Try To Hit the Pool 3

Part Three: Invasion of male spaces.

In the late 2010s, men experienced a significant invasion of their spaces by women - spaces that, to women, often held little personal significance. Gaming and tech were some key examples. During this time, there was increasing discussion about how male-dominated spaces needed to change, with critics arguing that they were misogynistic, unwelcoming, and in need of feminization. However, to men, these spaces were as important as a restroom is to women - a place of personal comfort and retreat. In a man's office or gaming space, you might find all sorts of fun items and collectibles, whereas his toilet serves a purely functional purpose.

If you’ve read through both chapters so far, you’ll hopefully have found yourself seeing that for men in this world, the possibilities of things one can be are ever diminishing. Gaming was one of the few spaces young men had left to blow off steam, and even that was taken away. The event has a name, “Gamergate,” and to some, it was about female developers sleeping with men in the industry to get good reviews - in fact, that’s what it was about at the start. Then came the media spin: the gaming world is misogynistic and needs reform; games need to have less sex appeal, no more girls in skimpy outfits being used to sell games, no more mean words, no more pushing women out. Of course, this neglects the fact that gaming is mostly a male hobby. It’s probably not that men are pushing women out, more that women don’t really have as much interest in gaming as men do - and definitely not in the same types of games.

The gaming market is a male-dominated one. It is all about men; it’s for men mostly, and the women who join in are normally fine with that. Most of the girls who spoke about it being too male-driven weren’t even gamers. I played a lot of Halo 3 when I was younger; we would call each other gay and retarded. But to say we meant it in any harmful way is ridiculous - it was boys being boys, having fun, saying silly words. We weren’t racist, sexist, or homophobic; we were just playing games with each other. I don’t think anyone I played with was gay or retarded (well, other than me). But these words don’t mean harmful things in those contexts; they are male bonding. It’s just how guys talk when it’s just us dudes and we’re doing something competitive. People looking in don’t understand it, but that’s fine - you don’t have to. Just don’t go into those spaces, miss the point, and say everyone’s hateful, because they aren’t. They’re just guys being dudes, being pals. And to the people who say, “Yes, but they’re slurs and they still hurt people’s feelings,” grow up. There are people in the world dying at war, and you’re worried about a little word? The people who get hurt on others’ behalf are the worst type of people, and they are contributing massively to the downfall of civilization.

One story that is actually quite recent was from the game Fallout 76, when a guy who did happen to be gay was playing and got attacked - which is something at that time you could do in that game - by a group of guys hitting him with weapons and calling him gay. His in-game avatar wasn’t wearing hot pants and a crop top; there was literally no way the other players could have known he was gay. I found the video frankly funny - it was harmless, silly stuff. The response was like they had committed a real-life lynching. All of the players that said the naughty words got banned from playing the game (a game that wasn’t exactly doing great player-wise at that time), and one even got doxxed - all over what? Calling someone gay? Well, you know what? That guy was gay, not because he liked men, but because he chose to get so offended over something so small.

The key is: why was this such a big deal? It’s not because people actually care. In my view, a very cynical one, it’s because gaming companies want to widen their market in order to bring more women in, in order to sell more games. It’s not because they care in the slightest about making gaming safe; they’ve just been told by some out-of-touch person who probably barely plays the games themselves that they should make it more female-friendly, get rid of the naughty words. This has ironically alienated their user base, and a lot of game companies that do go along with that narrative are now struggling.

A YouTuber known as MamaMax would, in one of his early videos, display in a sense what these spaces meant to young men in his upload Halo - The Games That Raised Us.

This mini documentary talks to young men, and tells stories of what the video game Halo meant to a generation - interviewing his friends about how the game impacted them. When viewing the documentary it becomes clear that these spaces not only meant a lot to myself and others, but also to those all over the world. The erosion and safeguarding of these spaces in the media, and the push to sanitize them and make them more “safe”, took away a culture that had organically formed - a safe haven for many young men to vent and be themselves.

It's important to note that MamaMax is now considered cancelled for a completely unrelated matter connected to his later videos around online paedophile hunting, and actions in that community, but the documentary I am referencing still provides a strong case for what I am saying about how meaningful these spaces were to men.

For this chapter I am only going to provide two examples. While it is true a whole book could be written on this subject, I feel it is only necessary to write a small chapter to capture the overall feeling of the time. A supplemental, if you will. We blazed through Gamergate and I will now do the same for tech with the example of James Damore.

In 2017 Damore would publish a memo to a shared Google workplace. This paper was created in response to Google's increased push to get more women into the tech field. Damore, a technically minded employee of the company, wanted to raise attention to the idea that Google was becoming an ideological echo chamber - naming his paper as such "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber." He argued that men and women have differences, and these differences are the real reason that we see women not participating in tech as much as men. Not - as the media was asserting - a need to make the spaces more friendly or less discriminatory to women.

The 10-page memo argued that Google’s political bias equated freedom from offense with psychological safety. Damore claimed that while discrimination exists, it’s extreme to attribute all gender disparities to oppression, advocating instead for recognizing biological differences. He cited research, such as Simon Baron-Cohen’s empathizing-systemizing theory, suggesting women are more interested in people, more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism, while men have a higher drive for status, explaining their overrepresentation in high-stress tech roles.

Damores take was actually very balanced, listing in a section of his memo left and right wing bias, which I actually think are very spot on. Here is the list;

Left-wing bias:

• Compassion for the weak

• Disparities are due to injustices

• Humans are inherently cooperative

• Change is good (unstable)

• Open

• Idealist

Right-wing bias:

• Respect for the strong/authority

• Disparities are natural and just

• Humans are inherently competitive

• Change is dangerous (stable)

• Closed

• Pragmatic

Damore would state in his memo:

“At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.”

To me thought the most important quote from his memo is the following:

“Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.”

I bring this up as it echoes what I stated in the first chapter about how men want to do something new and unique to blaze a trail, status for men is important and this could provide some insight into why some would choose transition to gain it.

Back to Damore, after the memo he created was leaked, he was fired from Google - which would in fact prove his point further about how it was an echo chamber.

Later Demore would file a lawsuit and end up winning for an undisclosed amount due to being fired unfairly, but his memo and the fact he did eventually win, speaks volumes to what I’m saying about how men are being punished for the facts of life. Women are not as interested in tech or gaming yet for some time and even now we are told that their non inclusion is due to discrimination or them being a mens club.

The trickle down of this is that, as the Transmaxxer I named Taylor pointed out, STEM initiatives are created to bring more women into the field to “correct the balance”. These policies then create a world in which men have a harder time getting into subjects they are genuinely interested in, creating a discriminatory pattern which young men then suffer from.

It is in no way controversial to say men and women have different interests. Yet for a time, and even still today, people stating this clear cut fact will be labeled as a misogynist or be accused of contributing to the ongoing subjugation of women. I believe the reason for this is simple: these viewpoints are so obviously right that if people heard them, they would agree. And this scares corporations that are trying to push a narrative of “inclusion”. There is nothing inherently wrong with a tech workplace being mostly or all men. It doesn't mean that discrimination has occurred, and the “fix” to this should never be to hire more women just because we need to balance things gender wise, to fit some wider ideological narrative.

The kind of funny note to all this is; the transgender trend could end up solving the problem for these companies, as men becoming women would mean getting the numbers of female staff up without having to actually hire women, or give them opportunities.

This concludes Act 1 of the book, the next few chapters are where we start to dive into my personal story and the events around it. Over the last three chapters I have tried to paint a picture of how young men may feel, and the way I felt about the world.

If there is one thing I want you to take away from these first few parts of the book, it is that men have had a rather hard time in the media for a long while now. None of this is to mention the #MeToo movement, which also became a kind of witch hunt at its peak.

With all this in mind, it is no wonder why so many young men feel demoralized and turn to cults and ideas far from the norm to gain a perspective where they are the winners. It is no wonder why people like Andrew Tate gained such a huge following, and it is no wonder why we see a mental health and loneliness epidemic that is only growing. There is no real space for young men to be themselves, and a removal of all the incentives and ideals that could lead men to a good place, where they are both self-actualised and kind to others, is next to non-existent. The sins of our fathers are heavy on every man, the ghost of discrimination past.