely a mixed-sex group or women) to associate with and consider letting their value system guide you, at least in the short term while you un-disorient yourself and re-ground yourself in reality.
We can probably help you with that, if you’d only drop the performative façade of pseudo-Tatian toxic masculinity (which is surely getting tiresome to sustain) and ask us some genuine questions with the genuine intention of considering our answers. There may be pathways to feeling much more secure, much less afraid, and much less lonely that you never previously seriously considered, but they do not involve staying your current course. That leads only to depression, empty aloneness, and the regretful realization of having wasted years, assuming that you survive that long rather than getting yourself killed in some foolish stunt or pointless fight.
The road you are now on leads to only desert and bleached skulls; yet there are other roads that lead to community, fellow-feeling, and a sense of securely being accepted into a group, being part of a whole. Trust me on this, if you trust me on anything.