0
Share on bsky
View this post on Instagram
I ran the model, and here’s what I know:
For 30 years, I was the model of male performance masculinity. My generation didn’t call it the Manosphere, Red Pill Society, The Abundance Mindset, Hypergamy, or Frame.
It’s just what we did—handed down from our fathers and their fathers.
I ran the model better than most. Division I football—the jersey spoke louder than I ever needed. Then a career in commercial aviation. The epaulets on the shoulders carrying all the weight and authority. After that came day trading, short selling equities. The purest form of the performance model there was—daily spreadsheets, some showing six-digit profits, all verifying you know more than most men could see.
Everything designed as output. The frame before anyone named it, charged $997 for it, or put it in an algorithm.
I’m not telling you this to brag. I ran the manosphere model most of today’s influencers could only dream of. I ran it harder and farther than most of the men selling it ever will.
This is where it led me—and where it’s leading this generation of young men.
At 50, I tore it all down. A realization that outward performance doesn’t build real relationships. A wife and three daughters who managed me rather than knew me. A house that from the outside looked like the American dream, yet inside it was empty. What I had built didn’t produce any real relationships.
And for this generation of young men, it’s even more devastating. The manosphere produces outward confidence, but nothing inside.
Holding exterior frame is holding interior emptiness.
Being strategically unavailable is being isolated.
Demanding respect is pushing her away.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for men in their twenties and thirties. Not accidents. Not illness. Disconnection turned inward. One in four young American men feels lonely on any given day. Two-thirds of young men feel that no one really knows them. And the numbers are not improving. Male suicide rates have risen 30 percnet since 1999.
The manosphere performance model has been running for 20 years. It is producing exactly the opposite of what it sells.
In a 2008 study, Snyder, Kirkpatrick, and Barrett found that women specifically distinguished between men who use dominance in competition and men who will use dominance against their own partners. In 2025, a University of Amsterdam study showed that women seeking long-term partners were systematically put off by dominance. Not sometimes. Systematically.
The manosphere has been teaching its system for 20 years. The loneliness numbers are not improving. The suicide numbers are not improving.
The irony is in the research itself. In David Buss’s 1989 study—37 cultures, over 10,000 participants—kindness and emotional stability ranked first. Not status. Not composure. Not frame. Kindness. Across every culture they studied, universally.
The system is teaching men to optimize for exactly what the research says she is not selecting for.
Young men are now single at nearly twice the rate of young women—and the gap is wider than it has ever been on record. The system has been running for 20 years. If it worked, something would be moving in the right direction. Nothing is.
The performance model does not just fail to produce the connection we wanted. It actively prevents it.
Research on emotional suppression—the instruction to never let her see you rattled—finds the same pattern everywhere it looks: habitual suppression is associated with lower relationship satisfaction, reduced closeness, lower quality conversation. Not in some contexts. In all of them. The research looked for a context where emotional withholding helped a relationship. They did not find one.
I know because I lived on the wrong side of all of it for 30 years.
When I tore down the performance model and rebuilt myself, here is what I found:
The performance was not protecting me. It was insulating me from what I was trying to build: connection.
Connection requires access. She wants access—when she gets it, she feels companionship. The performance model was designed to prevent exactly what she needs.
She also needs integrity. The same man in every room, all the time. Able to hold his emotions rather than forcing others to manage them. The research calls this prestige. I call it finally being someone she can actually connect with.
We are in the middle of a real crisis of male loneliness. The data is unambiguous. And the loudest voices offering men a way through it are selling a system that the research shows produces more of it.
I ran that system for 30 years. I know what it costs.
The other door exists. The research has been pointing at it the whole time. It does not require becoming less—it requires becoming more honest about what we have been doing and why it is not working.
That is harder than holding frame.
It is also the only thing that actually works.
~
Read 0 comments and reply