Zoomer Girl Derangement
John Carter is brilliant, but is he right?
Among intellectual men who do jobs sitting down, there’s a growing trend to characterize women as emasculating. The paterfamilias of this movement is Jordan Peterson. Yet a robust faction, if that word applies to verbiage, exists on Substack. One of its most articulate spokesmen is the author who writes as John Carter. With over 10,000 subs, John is engaging and brilliant. But is he right? That’s what I’ll be exploring here.
In this episode, I’ll look at a guest post on John’s stack called A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement. It’s the opening post of zinnia’s own substack, which John wanted to boost. With 98 restacks, hundreds of likes and comments, and over 1000 subs with her first post, I’d say it worked.
I’d like to give a fuller explanation of that derangement, from my pov as a mother of daughters zinnia’s age, I’ll quote from a conversation I had with John. I’ll also look at his other articles on Tonic Masculinity, The Devouring Mother of the Digital Longhouse, and Pixel Valhalla. And I’ll end with my ideas on how this derangement started and how it could finally end.
a partial explanation of zoomer girl derangement
The subtitle on zinnia’s article is “Are women okay? The answer is obviously: no. But why? Some thoughts on thots and the traps they fall into.” John added in a footnote, “Including becoming traps. Couldn’t resist.”
What is a thot? That Ho Over There or a slut with no morals. A song line is “just can’t make a thot a wife.” While it’s termed a misogynistic insult, a commenter states, “Some women self-identify as thots because it turns them on.” Let’s guess the gender of that commenter.
zinnia writes about first encounters with the male gaze for girls:
As you come of age, you must confront a paradox: your greatest source of power, your desirability, is your greatest source of vulnerability. Girls react to this paradox in various ways: some girls retreat into themselves, despising the male gaze; others embrace it, perhaps out of insecurity, perhaps out of ambition. Whatever the case may be, as you come of age, you come to terms with it. You accept your desirability, but you do not let it define you; you pursue other things, hobbies, interests, passions. You do not resent the male gaze, but you do not hunger for it either. This is the healthiest way to come to terms with your newfound status as “sex-object.”
But this power also leads to resentment and distrust. She writes:
Women are experts at concealing, disguising, or downplaying their flaws. Men become accustomed to being tricked, misled, or exploited. Bitterness and resentment germinates among young bachelors, as this trend intensifies and expands over time. Men expect an information asymmetry, which is that women can deceive them, which creates a posture of preemptive distrust.
… in an era of suspicion, paranoia, distrust, betrayal, promiscuity, and de facto casual prostitution, young men begin to resent women as a group — even beautiful young virgins are treated as sluts, and whores.
A 4Chan post states this resentment as hoeflation:
Do Western men desire to be protectors and providers? Or are they looking for That Ho Over There? Is it women being Hoes that’s the problem or the inflation of the price vs. the quality of the Ho? And is he saying his grandmother was a Ho worth the price?
What’s the old joke where a man asks a woman if she’d have sex with him for a million bucks, to which she agrees. Then he offers a twenty and she replies, “What do you think I am?” He answers, “We’ve already established that, now we’re just haggling over the price.”
How does the male gaze determine quality vs. price? zinnia continues:
Worse, some girls are ugly. Contending with ugliness as a young woman is a bitter and brutal process. Ugliness in women is an existential failure; at least, it feels that way when you’re thirteen years old and all of the boys like all of the other girls but ignore you. The ideal woman is, first and foremost, beautiful. Everything else is secondary. And this breeds a certain kind of powerlessness. Your appearance is, to a large extent, out of your control. Yes, you can exercise, maintain a slim figure. Yes, you can do your hair, and wear makeup, and dress nicely. But nothing can fix an unshapely nose, narrow hips, broad shoulders, a recessed jaw, or hollow eyes. And you may say, men don’t care! Men will love you anyways; men will desire you despite your flaws, they will find you attractive as long as you are slim and bubbly. But this is only partially reassuring. Because women don’t want to be just acceptably attractive, deep down, every woman wants to be Helen, beautiful enough to sink a thousand ships. Fantasizing about becoming beautiful, of waking up one day and having the world fall to your feet, is a desire for extraordinary power. Ugliness makes girls feel powerless.
Interesting that ugly is both italicized and bolded. zinnia, whose editor and host publisher are both men, wants to make sure we know some girls are ugly. She’s not saying they feel ugly but really are, with nothing they can do about it. In the fierce competition to be Helen of Troy, I, with my narrow hips, might as well drop out.
Did Helen get a sadistic thrill out of the slaughter over her face? Do we really believe this myth in the first place? I think Helen, like all named women in the Bible or other myths, is a euphemism for the Hellenist domination of rebellious colonies like Sparta. Cassandra could tell a different story of the male gaze and the ‘benefits’ of men fighting for ownership of their possessions.
What is it that ugly girls lose? The ability to commodify themselves at a higher rate. The difference between grandma, Helen and That Ho is just haggling over the price. Women want to be a coveted and marketable commodity in men’s eyes. zinnia states:
… refusing to acknowledge that it is in women’s nature to desire male validation does not make the desire go away. Repressing a fundamental instinct only means that it will make itself known in intensely destructive ways. Young women can only come to terms with coming of age when they can acknowledge that they desire male attention, and the baggage that comes along with that. And through acknowledging it, they can make a conscious decision about what to do about it: when to indulge the instinct, when not to, how to cope with feeling ugly, how to pursue beauty in a balanced way.
She concludes that other women telling you you’re beautiful is just a ruse. Women need to hear it from men and see it in their hungry gaze. Then you can go for the ultimate transaction—falling in love and being a mother. She writes:
Today, truth lies within the domain of internet ghettos, siloed away from the rest of polite society. At best, what society tells you is entirely unhelpful: “You’re beautiful just the way you are.” At worst, what society tells you is entirely destructive: “If you feel alienated by your body, you should maybe consider a mastectomy.” I didn’t want to hear any of this and I didn’t need to hear any of this.
But no one told me anything I needed to hear. What I needed to hear was that it was okay: that it was okay for me to want to be pretty and for me to want boys to like me; that it was okay that I felt scared and uncomfortable with the way my body changed and with the way the world started to look at me; that it was okay that I felt ugly, and that I didn’t need to be the prettiest girl in the world, just the prettiest version of myself; that it was okay for me to aspire to things beyond a high-powered career; that it was okay for me to want to fall in love and for me to want to be a mother, that it didn’t make a traitor to my sex. I needed someone to tell me that it was okay for me to be a girl. And it was not just me that needed to hear that, other girls needed to hear it too, and they still do.
zinna closes with a picture of a pretty girl kneeling in a garden with long blond curls covering her breasts, in full make-up and jewelry, with demurely downcast eyes and a slight smile. A male fantasy or female? Maybe a female fantasy of what she wants the male fantasy to be, because you ‘just can’t make a thot a wife.’
buying the cow
zinnia’s partial explanation of zoomer girl derangement does a sensitive job of detailing the ways in which girls deal with their innate desire for the male gaze: commodify it, resist it through anorexia or transgenderism, or embrace it to fall in love and become a mother. Nowhere is there a breath of criticism of men. Is this also what men want? I asked John Carter on a message thread:
My guess is that zinnia's dream isn't dropping her infant off at daycare and then rushing to her high-powered, soul-sucking job. It's being able to actually be a mother and raise her own kids, something generations before us took for granted. And it's finding a man who wants to support her financially so she can stay home and raise their kids.
Is that what you want, John? Are you looking for the right woman, who's pretty enough, so you can support her to raise your kids? For men who want that, there are many attractive women to choose from. I'm not sure why you wouldn't have found that yet, if it was what you wanted.
It seems cruel to tell women that the problem is them not being pretty enough if the reality is men don't want what they do, no matter how pretty they are. It blames their 'derangement' on themselves, like Malone's pet theory blames people for their own 'mass psychosis.'
I'm not saying this is the fault of men either. I write about how the mortgage was raised to a two-income level so men would need to double their incomes in order for women to have the same choice their mothers did. I believe it should have gone the other way with the labor of men also serving the family and community rather than women serving the market, aka making the rich richer. That's what my economic system enables.
John replied:
The legal landscape created by divorce laws, family courts, etc., is extremely one-sided, and indeed turns marriage into a particularly bad deal for men. Which is one of the reasons they tend to avoid it, especially when sexual mores no longer require marriage to obtain sex - "Why buy the cow when the milk is free?" as my grandmother put it.
You're almost certainly correct that this is a considerable factor in the emotional dissatisfaction of women; however, worth noting that the legal environment hasn't changed much in decades, while the spiral into misery and mental illness got started more recently, hence the hypothesis that social media played the decisive role.
Speaking for myself, I'm not averse to family life at all, and to the contrary would very much like to be a father.
In the analogy of John’s grandmother, where milk represents sex, women have a choice to sell the milk in small transactions or give it away for free in the hopes that the client will crave it enough for the ultimate transaction: buying the cow.
Unlike John’s grandmother’s generation, a woman who withholds her milk in a free milk society is likely to end up a spinster. Men don’t buy the cow without free samples.
Yet John wants to go further. Why buy the cow when you can get the calf for free? If the old cow doesn’t please you, you can send her to the slaughterhouse. Putting her out to pasture is too mild of a metaphor since a cow and her calf in pasture have everything they need to live, unlike a single mom with no home and no money.
tonic masculinity
My history with John is as one of the writers who took my term ‘tonic masculinity’ and used it to mean some variation of ‘bros before hoes.’ When I coined it, I defined tonic masculinity as a world that puts children in the center, surrounded by women, surrounded by men. In his article on Tonic Masculinity, John states:
Women are simply ... absent from the discussion. They’re not in the room. They’re not allowed in the room. … if we are a generation raised by women, another woman is the last thing we need. … The focus of Tonic Masculinity is on lifting men up, on making them strong, powerful, and virtuous, in the old renaissance era meaning of virtu – possessing in abundance those qualities which are worthy of admiration and praise.
Rather than tonic vs. toxic, since they didn’t believe in the latter, they distinguished masculine over feminine. I define as toxic masculinity as superiority to women and felt my term was being used as a fig leaf to rebrand it. This superiority to women became evident when I challenged it.
the devouring mother of the digital longhouse
This is a sharp-witted and insightful article that, in the end, defines the internet as Big Mother, much as Jasun Horsley does. It becomes the Digital Longhouse ruled by the Devouring Mother:
The devouring mother is strong, she has grown fat on the souls of our young, and she has no desire to cease her gluttony. It gives her great pleasure to warp the minds of young girls, crush the spirits of boys, and turn the two against one another. Their misery is her food. She is an egregore built as much from spite as concern, and she has been turned loose quite deliberately by the demonic clown cult ruling our civilization.
How did mothers become the personification of the internet? This is such a stretch I don’t know where to begin. Mothers haven’t designed it or profited by it, and are one of the lowest demographics of users. Women develop verbal skills earlier than men, and value real life relationships. The internet is the anti-thesis of the mother.
pixel valhalla
This is another clever and funny article where I question its conclusions. In an ingenuous tour de force, John describes the Nordic Valhalla where warriors die in daily battles only to resurrect and party. He compares this to the gamer who is a “one-man killing machine spreading slaughter and mayhem” and in between his warlord stints, “enjoys an infinitely varied harem of supple and willing whores.” Porn and shooter games are the pacifier for men’s innate nature as predators.
Yet somehow this is still the fault of women, left liberal women to be precise:
All else being equal, I think we would see women abandoning woke politics after a while, as they realize that if all the men are shitlords, their only romantic options are shitlords. Women tend to be more ideologically malleable than males: they’re the most enthusiastic supporters of whatever they perceive the dominant morality to be, but they also tend to adopt the worldviews of their husbands much more so than husbands do that of their wives. That’s assuming they’re married to dominant, high-t men, of course.
The women who marry the kind of male feminist that settles for an obese HR goblin in her late 30s generally tend to be ones who call the shots in the marriage … These marriages often strike me as more like the woman buying herself a Pomeranian than landing a husband, and I can’t imagine their sex lives are much to write steamy romance novels about. I expect they are deeply unfulfilled.
All else is not equal, however. The pressure on women to conform to woke ideology is intense. It cannot be assumed that they will abandon it simply due to romantic misery.
At least these men had the courage to get married, to make a commitment to a woman they loved and throw caution to the wind. I’ve never read a steamy romance novel where the man proposes with a pre-nup in hand. Or gives his beloved a lame excuse about the courts being biased towards women, a claim I can quote law, cite statistics and tell endless anecdotes to refute.
When John blames women for commodifying themselves, he has left them no option. He doesn’t want a short-term transactional relationship but neither does he want a long-term financial partnership. As far as I can tell, he wants sexual relationships with no strings attached. And when he encourages zinnia to believe a girl who’s pretty enough can get it all—love, marriage, children, the whole she-bang—he and his followers are just leading them on.
the sexual merry-go-round
To state my own position clearly, I think something has gone terribly wrong with the relationships between men and women. The purpose of life, on the social plane, is to care for the people and places that have been entrusted to us. Caring for people, particularly children, is the biological domain of women. Of course there are exceptions. Don’t they prove the rule?
Taking care of places is where masculinity comes into its own. Men like to build, to make things, to tinker with a machine until it works. As William Hunter Duncan says, “Real men have skills, and that doesn’t mean video games.” Men have muscles in order to use them, not to pick up heavy weights and put them down in the same place. It’s a joy to be competent and to do something you’re good at.
The purpose of life has been thwarted for both women and men. The history of Western ‘civilization’ is one of conquest and enslavement. This turns manual labor into a job for slaves. Free men become middlemen, no longer producers. They need to compete for a job, a good salary, paid employment, rather than doing the work, of which there is always plenty available.
Within this 100-generation money system, women were made dependent on men but granted freedom of their time within those parameters. Their time, however, had no value, the women themselves had no value except a brief mating flurry. With my generation that changed. Women became valuable to the ‘market’, which is a euphemism for making the rich richer. Women ‘won’ their right to bullshit jobs just like men. And the competitive mortgage doubled to two incomes, losing women forever the ability to stay home with the kids.
Women’s ‘liberation’ should have gone the other way and enabled the labor of men to also serve family and community. But as long as slave labor exists, a sitting job—as I’m doing now—will always be preferable. My economic system doesn’t take that away but makes an honest living equal to the cost of housing possible. It pays the collective mortgages forward as targeted dividends for local goods and services.
But why should women bother our pretty little heads with economics when we can blame ‘that ho over there’ for not playing the game well enough to grab the golden ring? Forget that it’s only brass and merely buys you one more ride on the sexual merry-go-round. Use that pretty little head, zinnia, to change the fucking system. Or the system and men like John Carter will find the cheapest way of fucking you.
John Carter of Postcards from Barsoom on Substack has written Tonic Masculinity. In response, I ask four questions: 1) Is the soul of a woman different than the soul of a man? 2) Is sexuality polarized? 3) When men bond in a common project, what should be their goal, and 4) Can't we just like each other? I explore schismogenesis and the right-left hemispheres of the brain as the feminine-masculine.
I discuss the appropriation of my term, tonic masculinity, and how it's being used to 'flip the script' by representing domination, superiority, aggression, violence and misogyny as 'tonic' with serial killers who 'go a bit too far' and feminized men as toxic. I analyze an interview of 'The Tonic 7' on RealFemSapien and my erasure from the concept. And I discuss the context in which I coined it of Charles Eisenstein's article, I Like to Fight.
What is toxic masculinity? I give several examples from the reactions of those who usurped my term, "tonic masculinity" demonstrating that they don't have any idea.
Thanks, Tereza. (I'm popping out of my self-imposed retreat to comment briefly.)
I agree with your conclusions on the slave system thwarting everyone.
Of course it's not just the insane money system, it's been everything. The divide and conquer - repeated again and again - to keep us arguing with each other so those pulling the strings are always out of sight.
Big sigh.
Yes something has gone terribly wrong. Dissecting the symptoms rarely leads to getting at the cause and a massive reorientation is needed. Rather than trying to figure out how men and women can come together in such a distorted landscape, we need to reject and abandon the landscape, and create something sane again, where we at least we start with the idea that people are equal, everyone is worthy of respect and compassion and that underneath all our drives - including sex and security - is love.
It's all been hijacked, as you know.
It can all be so much simpler, outside all this noise.
I didn't know what a thot is, I sort of wish I didn't now. Commoditizing sex isn't new, of course. But treating the commoditization of humanity as if it's a thing we need to incorporate in how we interact with each other is implicitly agreeing to this imposition, as if it's real and happened naturally. It isn't and didn't and I reject the whole construct.
I imagine a world post the shedding of a lot of this. How long does that take? IDK. Very tough to navigate in the meantime. The superficial differences we've been trained to focus on, where all the division lives, that perpetuates so much noise, can so easily be dropped into something deeper, that just naturally unites.
We were never intended to work so hard, for what is so natural.
Thanks for adding your brightness, clarity and humor, Tereza; for using your 'pretty little head' to such good use.
Best.
interesting discussion.
i'll add another odd tendril to it that that neither of you even hinted at: the incel business. many years ago, before political correctness had gained a foothold before morphing into so-called woke-dei stuff, i remember watching a series about the sexes. frequency of sexual intercourse was something that came up and it turns out that the so-called 'ugliness' of a woman had almost no bearing on sexual opportunity and action — for the woman. on the other hand, ugly men had very little chance of sexual intercourse. at the time this was linked with the importance and power that women have in advancing the 'best in kind' into the gene pool.
i would imagine that carter has addressed this? i don't have time to look into that at this time and it doesn't have a high enough standing in my interest scale to displace the other interesting stuff. peterson has addressed this, of course.
humorous aside: rather bizarrely, a self-appointed(?) spokes person for 'beautiful' women, actress olivia wilde in the total absolute confidence of empty-headed ignorance publicly dismissed jordan peterson as the leader of the incels. the context was that she made(?) a movie that modelled an immoral man after her image of jordan peterson — i think that was it. it was interesting to see a woman self-representing herself in this way and in that 'appointment' dismissed casually and brutally a sub-class of human — another example of an undeserving class being created and perpetuated and so easily dismissed as unworthy of being alive.