Rachel Monroe recently published a fascinating essay on Jared Rutledge, the pickup artist whose Asheville, NC community turned against him after discovering his dehumanizing and degrading comments online. Rutledge’s comments were quite similar to what you might find in much of the manosphere if you go looking—lashing out at women who won’t have sex with him, saying women are only valuable if they are beautiful and submissive, tallying the number of women he has slept with, and going so far as to give them scores.

Rutledge expressed a great deal of remorse for his actions, even trying to make amends by donating to a local rape crisis center (which was rejected). For the story, he told Monroe about his past, and what had drawn him to pickup artistry and the manosphere—anger, bitterness, insecurity, and a feeling that he couldn’t make sense of the world around him. In my own research on manosphere discourse, and what men say about the current state of dating and masculinity, Rutledge is far from alone. Many men turn to these communities to try to make sense of their role in a society that looks very different from their fathers’; the decline of the industrial economy, the end of “The Greatest Generation,” and of course the decades of feminist movement and LGBT activism that have dramatically changed the landscape of gender and sexuality.

The work of author and journalist Susan Faludi has been foundational for my own thinking on the topic, and her account of this problem can shed light on what brings men to the manosphere in the first place. In her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, she writes:

It’s often been observed that the economic transition from industry to service, or from production to consumption, is symbolically a move from the traditional masculine to the traditional feminine. But in gender terms, the transition is far more than a simple sex change and, so, more traumatic for men than we realize. A society of utility, for all the indisputable ways that it exploited men’s health and labor, and in an industrial context broke the backs and spirits of factory workers and destroyed the lungs of miners, had one saving grace: it defined manhood by character, by the inner qualities of stoicism, integrity, reliability, the ability to shoulder burdens, the willingness to put others first, the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice. These are the same qualities, recoded as masculine, that society has long recognized in women as the essence of motherhood. Men were publicly useful insofar as they mastered skills associated with the private realm of maternal femininity. Like mothers tending selflessly to their babes, men were not only to take care of their families but also their society without complaint; that was, in fact, what made them men.

…

In a culture of ornament, by contrast, manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered ‘individuality’ that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of feminine vanity, the public face of the feminine as opposed to the private caring, maternal one. The aspects of this public ‘femininity’—objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching, and mirror-gazing—are the very ones that women have in modern times denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. No wonder men are in such agony. Not only are they losing the society they were once essential to, they are ‘gaining’ the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing. [pp. 38-39]

Britney is on Twitter.