The 2013 study, “Physical attractiveness and its relation to unprovoked and reactive aggression” gets to the crux of the problem. The experiment in question consisted of women and men being shown photographs of the opposite sex, and assessed how perceived physical attractiveness influence aggressive behavior in a laboratory setting.
The abstract of this paper reads,
“The results indicated that for male participants, unattractiveness predicted unprovoked and reactive aggression as strongly as callous/unemotional psychopathic traits. Among female participants, attractiveness predicted derogation of the opponents more strongly than any psychopathic trait.”
In summary, when women were shown unattractive men, they mostly were indifferently negative to them, but when men were shown unattractive women, they displayed proactive and reactive aggression, to the extent of psychopathy.
During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called Heidi Cruz, the wife of his Republican primary rival, Ted Cruz, ugly. The implication was that because his wife was “ugly” (she’s not for the record, and is arguably smarter than her husband), Cruz wasn’t eligible to be president, because to Trump, a woman in the public eye’s first responsibility was to be beautiful. In 2016, at least in my circles, it was commonly declared that Trump was a misogynist, especially after the Access Hollywood “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape, and that the way he talked about women was disgusting, but then he won the presidency in 2016. At that point, we should have probably realized that our progressive views on gender weren’t remotely the public consensus, even though Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote.
To be clear, there was a substantial progressive backlash to Trump during his first term. The 2018 midterms were marked by the rise of left-wing firebrands like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the House of Representatives flipped to Democratic control, with Nancy Pelosi taking the gavel (again) as Speaker of the House. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, George Chauvin, led to mass protests across the country that initially had over 90% approval, and even the endorsement of former President George W. Bush. Of course, approval of the protests plummeted as they became more violent, but with the election of President Joe Biden, there was an increased conviction in many corners that the country was ready for real bonafide progressive governance.
But spoiler alert: The United States did not want progressive governance1, and in 2024, the United States handed the House and the Senate to Republicans, and put Donald Trump back in the White House. He won both the electoral college and popular vote, the first time a Republican had done so since 2004.
Some people were astounded and horrified that this happened but in my mind, the signs were always there. On the Internet, and off it, there was an underlying current of strong malcontent that social progress had gone “too far”. Women were getting too uppity, JD Vance, the new Vice President of the United States raged against “childless cat ladies”, mass deportations won at the ballot box, and well, race science is apparently back and better than ever.
Let’s rewind on how this came about.
After Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 over Mitt Romney, a lot of Democrats thought they had an “emerging Democratic majority” in the words of Ruy Teixeira and John Judis. Teixeira and Judis stated that this so-called majority would only exist so long as Democrats held their margins with non-college voters (which didn’t happen), but a lot of left-of-center activists took this to mean that country was priming for radical shifts leftwards on economic and social issues and the culture responded accordingly. Slogans like “No Human is Illegal” and “Healthcare is a human right” took off on social media, and feminism was front and center with campaigns like “He For She” and in the latter half of the decade, #MeToo. But no progress is linear.
Alongside the normalization of feminism, ”body positivity” (including the somewhat misguided “Health At Every Size” movement) became more mainstream2, and for the first time, at least in certain circles, it became socially frowned upon to ridicule people that weren’t conventionally attractive, at least publicly. The Perez Hiltons of the world went underground during this time, and even Victoria’s Secret hired a model with Downs Syndrome. Obviously, this brand of social progress was on borrowed time, and by 2025, “woke” fashion was over, as was body positivity, and heroin chic was back and worse than ever. But the backlash did not stop at runways and magazine covers.
I am not a video gamer, I never played video games growing up and never wanted to either, but I am very well-versed in other forms of media, which is how I realized that the social regressions of the last decade stem from an online movement called Gamergate.
Gamergate began in the mid-2010s, and was ostensibly about “ethics in videogame journalism”, since it kicked off with an ex-boyfriend accusing Zoë Quinn, an independent video game developer, of receiving favorable coverage from a journalist she was personally affiliated with. However, it quickly escalated into a wider campaign of harassment and abuse towards women in the videogame industry, most prominently Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, who analyzed the portrayal of women in media, and Brianna Wu, who is a game developer and longtime criticism of sexism in gaming. While the original rationalization of Gamergate was pushing back against institutional nepotism, it was ultimately about gamers pushing back at people who they perceived as oppositional to their interests, and the repercussions of this anger were wide-ranging.
Sarkeesian was a longtime a creator of feminist videos for Feminist Frequency, an early one of which was called “The Straw Feminist”, in which she demonstrated that many movies and TV shows, make use of villainous, over-the-top feminists in order to spin a fantasy that we live in a world without gender inequality. But, what really put her on the map was a video she made about challenging stereotypes in video games, such as “Damsel in Distress”, “The Lady Sidekick”, “Women as Reward”, and “Women as Background Decoration”. Sarkeesian also pointed out that female videogame characters all looked the exact same, impossibly slender but also curvy and buxom. People did not respond to this point well, to say the least.
While Sarkeesian was accustomed to vitriol in her video comments, the harassment campaign, which included death threats that ultimately drove her into hiding, was on another level. A lot of people, men and also many women, felt personally attacked by Sarkeesian, and decided to get revenge on her and her industry allies as well as everybody who agreed with her, and they got it.
In my mind, Gamergate was the beginning of a decade-long backlash against women and feminism, especially in the United States. Prominent events in this backlash include Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, the rise and fall of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022, and finally, the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 over yet another woman, Kamala Harris.
What endured in the cultural memory of Gamergate, even to the extent of memetic mutation, isn’t Sarkeesian’s video series or even the vicious harassment campaign that ensued, it’s that evil feminists forced video game creators to make female characters uglier, and specifically, with smaller breasts. And honestly, that’s really blackpilling, because the natural conclusion to that point combined with the idea that Gamergate catalyzed a decade-long feminist regression is that men were so angry at having to see women they didn’t want to fuck in the media they consumed that they decided to punish women in collective for it.
But it’s not just the media, movies, television, video games, it’s also social media that’s driving the backlash. In the past, people only really saw the faces and bodies of those around them, on TV and film3, and in glossy magazines. Although “normal” people were also less polished than they are today, even in the upper classes, a regular person living in suburban Cincinnati didn’t have the entire Internet of people to gawk at. Sure, normies weren’t constantly comparing themselves to the Instagram baddies of the world, which probably helped their self-esteem, but they also weren’t seeing people they were, to be quite blunt, actively disgusted by as they scrolled through their social media feeds.
Fat people have always existed, non-passing trans people have always existed, people with bad skin and uneven teeth and lots of tattoos have always existed, but in 2025, those people’s lives and appearances are available for public consumption, with or without their consent. Unfortunately, I think that’s genuinely radicalized people, especially men, which is why ridiculing women’s looks goes viral, because that’s the cultural climate we’re in.
Kamala Harris did WORSE with men than Hillary Clinton did, which was previously considered a generational low for Democrats, and that’s just one manifestation of the ongoing gender war. Men now vote further right than they have in decades, and I’m not sure how to fix it, but quite frankly, it’s a real problem and I’m starting to think this country will burn to the ground if the people responsible for doing so aren’t satiated.
Today, I can’t scroll through my timeline on X/Twitter without seeing dating discourse, and it always ends up at the conclusion that women are to blame for the pandemic of singledom because we’re too fat and too ugly and too invested in our careers. This is obviously untrue, the vast majority of women aren’t nearly as ambitious as I am, and if women are too fat, so are men. But, the damage has been done. Hatred of women is more normalized and even encouraged than it has been in decades, and quite frankly, I don’t know how to fix it, or even if it can be fixed.
I can’t undo the last decade or more of history. I can’t prevent unattractive people from having a visual platform, and I can’t go back in time and stop women in the video game industry from advocating for female characters with somewhat realistic proportions. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, you can’t force people to forget society’s perceived slights against them, no matter how irrational those slights may seem to outside observers. All we can do is white knuckle it all, hope for the best, expect the worst, do what we can to help who needs it, and well, keep calm and carry on until thermostatic regression, if it even still exists, comes back around.
Yes, Joe Biden governed like a progressive, at least on domestic policy
I’d argue that it was never really acceptable to be fat, and the beauty standard for women was still thin, but it was just more stigmatized to be an asshole to and about fat people, which was a social norm a lot of people hated
While people on TV circa 1989 were less polished and glamorous than on the CW 30 years later, they were still attractive, like Lori Loughlin in Full House, who was far more natural looking than Kylie Jenner in 2025, but still young, thin, and beautiful
I've always thought of people who cared about gamergate as reactionary losers. And I mostly still do, but I now believe that it's important for young men to have a space where male preferences can exist without being constantly interrogated. Blow up bad guys and save the hot girl has something of a timeless appeal. And gaming was that space for a lot of young men. Which is why the reaction to feminist critiques in gaming was so intense.
But in any case, you're right, the real question is, where do we go from here?
Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned from how Steve Bannon viewed the men of gamergate when he recruited them. Instead of seeing them as a problem to be solved, he viewed them as an asset. A group of angry and disaffected people who would be very useful to have fighting for him.
For Democrats, that means instead of thinking, "how do we make men less angry so that they'll listen to us," the thinking should be, "how do we channel that anger towards our enemies instead of towards us?"
I had my problems with Bernie in 2016, but he was right that the outgroup for democrats needed to be billionaires. Dividing up the electorate into specific demographics and writing a policy for each one doesn't work and I certainly don't think that adding men to the list of Who Democrats Serve would meaningfully change young men's opinion of the party. But having an enemy that they can coalesce around? That would be very helpful.
Going after billionaires is the populist move. And after seeing Trump dominate the last decade of politics with a populist movement, it makes sense to want to copy that. And maybe that could work. But it also might be trying to fight the last war. Whereas I assume that the next election will be more about technology and the role of AI in our society. But in any case, whoever picks the right enemy has the best odds of winning.
I feel like the thing that pissed people off about peak woke wasn't even the presence of more diverse bodies and people, but the immediate condemnation that rained upon people that weren't automatically comfortable with the social mores of college-educated, urbane, cosmopolitan America. Pop culture critical theory being shouted at normies from people they'd never want to talk to, let alone consider attractive or admirable, aggravated them into deeper bigotry.
In politics, the messenger is the message, and covering every topic in Intro to Sociology, esoteric bullshit irritated people into a place of complacence. Social media fosters a culture of "guilty until proven innocent" and watching unattractive, innumerate teens and 20-somethings scream at people about how racist/sexist/colorist/bigoted they were pissed off the general public so much that they don't give a shit about the bigotry of the GOP because at least they'll lower prices.
I suspect that the way Democrats win these people back is by attacking the woke hive and labelling them as overeducated irritating ninnies, but I don't think the party has the stamina to endure a fight with - let's face it - unemployed losers that have nothing better do with their shitty, socially isolated-lives. Shutting down social media entirely by destroying the servers might work, but life isn't a James Bond movie.
Regardless, the Democratic Party has to be meaner, and I don't think that's possible until they clear out the legion of passive-aggressive staffers that run the DNC and congressional offices. Gavin Newsom might be an amoral, serpent-demon from the pits of hell, but at least he's willing to be confrontational and rude in a way the base likes. Centrist moderates constantly choosing the high road might put them in a position where they end up losing the primary because base voters want a viper. I know that many of the centrists can adjust (Slotkin and Spanberger both seem like people that could embrace the venom needed), but mealy-mouthed, conflict-averse focus on policy is not going to fix this problem, and the ambitious Democrats need to avoid people advising them to be so.
Sorry for the rant, I have a lot of opinions on how the Democratic Party sucks and am just tired of rooting for perpetual losers. If I wanted to do that I'd root for the Portland Trail Blazers.