Conversation

I read something a few days ago that has been nagging at me ever since. It was an explanation for why hating JoCat for that fun video became a culture war thing. It's mindblowing, obvious in retrospect, and depressing.

The primary audience for a big part of the right wing influencer-sphere is middle and high school boys on their way to incel-dom. That's how they get massive followings and thus money. Other people watch the videos and streams too and the ideas spread from those videos to social media where they eventually get into Fox News or the RNC platform but they start with adult men trying to win the approval of those boys.

That target audience needs an explanation for why girls don't like them despite how desperately they want girls to magically fix everything wrong in their lives. The hatred of women that naturally arises from that conflict becomes part of what "being straight" means to them. Unironically liking women and happily sharing that challenges that definition of straightness. To overcome that perceived threat, they latch on to the paradoxical "it's gay to like women."

Once that happens, JoCat is a popular gay man stealing women from them because he's woke. Attacking him is basically self defense because all of their problems remain since he denied them the women who could fix their lives.

I'm sure there's more to it than that but it's a pretty compelling explanation to me, even if it is a bit "For want of a nail".