A Pyramid's Waterwheel
On misdirected rage, the manosphere, and who benefits from our pain - Issue 1.1
Something has been nagging at me since Issue 1, and I want to sit with it before we move on to talking about specific story tropes. This article wasn’t part of the grand Fantasy Facing Fascism design, hence the numbering difference, but it kept beating at me, so I had to write it.
In Issue 1, I talked about the pyramid — the shape of a system that runs on gravity and requires a wide base of have-nots at the bottom to support the privilege and power of those at the top. And while I described the inexorable slide back to the bottom, I didn’t talk about the feelings of betrayal that slide generates. Because the system betrays all of us: men, women, the global majority, lgbtqia+, the list could go on. If you exist within the system and believe the promise of success, you will be betrayed. And then the outrage will start, because that’s the human reaction to betrayal.
And because I didn’t go into depth about the betrayal or the pain that betrayal causes, I also didn’t talk about how the pyramid harnesses betrayal to power its own success. Actually, I planned to do that a bit later, after some of these ideas had time to settle, but I’ve spent the last few days chatting with you wonderful Substack people (we wonderful Substack people?) and this has kept coming up. And then the words started itching in my fingers and I just had to write it. So buckle up! It’s time to talk about the waterwheel that powers the pyramid!
Here’s my best attempt at mapping the mechanism through (you guessed it!) metaphor.
The pyramid promises everyone the same thing: work hard, play by the rules, climb correctly, and you’ll be rewarded. And then — for most of us, eventually — it fails to deliver. And when it does, all that faith in the structure curdles into something that needs somewhere to go. Rage is the appropriate response to discovering you’ve been lied to. The pyramid knows this. And rather than absorbing that rage, it redirects it.
The manosphere is one of the most visible results of that redirection. The manosphere didn’t invent male loneliness (the pyramid did, actually, by sticking women with the responsibility for all relationships and shaming men for being human beings), but it did latch onto the pyramid’s impact on men. All that pain, all that disconnection, all that hunger for meaning and belonging that has to be locked in the cupboard and only let out to play at Superbowl Sunday with all the (male) mates, was the perfect set-up for profit. And that’s what the manosphere is. It’s a waterwheel constructed in the middle of a saltwater river comprised of every unshed male tear. And that waterwheel makes more and more money every single day, running on the stifled grief of the people the pyramid has betrayed.
The manosphere is a waterwheel constructed in the middle of a saltwater river comprised of every unshed male tear.
But here’s the thing about grief… It turns to anger the way a rag saturated with kerosene does. One spark, and you’ve got an explosion.
And where should that explosion be aimed?
Not back at the pyramid! Not at the mechanisms designed to make money for the people on top of the pyramid! No, it needs to be aimed somewhere that reinforces the societal structures that caused the explosion in the first place.
And so the manosphere targets women.
Because if men are furious at women, they’re not furious at the system.
The damage the pyramid does to men and to women looks very different, and I want to be careful not to flatten that distinction. The power differential is real. The rates of violence are different. The types of harm are different. These are not equivalent situations, and pretending they are doesn’t serve anyone.
But the waterwheels in both cases run money back up to the top, and the violence in both cases comes from the same place.
The pyramid strips men of emotional vocabulary, of intimacy, of any identity that isn’t built on dominance or so-called “stoicism” (the circular reality of stoicism is a topic for another day) or productivity. Isolated and without the tools to name what’s happening to them, some men become more self-protective, more entitled, more convinced that the people around them are objects rather than subjects with their own inner lives. That entitlement makes it easy to direct harm at people who have been dehumanized — and women have been dehumanized for a very long time.
So women experience that harm. And women — as anyone who has experienced such a crippling bombardment of non-stop vitriol and violence would — pull away. We disconnect from the male figures in our lives and strengthen our connection with other women — and we know how to do that because we’ve been the relationship-keepers for our whole lives! Women rally together to push back against the abuse perpetrated by men. Feminism ignites in an explosion of anger (which, to be fair, is a whole lot less violent than the manosphere… Men are dying from a loneliness epidemic, women are dying because we’re being killed by men. Both forms of death are rooted in the pyramid, but men are the actors in both of these. There is no equivalence here.) And the loneliness doubles. And the outrage doubles. And the violence doubles. And the wheel spins faster.
If men are furious at women, they're not furious at the system.
Meanwhile, the pyramid is making money. The algorithms that feed the manosphere are the same algorithms that optimize for outrage because outrage keeps people scrolling. The influencers monetizing male pain are doing exactly what the system rewards. And, as much as I hate to say it, so are the influencers monetizing female pain. They’re doing so in good faith (which is the opposite of most of the manosphere), and they’re doing it to try and create real change, but the reality is that the anger that should be aimed at the architecture is being converted into engagement metrics and used to sell supplements. The pyramid isn’t just redirecting the anger— it’s burning the anger for fuel. And when the anger has cooled and we’re all just burnt-out shells, that’s okay. We’re still not attacking the system.
I sat with this for a while before I could articulate why it matters beyond the obvious. Here’s where I landed: if this is a waterwheel using the flow of outrage to generate money, then “men are bad” and “women are the problem” are both just the pyramid talking. They keep the wheel moving. They keep us from looking up at the structure that built the wheel in the first place.
I’m not suggesting we respond to male violence with a shrug and a systems analysis. The harm is real and it’s happening now and it needs to stop.
But I’m also not willing to hand the pyramid exactly what it wants, which is for people who are all suffering under the same structure to spend their energy fighting each other.
If you’re a feminist influencer reading this, then first: how the heck did you even find me? I have like twenty followers??! But second, thank you for the work you do!!! It’s not easy to hold the line for women’s rights and safety amidst all this hate. I know this essay might come off as an attack against angry feminism. That’s not what I’m trying to do. Women deserve safety and respect, and part of that means we have to hold men accountable for their actions. You are an essential part of making that happen.
The system has betrayed everyone. Not equally, but entirely.
I guess what I’m trying (and probably failing) to say is that feminism spends so much time focusing on the gendered aspects of the fight that we sometimes unintentionally play into the hands of the larger structure. Every man who reads “patriarchy” and think “men’s fault” is a man who fuels patriarchy’s machine. Every woman who reads “matriarchy” and thinks “women-in-charge” is a woman who fuels patriarchy’s machine. I know and you know that those two words have nothing to do with men being at fault or women being in charge, but remember the journey it took to get here. And as we level our anger at the patriarchy instead of at the men who (like women) fuel it, let’s remember compassion. We’ve been betrayed by the system. We’ve been beaten, we’ve been killed, we’ve been forced, we’ve been subjugated.
Yes.
The system has betrayed everyone.
Not equally, but entirely.
And now we’re picking up the pieces.
Every wall we use to divide ourselves from others at the bottom of this patriarchal pyramid is a wall the system can use to crush us.
Remember: Together, we resist. Together, we endure. Together, we thrive.
That doesn’t just mean women. That doesn’t just mean all people who menstruate. That doesn’t just mean all people who identify as female. That doesn’t just mean all feminists. That doesn’t just mean all progressives. It means all humans.
All of us.
Together.
This is the kind of writing I really struggle to do in the absence of community. I’m not asking you to subscribe - the button’s there to make it easy to find, not to pressure you. But if you could leave a comment with some of your thoughts or even just a hello, it would mean a lot to me. And if this essay resonated and you have the energy to share it with a friend, that would mean a lot, too.
If we all give what we can to re-shaping the future, maybe our children will live in a happier, kinder, free-er (or at least less apocalyptic) world. Thank you for stopping by!
So there's one thing I want to seek clarification on and that's whether you think abolishing the pyramidial structure in favour of the doughnut must come before gender equality (parity is what I believe you used before) is achieved. Because I don't see any progress being made towards flattening the structure while half of humanity is fighting the other half and that's in addition to all the other differences that divide our people (politics, geography, culture etc). But there is the alternative you could hold that ridding ourselves of the pyramid would naturally entail the formation of a community that recognises each individual equally and that fixes, by default, the issues that feminism commonly combat. So it's kind of a catch 77 (I think that's what they're called) where you need a large degree of cohesion to direct yourself against the pyramid but you can only have that unity when you're out of that structure.