How feminists are weaponizing love

And how the movement has turned into a conspiracy theory

Julia Pastouchonok

“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act.” 
—Robin Morgan, feminist activist

“The male is a biological accident: the Y gene is an incomplete X gene…”
—Valeria Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

In recent years, growing public attention has been paid to the concept of emotional labor, referring to the unpaid effort involved in managing other people’s feelings, but not in a positive sense. Now, a newly popular term, mankeeping, sharpens this idea, highlighting how women are often expected to serve as emotional caretakers for men who lack strong interpersonal support systems. A recent New York Times piece about the topic has cause a bit of a controversy, highlighting the disproportionate burden women carry in tending to the emotional and social needs of their male partners.

The concept is an extension of kinkeeping, which sociologists use to describe the traditionally gendered role of women as maintainers of familial and social bonds. But whereas kinkeeping involves logistical coordination and family cohesion, mankeeping zeroes in on the emotional deficits some men carry into adulthood, deficits that women are expected to patch over. This includes things such as having to listening to and processing their feelings, offer therapeutic support, motivate them to engage socially, even mediate their personal conflicts.

And this labor often goes unacknowledged and unreciprocated, creating a one-sided emotional economy. Furthermore, the rise of mankeeping is closely tied to the decline of male friendships, as multiple recent studies in both the United States and the United Kingdom reveal a sharp drop in the number of close friends reported by men over the past few decades. Cultural norms around masculinity, which discourage vulnerability and emotional openness among men, have left many boys with few outlets for meaningful emotional expression.

As a result, quite naturally, women have become the default emotional anchors in these situations, whether as mothers or as wives. But this is about as far as I’m willing to go in terms of a good-faith representation of the argument, because at the end of the day, we’re still pathologizing the male need for emotional care, and as someone who has worked intimately with at-risk boys, I can tell you that when a young man is on the edge and has nowhere to turn, he usually ends up drowning in substance abuse or killing himself.

So to see American women, who for decades guilted men for not opening up and sharing their feelings more, begin to guilt men for opening up and sharing their feelings more, is enough to convince you feminism was a mistake.

Homeless man, Leroy Skalstad

Imagine marrying a man and then considering it sexist against women that he expects you to actually care about his well-being. This is borderline-sociopathic thinking. And I really mean it when I say it’s enough to make one rethink feminism, even speaking as one who identified as a radical feminist in college. In so far as feminism is a civil rights movement for women’s liberation, I am all for it. But somewhere around the start of the third wave, it went from pro-woman to anti-man. I’ve spelled this out before, but suffice it to say, academic Marxists convinced feminists that victory was only to be had by speaking in terms of identity politics. This turned feminism from a civil rights movement into a conspiracy theory.

The conspiracy theory is simple. It is the belief that men have historically conspired, and continue to conspire, in order to maintain their hegemonic hold on politics, the economy, and culture. One of the primary reasons for maintaining this control is because all men are rapists and have constructed a culture of rape. You may have heard the common radical feminist claim that “America is a rape culture.”

I would argue that if you want an example of a rape culture, you should look to Muslim-majority nations, or Muslim communities in Western nations, where rape rates are often orders of magnitude higher than among local residents. But more importantly, mankeeping does not suggest emotional immaturity any more than womansharing does. And what, you ask, is womansharing? Why, it’s the counterpart to mansplaining and the very common practice among women of sharing their emotional drama with men, who tend not to care as much about such things, but who are nevertheless burdened with the “emotional labor” of having to let women vent, and potentially getting into trouble for trying to help by offering solutions instead of staying silent. As the old saying goes, men listen to fix while women listen to feel.

Except maybe the attempt to pathologize caring about your spouse’s emotional needs is truly toxic, whether we do it to women or men. Maybe the only reason people would suggest such a thing in the first place is not because they know anything about male homosocial bonding, but because they have a problem with men. Maybe, just maybe, the more we listen to our partners’ emotional needs, whether it means offering solutions or holding space, whether it means supporting women during MeToo or supporting men during the friendship recession, whether it involves mankeeping or womankeeping, the better off we all will be.

whoismargot

Just as wokery turned the noble black rights movement into an anti-white hate campaign that sounds more like the KKK than MLK, and just as it turned the trans movement from a civil rights effort into a psychotic and homophobic circus, it has reduced women’s liberation to man-hating. In each case, conspiracy theory played a major role. White people are keeping you down. Straight people are keeping you down. Men are keeping you down. The Jews are keeping you down. All these beliefs that are now commonplace in the current landscape of woke ideology.

There are limits, of course. There are extremes in mankeeping and womankeeping where the other person is demanding beyond what is reasonable or healthy. But that is not what we’re talking about here. We are talking about men, suffering and in need of help, with fewer and fewer people to turn to, meaning they have to turn more and more to their female dependents for the emotional air they need to breathe, and then people like the author above are attacking them for it. In a 2021 article in the Center for Male Psychology, the psychotherapist Phil Mitchell wrote:

In 1967 American radical feminist Valerie Jean Solanas self-published a book called ‘SCUM Manifesto’. It argued for eliminating the male sex, and ‘SCUM’ is said to be an acronym for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’. Some people thought SCUM Manifesto was satire. They were wrong. In 1968 Solanas attempted to murder pop artist Andy Warhol by shooting him. She also shot art critic Mario Amaya, and attempted to shoot Warhol's manager, Fred Hughes. Some people think this attitude has gone away. They are wrong.

“Kill All Men,” “Men are Trash,” “Male Privilege,” “Manspreading,” “Mansplaining,” “Toxic Masculinity,” “Patriarchy,” “Oppressors, not oppressed,” boys and men can’t turn a corner these days without hearing some phrase generalizing males as privileged, abusive, or scum.

As a former Big Brother who saw many young black and brown boys in my care burned and discarded by women exactly like the one above, who refused to hold space for them, or demanded that they operate emotionally in feminine terms, I admit I can get worked up a bit. Especially when you look at the suicide rates among young men and boys. So it’s not as if the stakes are low. Boys are killing themselves because they need love, and people like this are judging them for seeking that love and care from their own mothers and wives.

Thankfully, all the women I know are mature and loving people who consider it a blessing to be able to care for the men in their lives, as I consider it a blessing to be able to care for the women in mine.