Wifejak and the Week of Gender Dynamics Galore!
The past week a controversy surrounding a meme known as ‘Wifejak’ has emerged, which, I must admit, I am not entirely conversant with. The debate has stirred up a lot of interesting discussions around ‘conservative’ culture’s relationship with love and marriage, amongst other things.
There are various degrees of right-wing ‘fanaticism’ when it comes to many topics, from the angrier, more radical incel/MGTOW tier to the more ‘tolerantly’ fluid upper ‘trad’ tiers. Some of the more radical elements have adopted a kind of ‘white sharia’ mentality when it comes to women and spouses, often owing, it seems, to their inexperience with the ‘fairer sex’. Men weened on feminity only from within the confines of their isolation often take on an unrealistic perception of expectations when it comes to women and relationships such that the types of simple—perhaps, innocent—annoyances exhibited by the ‘Wifejak’ meme are regarded by them as hostile attacks on manhood or the ‘idealized’ vision of traditional coupling.
But this meditation is not really about Wifejak, nor the fathomless outgrowths of ideology which can be drawn, mapped, charted, and dissected ad nauseam from the implications thereof. Nor is it the usual ‘transgressive’ tract, howling at the moon about our invisible controllers or mapping reality’s hidden codes by way of some seemingly mundane cultural signals. No, it is merely a springboard for a few small observations about our ordinary lives as we live them.
One of the key dynamics exposed in the ‘Wifejak Scandal of 2024’ is an evident detachment in the right-wing/trad community from real relationships, which can apply to many of us who’ve perhaps become so isolated that our online worlds have been made into inadvertent surrogates of reality. Meaning: some people have not gone out and ‘touched grass’ in so long, that their simulated world becomes one with whatever Twitter narrative is currently fashionable. It has led me to thinking: in the modern age of online dating, app culture, et cetera, people with time on their hands have constructed an inauthentic model of how intersocial relationships should work. This includes romantic relationships, which many in the ‘manosphere’ have chewed over, processed, scrutinized into an overbearing hermeneutics complex, draining the real, flesh-and-blood thing of its inherent incommensurability. In plain words: they have fashioned an artificial mockup from an intangible which cannot be so constrained to numbers and charts, and bottled up at whim.
The ‘thing’ I speak of is life and love. Not to get schmaltzy, but it’s the stereotype of love being more than the sum of its parts, a fact those who’ve only experienced its penumbra over the internet cannot possibly understand at the deepest physiological level. What’s been eye-opening for me is contrasting how myself and people I know have experienced love and marriage as compared to the inert descriptions of the same on the right-wing and manosphere pundit circuits. There things are often delineated to such an excruciating exactitude, as if love, marriage, fertility, and all else can be controlled for down to the finest detail like a set of architectural blueprints. It’s why discussions of the proper age of marriage—particularly apropos the turgid topic of ‘depopulation’—often elicit an eye roll from me. Such things simply cannot be steered like a clinical trial. Real life is imperfect, and the happiest and most ‘settled’ people I’ve known simply take it as it is, rolling with the punches rather than trying to ‘min-max’ every turn of fate. They do not calculate child-bearing ages and map out offspring charts in relation to their phase of life and career trajectory—counting years as currency. The children simply ‘happen’, often unplanned and blissfully so.
This segues into the right-wing’s and manosphere culture’s obsession with, or fetishization of, idealism and formalism of all kinds. To clarify, this isn’t meant to demean ‘incels’ and other right-wing adjacent stereotypes. Rather, I view them as byproducts of a society deeply out of joint, which has condemned a generation of males to linger in the shadows, never tasting the ‘sweet’ bud of life. But the fact remains, people who do not experience life’s fruits directly, but rather from the simplified distortions of internet memes and angry forum coalposts, tend to gravitate toward ideals characterized by their extremes.
For instance, masculinity cannot simply be a moderate observance of anti-leftist practices but must instead strive to the Herculean and Promethean. Women cannot be forgiven for their slight variance but must remain docile tradwife dolls always at their husband’s beck and call. Likewise their looks must adhere to faultless Fibonacci derivations, with ‘proper’ hair lengths, chin-to-nose ratios, and thigh gap widths. It’s become quite tiresome and is indicative of people who’ve retreated into impossible abstractions, channeling their worldly angers into formalist deadends.
The modern world, awash with its tech credo, facilitates the formation of these small ideological subcults, where people spurned by society echo-chamber themselves into immoderately amplifying unrealistic conceptions. These portals of modernity give rise to an epidemic of overthinking, leading to society’s shunned, with their higher-than-average IQs, to micro-analyze everything—often involuntarily—into a kind of formulized schema. These conceptions inadvertently evolve through all the iterative volutions of the echochamber churn to become freakishly out of tune with reality. The process takes on a life of its own, compelling them to pre-calculate their lives like a fastidious tailor fussing over every hem and seam, wearing out the tape measure.
Talented thinker Johann Kurtz has written up his own reflections on the Wifejak phenomenon, philosophizing better than I can on the ramifications for the ‘right’:
Though it may have the flavor of sciolism to some, there are thoughtful takeaways which can illuminate this cultural moment:
Touching precisely on my earlier thesis, he writes:
Young men see older married men indulging in Wifejak and are concerned that this indicates married men are ‘checking out’ of the cultural struggle and learning to be content with what they have. The young then feel abandoned and outraged.
This is tied up in a deep anxiety among young men: are modern women redeemable? Are young women still capable of approaching the archetypical vision of the ideal woman? How can the answer be yes if we can’t relate what an ideal woman is?
Continued:
The full archetype of the woman is too expansive to unpack here - perhaps a topic for future essay - but we get some sense of it from Edith Stein’s description of woman’s soul as “fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold.” It involves nurture, companionship, a wholeness of humanity over disciplinary specialization, and an acceptance of bonds of care over personal autonomy.
Young men are concerned that modern women are incapable of such nurture; that their upbringing and participation in a promiscuous dating market has permanently compromised them. There’s a sense that young women know how to take, but not how to give. Figures like Andrew Tate have gained a following trading on such anxieties, and have suggested a new way of relating to women as a result (one which focuses on domination, force, and distance in order to suppress modern women’s negative instincts and shield oneself from vulnerability).
Young men are being ‘radicalized’ into a kind of inflexible formalism by both their own seclusion and online figures like Andrew Tate, as well as the distantly perceived actions of contemporary women.
Wifejak is not intended to express generativeness or compassion. The joke is in exposing women’s little contradictions and wants: ‘Buy me flowers’, ‘Bring me a drink’, ‘I don’t know what food to order’. Married men with good wives find these little acts of selfishness charming because they are particularly feminine and are the small, universal cost of married life. But it's an unsuitable image to present to the unmarried because it appears to confirm what they fear about women without any redemptive context.
Beautifully phrased above, Kurtz’ description of real experiential devotion would strike a contradictory note for the isolated, basement-dwelling class: the simple fact is it is virtually impossible to ever appreciate these small, unspoken charms without having experienced them first hand. The reason is, they are little paradoxes of social dynamics for the same reason a girl “punching” you with mock anger in first grade as a sign of secret affection may strike an alien unfamiliar with human behavior as a bizarre contradiction.
Again, this takes us back to the idea of de-radicalizing life by reducing the need to measure, catalog, and over-analyze everything. As stated, the happiest people I know appear in some ways blissfully unaware of the accidental incongruencies they may have introduced into their path by way of charging in, and not preplanning everything as if it were a detailed budgetary proposal. Homes are often purchased on a whim or gut feeling, not as part of some statistical-app-aided probability spread utilizing boolean functions and delta curves for ‘ideal’ housing market and macroeconomic conditions. The same goes for marriage and pregnancy and any other of life’s heavy-weighted milestones.
Modernity has a way of turning the living into a scientific calendar or a kind of HR curriculum. Abetted by apps and social media, a new ecosystem has solidified popular sentiment or cultural fads into a kind of militarized rubric which the rest of us are obliged—subconsciously or not—to follow. That’s not to mention that nodes of ‘influencers’ instantiating their pathologies into concrete manifestos disguised as lifestyle op-eds act as waveguides to direct prevailing cultural impulses into mass coherence for the sake of social uniformity orchestrated from on high. Before we know it, we’re deferring to these crushing external pressures rather than listening to our inner voices or natural instincts.
The churn of our tech-influenced social media age has given everyone a voice and platform, which has filled our reality-stream with an emergent flux of philosophical and ideological overproduction, turning everything into a contested battlespace of formulized rhetoric and prescription. It has thrust us into an epistemic stovepipe resulting in the expectation that every phase and turn of our lives must adhere to a strict syllabus of choices about the pace and schedule of each major decision marking our progression along this aseptically preordained timeline.
For lack of a better reference frame, wayward young men have turned the essentials of reality into something unnaturally programmatic and formulated. Life’s most crucial choices become petri dish solutions to be studied and dissected under a microscope. In the dimness of modernity, these young men seek easy, structured ‘guidelines’ to make sense of things. Unfortunately, reality has no such schematic and must simply be embraced, warts and all, like a chaotic storm of wind and hail.
Dovetailing with Wifejak week was this NYT offering which tries desperately to intellectually tie Trump’s rise to sublimated male libido:
The article itself is a hoot, but I’d like to first offer this reductively entertaining summation by X user ‘BoneGpt’:
NYT article about hypergamy. Their conclusion? Women caused Donald Trump to happen by doing too well after getting rights and still demanding to marry up. Some of my favorite bits of this unintentionally based take:
Women are pulling ahead making it harder to fulfill their Cinderella fantasy. Even though the economic pressure went down for women, they still want to marry up more than ever.
We analyzed 32 rom-coms and found none that featured broke losers.
Women want to be Sandra Bullock.
"The male breadwinner norm" has left diminished men looking for submissive tradwives instead of powerful, sexy, strong playwrights like our author.
The article itself throws its ideological cards on the table from the get go:
Joe Rogan. Elon Musk. Representatives of bro culture are on the ascent, bringing with them an army of disaffected young men. But where did they come from? Many argue that a generation of men are resentful because they have fallen behind women in work and school. I believe this shift would not have been so destabilizing were it not for the fact that our society still has one glass-slippered foot in the world of Cinderella.
It makes the correct arguments, but as BoneGPT adduced above, it purposely reaches—and I mean reaches—the wrong conclusions in order to satisfy prevailing orthodoxies.
Author Sarah Bernstein correctly identifies male woes amidst a society which has seen women artificially boosted past men by every metric, from college enrollment, to more recently, even home ownership. But while admitting the core issues are real, the author disingenuously smears Trump, Rogan, and Musk’s putative ‘bro culture’ as somehow playing off these fears and repressed angst. It’s the same modus operandi media shills use to impugn ‘populism’ when they acknowledge that democracy is all vox dei, vox populi yet in the same breath cast aspersions at populists for somehow ‘stoking’ or ‘taking advantage of’ the admittedly real issues.
Similarly here, ‘bros’ of the manosphere are cast as the bad guys for playing up the legitimate social fissures:
Enter the manosphere: a space occupied by new media podcasters and their favored politicians who win eyeballs, votes and dollars by selling a retrograde version of masculinity as the fix for men’s woes. In the final month of his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump skipped traditional outlets for a manosphere media blitz, which many credit for his 14-point lead among young men. While so-called female gold diggers are an obsession of the manosphere, much of its content reinforces the male-breadwinner norm — tying money to manliness and women’s preference for providers to biology.
It’s a contradictory and intellectually dishonest—not to mention subversive—take: when you admit the premise is real, you can’t then turn around and smear those acting on it as some kind of charlatans or grifters. Also, the last line roundly exposes the author’s lack of understanding of the core issue: it’s not providers or biology—it’s biology itself which steers women’s preference for ‘providers’.
She again reaffirms the typical female inability to grasp hypergamy, or mating dynamics in general:
A 2016 study in The Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that even when economic pressure to marry up is lower, cultural pressure to do so goes nowhere. A recent paper from economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve found that since the 1960s, when women’s educational attainment and work force participation first began to surge, Americans’ preference for marrying someone of equal or greater education and income has grown significantly.
By believing it is “cultural pressure” driving well-heeled women into a hypergamy spiral, the author reveals herself as childishly misled by the very Cinderella myths she revels in. It’s not ‘cultural pressure’—like a diet of Disney movies, as she would have us imagine—but innate biological instinct which ensures women’s attraction to a certain male archetype. But in an age where transhumanist leftists of the author’s ilk seek to abrogate biology and replace it with a slew of pseudo-intellectual contrivances, her clueless take wins no surprise.
She redeems my read of her shortcomings in the very next paragraph by again citing Rom-Com movies as cradles of this tragic misguidedness. The sordid affair reveals the true nature of the modern fracture between sexes: women believe they can socially engineer human bio-dynamics into an ‘acceptable’ mode in the tried-and-true HR managerialist framework. Men, on the other hand—due to their closer salience to these issues’ negative effects—cut down to the bone and understand the true, non-reconfigurable nature of the processes involved: it is simple biological reality.
If you remain unconvinced, she gives away her entire stealth social-engineering plot towards the end:
The manosphere would have us believe that this situation was inevitable, that women have emasculated men with their success and now complain that there aren’t enough real men to go around. In truth, our culture is broken because while we have acknowledged the limiting nature of the peasant-to-princess story line, we have not done the same for the prince. Over the past 60 years, as girls and women have fought their way into classrooms and boardrooms, society has expanded its idea of womanhood accordingly, yet our definition of manhood has failed to evolve alongside it.
Letting go of the male breadwinner norm is not an instant fix for our culture, but we can’t move forward without that step. After all, “breadwinner” is not only a limiting identity; it’s also a relative one. If we don’t release men from the expectation, any plan to help them regain lost ground will have to also ensure that women never catch up.
You see? Rather than accepting biologically driven human nature, the elite social engineers want to redefine masculinity itself to hew to their idealized corporate vision of society. In their eyes, it’s not men simply reacting to the ‘call of the blood’ but rather them selfishly fighting back ‘modernity’s progress’; get with the times, guys, and learn to accept a submissive, post-masculine (read: emasculated) social role!
It’s been a rather busy week when it comes to male-female power dynamics, what with the polarizing ‘adult star’ Lily Phillips flashpoint ratcheting up the furor. But I hadn’t intended to barnstorm through each instance of revelatory ‘teachable moments’ on this count, though sometimes a simple picture, or even headline, is worth a thousand words:
All I will say to the above controversy is everyone has got it wrong, both liberals and dissident right manosphere jocks alike. Sure, Jean-François Gariépy made a worthy effort, which does provide for some entertaining reading, and has the ring of truth to it. But in reality, Lily Phillips has played everyone; her breathlessly tear-eyed performance was meant precisely to churn endless clicks and commentary amidst the easily-duped over-analytical autists of the dissident right. She rakes in millions on OnlyFans by successfully employing such baiting tactics against too-literal-minded right-wingers who can’t see the forest for the trees, or the stumps for the bush, as it were. They hyperfocus on her feigned ‘devastation’, ignoring the jubilant aftermath where she smirkily admits to having loved it all, and reveals plans to upstage herself with a 1000-men-a-day marathon on the next go-around. All the weepy contrition is artifice for the cameras, or merely the vixen’s performative dopamine overload.
Sometimes not everything branches forth from the layered meta-analyses of gender dynamics, but rather comes down to the simple commodifying banalities of our times.
Note to subscribers:
This more casual culture commentary seemed a fitting time to both thank and remind readers here that the Dark Futura project has merely been a personal divertissement of sorts from my main page. This project allows me to unwind and indulge myself in outre and fanciful topics as palette cleansers, not to mention to keep myself amused and allow me to dabble and experiment as inspiration for personal artistic growth. It was never meant to be a money-making endeavor and so it will likely never have paywalled articles except in such case where the subject matter may be deemed ‘sensitive’, as has once occurred. I do this more for my own personal enjoyment, rather than a ‘career’ pursuit. So, for those few who do support monetarily, I thank you greatly. I do not expect remuneration as I am able to only generate a couple articles a month here for now, so only the most ironclad fans are invited to support my creative endeavor should they have the comfortable means to do so. For those I am extra grateful, particularly the diehard few who even support both channels—you know who you are. But as I said, I just wanted to ink this reminder that this is a somewhat secondary side project to keep me occupied, so expect a hodgepodge of content in various forms and styles, and not all of it overly serious.
Todays young women are absolutely brainwashed to be entitled, toxic narcissists. My three daughters have unrealistic expectations, while my son has withdrawn into his online world. If I had to do it all over again, I would move to the Alaskan bush, cut off all television and technology except for VHS cassettes of Little House on the Prairie, and homeschool them on nothing but the classics. Alas, it wasn't until we caught a glimpse of what they were teaching our kids over covid-zoom-school that we began to realize how toxic the programming driving a wedge between the genders had become. I worry for my son....
Simpliticus outdid himself again with this gem of an article. rate 5 stars and 2 happy faces.