Reckon True Stories · Ursa Story Company

What's Happening with Men?

August 20, 2024·38 min·2 clips

Filyaw argues that Black women collectively went to therapy starting in the 1990s and did the work on themselves that men have not done — and that the manosphere's hostility is men choosing to demonise women rather than undertake the same healing.

1. Reckon True Stories hosts Deesha Filyaw and Kiese Laymon examine the manosphere — Wikipedia-defined as websites, blogs, and forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism — through the lens of Black American culture. 2. Filyaw is the author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies and co-hosts Ursa Short Fiction; Laymon is the author of Heavy and Long Division and writes about race, family, and masculinity. 3. The episode asks whether the manosphere is a new phenomenon or an amplification of existing misogyny, and specifically how it has reshaped the experience of Black women dating Black men. 4. Nicole Young's 2022 Elle magazine piece 'My Brush with the Black Manosphere' is identified as the first major essay to document how Black men specifically engage in the manosphere space; it went viral from a writers' conference in Philadelphia. 5. Filyaw distinguishes between the manosphere as an online infrastructure and the 'podcast bros' she dates: men who tell her standards are too high, that she'll die alone, or who propose emigrating to find 'better' women than Black women. 6. She cites Warsan Shire's poem — 'my alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude' — as the framing she uses to evaluate whether a relationship is worth entering. 7. CDC statistics cited in the episode show homicide is one of the leading causes of death for women under 44, with nearly half of female homicide victims killed by a current or former male intimate partner, and non-Hispanic Black and Alaska Native women experiencing the highest rates. 8. Laymon traces the intellectual genealogy of the manosphere to Steve Harvey's Think Like a Man, arguing it created an infrastructure for men to advise women on how to behave — directed at a female audience because, as Harvey said, 'men don't read.' 9. Laymon notes that absence of the word 'love' in both Harvey's book and manosphere content: the discourse is transactional and value-based but never engages with love as a messy, genuine commitment. 10. He argues that the monetisation of contempt for women is a new feature: making a podcast about why women have no value is structurally self-disqualifying from any serious conversation about relationships. 11. Laymon makes a personal disclosure: he has asked past intimate partners whether he sexually assaulted them; each said no, but multiple described serious emotional harm inflicted while he was conversant in feminist theory, demonstrating the gap between intellectual knowledge and actual behaviour. 12. Filyaw raises the concept of 'fact bonding' in the manosphere — men sharing data points about women with the intensity of trauma bonding — while noting that the CDC statistics on intimate partner violence are never cited in those spaces. 13. Both hosts examine the homosocial dynamics of manosphere content: Laymon argues that the intensity of male-to-male admiration in these spaces suggests unexamined homoerotic feelings, and that men calling 'pause' on any physical intimacy with other men while emotionally fixating on them represents a tension that needs to be addressed. 14. Filyaw references the satirist 'Mel Mitch' and her character Kwan Dietrich as a parody of manosphere podcast hosts — always accompanied by an uncritical sidekick who validates everything said — as an example of the dynamic she is critiquing. 15. After Kevin Samuels died, Filyaw challenged the narrative that he fulfilled a role men needed for guidance, arguing that Black men who provide male role models without misogyny exist but lack equivalent platform reach — demonstrating that misogyny itself is the audience draw. 16. Christine Emba's Washington Post essay 'Men Are Lost. Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness' is cited for observing that writing on the masculinity crisis always stops at diagnosis — identifying the problem without proposing a constructive vision. 17. Filyaw traces the generational origin of the current gap to grandmothers who were privately advising daughters to be financially independent and not to depend on men, advice the grandsons never heard, producing a mismatch between women's rising standards and men's unchanged expectations. 18. She argues that Black women went to therapy in significant numbers in the 1990s, did the internal healing work that produced their current standards and self-sufficiency, and that men responding with demonisation are choosing not to do the same work. 19. The episode is a discursive, profanity-laden conversation between two friends; citations from essays and articles are woven throughout, and both hosts speak from personal experience as well as cultural analysis. 20. Listeners who have no familiarity with the manosphere or Black American dating culture discourse may find the episode assumes significant context; those who have followed these debates will find it unusually candid and self-critical from the male co-host's perspective.

As heard by us

A blunt, funny conversation about manosphere culture, Steve Harvey-style dating advice, and why women keep being told to fix men's behavior.

What's Happening with Men? is a candid Reckon True Stories conversation about the churn of anger, advice, and anxiety around men, women, dating, and accountability.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a candid conversation unpacking the Steve Harvey era of dating advice, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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