THE ALGORITHM IS ARRANGING THE WORST BLIND DATE IN HUMAN HISTORY

Young men are being fed a poisonous definition of their own worth. They are told a man’s value is measured by his income, height, muscles, dominance, sexual conquests, and willingness to grind himself into dust.

An ordinary job makes him a loser. Vulnerability makes him weak. Marriage makes him a sucker. Women are manipulative, materialistic, hypergamous, and always looking to trade up.

That is misogyny. It is dangerous to women and girls, and it is also fucking up the boys consuming it.

But I got a chance to watch part of this develop from the other side.

When I owned the childcare center, I worked with a lot of young women. I saw what appeared in their feeds. I had never spent much time on TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat, so I started exploring those platforms myself.

It did not take long before I saw what the machine was selling them.

Status. Luxury. Consumption. “Know your worth” transformed from healthy self-respect into a demand that everyone else prove their value through money, appearance, and possessions.

One of the ugliest dating slogans became “six feet, six figures, six inches.”

Yes, some women really say that shit. It is shallow, dehumanizing, and cruel.

But here is the distinction we cannot afford to miss:

THE FEED IS NOT A CENSUS.

Those clips do not tell young men what women believe. They show young men the women most likely to make them furious.

And the clips being fed to young women do not tell them what men believe. They show young women the men most likely to make them afraid, disgusted, and angry.

The algorithm is arranging the worst blind date in human history.

It introduces men and women through each other’s worst representatives, then sells advertising during the fight.

A five foot eight teenage boy sees clip after clip of women declaring that men like him are invisible. A girl sees clip after clip of men describing women as bodies with expiration dates.

He starts believing there is no point unless he gets rich.

She starts believing there is no reason to trust men.

Both retreat into tribes. Each tribe offers protection, belonging, and a villain.

In one tribe, all women are gold diggers.

In the other, all men are predators, cheaters, or emotionally defective children.

Then every new video becomes more “proof.”

The algorithm does not need an ideology. Its business model is enough. Anger keeps people watching. Insecurity keeps people buying. Loneliness creates customers.

This is why the manosphere works.

Its grifters did not create every wound young men are carrying. They found those wounds and infected them.

Housing is increasingly unaffordable. Wages have not kept pace with the life young people were told to expect. Stable careers are harder to find. Men still hear that they should be providers while being told that needing purpose or recognition makes them insecure.

Those are real pressures.

Then some asshole standing beside a rented Lamborghini tells them the problem is women, and offers to sell them the solution.

On the other side, women have real wounds too: harassment, abuse, unequal domestic labor, beauty standards, reproductive risk, and men who genuinely have treated them terribly.

Then another influencer takes that pain and turns discernment into contempt. Never compromise. Never build together. Never date potential. Find a finished product who can finance the lifestyle you deserve.

And, conveniently, buy her course while you are looking.

Both industries take legitimate pain, remove all nuance, assign an enemy, and create customers.

Consumer culture finishes the job. The oversized house, brand new car, luxury vacation, designer clothes, and carefully staged relationship become evidence that you are winning.

A modest home or used car feels like admitting failure.

People work longer hours, add side hustles, take on debt, and spend less time together in order to purchase the appearance of a successful life.

The advertisers win. The influencers win. The platforms win.

The family loses.

But if our entire response to a lonely, humiliated, frightened boy is “stop being toxic,” the manosphere grifter remains the only person telling him, “I see you. I understand why you are angry.”

We have to reach boys before those bastards do.

We also cannot help them by lying and pretending they have never seen genuinely superficial women. They have. We help them by teaching them that a viral video is not a representative sample of half the human race.

Men are not toxic.

Women are not toxic.

Some people are toxic, and the algorithm has built an extraordinarily profitable business out of introducing them to everybody.

I have been married for 34 years. She is my best friend in the entire fucking world. We dance together, listen to the same music, play video games, laugh constantly, and genuinely enjoy being around one another.

Those shared interests are wonderful.

But the real value of our marriage is that when life gets hard, and life gets unbelievably fucking hard, we are on the same side.

Children are hard. Jobs are hard. Homes are hard. Bills are hard. Illness, grief, exhaustion, responsibility, and the collapse of plans are hard.

Marrying the wrong person can destroy everything.

Marrying the right person does not make life easy. It means you do not have to face the hard parts alone.

Attraction matters. Sex matters. Money matters. Work ethic matters. Pretending otherwise would be bullshit.

But people are not product specifications.

If a man chooses marriage and fatherhood, one of the best measures of his success is how his wife and children respond when he enters the room.

Do they relax?

Do they trust him?

Do they respect him because he earned it, or obey him because they fear him?

If your family shrinks when you walk through the door, the bank account does not make you a “high-value man.” The expensive car is camouflage.

The same principle applies to all of us. Look at the people who know someone best. Look at who still trusts them when there is nothing to gain.

A high value partner is someone who tells the truth, keeps their word, apologizes, works beside you, laughs with you, and does not make home feel dangerous.

Someone who makes a difficult life less lonely.

We need to teach young people that their feed is not the world.

Ask them who profits from their anger. Ask what is being sold. Ask why the platform keeps showing them the most offensive member of the opposite sex while hiding the millions of ordinary men and women building decent lives together.

We need each other.

And that is exactly why teaching us to hate each other has become such a profitable fucking business.