When we talk about infighting on the left, we always think about shit like anarchism vs. MLism vs. trostkyism vs whatever the fuck. Honestly, I don’t think that’s the biggest divide on the left right now. The biggest divide is gender

Imho the reason why the gender wars are being pushed by our social media algorithms so hard right now is that the capitalists are trying to dissuade men (the traditional fighting force in an uprising) from the embracing the anticapitalist left.

Think about who’s most likely to be branded an “incel”. Is it the misogynistic billionaire? Is it the leering landlord? No. It’s the unsuccessful and lonely men who are unable to fulfill the traditional male social role and has thus become bitter with the label of privilege i.e. a person who is suffering at the hands of capitalism and its alienation and dares to suggest they might be a victim too. To be called an incel by a feminist is essentially an emotional “your suffering is your own fault, pull yourself up by your bootstraps”

(Caveat. Not talking about actual incels here, I’m talking about who is most likely to be called one by a feminist)

We talk a lot about how modern feminism just reinvents traditional gender norms, but we never really discuss why.

The reason why, as I see it, is that the capitalists need traditional gender norms to exploit our bodies. This idea has already been well analyzed and discussed in academia as it relates to women, it is currently understood by the left that capitalism considers women’s bodies to be little more than baby factories. This is true.

What is also true, however, is that men are arguably objectified by capitalism just as much as women. It’s just that while, to the ruling class, a woman is only valuable because she has a womb and can carry children, men cannot carry children, and therefore must make themselves useful to the ruling class, or be deemed worthless.

This way, you get the most babies out of the people who can make babies, and the most work out of the people who can’t. Simple as.

Now, fast forward to today. People are fed up with capitalism (even if they don’t know it) and are also fed up with gender norms. Those norms are also becoming less and less rigid, and people are starting to advocate for dangerous things, like self-determinism and class consciousness.

And so the ruling class has a problem, they know people are aware of the way the system exploits women purely and simply based on their bodies. They know that if people realized how much it exploited men in much the same way, they’d have a revolution on their hands.

They need to push men away from discovering their own exploitation, and so they sought to make the left inhospitable and unwelcoming to men. This was accomplished in all the usual ways, propaganda, rage bots, the democratic party, etc.

They are trying to convince men that they’re better off on the side of the ruling class, and to convince women that men as a collective are that ruling class and should be treated as such, alienating them further from the left. As long as these two groups of people are at odds with each other, the billionaires don’t have to worry about a revolution.