The War on Men: How Digital Domains are Dispossessing Masculinity

Men's Interest - Opinion [Easy Read | Original] By Jdawg

There’s something almost soothing—maybe even medicinal—about seemingly unserious media being recast as emotional salve in a world gone lopsided. But beneath that soft touch lies something quietly stark: the need for comfort itself has become more conspicuous as collective conditions deteriorate. A digital throwback like Blue’s Clues for adults is less nostalgia than it is a symptom—comfort food for the psyche. In times of upheaval, the subconscious reaches backward. Yet the frame we should investigate isn't what people are watching, but why the world makes them want to retreat at all.

Bye, brain

In earlier decades, the go-to refuge might have been video games—an expressive outlet for agency, competition, creation, and even rebellion. But we weren’t allowed to keep that either, not truly. The space was invaded, dissected, criticized, and carved into a spectacle, with major players falling in line with the pressures of the day. The hostile incursion wasn’t accidental. It was, in part, a social theater where neurotics seemed to demand emotional collisions with men: friction, confrontation, submission. Anger became the easiest thing to provoke—and the easiest thing to weaponize.

And yet, while anger may be simple, control is not. That’s where the real pressure sits. How many of us own anything in the real sense anymore? Take inventory—your electronics, your software, your accounts. You bought it, but can you fix it, modify it, repurpose it without permission? Probably not. Can you prevent it from spying on you, from being rendered obsolete by force or fiat? Less and less so. Ownership has slipped into a myth.

What we’re left with is access. And access can be revoked.

This arrangement cuts deeper than mere consumer frustration. For men in particular, the effect is destabilizing. Masculine character, traditionally and biologically, is bound up in security—holding ground, defending a perimeter, owning tools, shaping environments. When those levers are pulled away—when the user becomes a tenant within his own devices—his autonomy bleeds out through a thousand unseen seams. It’s not just about “things” being taken. It’s the status of being a keeper and custodian that dissolves.

Historically, subordinate roles were imposed on women and children. Subordination meant limited choices, constrained space, and property rights defined by someone else’s name. If men adapt to that status as a permanent state—not through force, but through passivity—we are looking at something historically new. And not admirable. It signals a concession of role, spirit, and identity. Something fundamental begins to die off.

You could see this as orthogonal to the common advocacy around gamer rights, but only if you're not paying attention. The erosion of user control, the deplatforming of individuals, the removal of modding rights or repair access—these aren’t just industry quirks. They’re part of a broader pattern. It’s not a coincidence that the people most affected are also the ones taught to keep their heads down and their hands off.

At stake is the mental infrastructure of self-rule. For years, the trend has been toward displacing independent cognition, exchanging it for mediated instruction. The average consumer, bombarded by algorithmic persuasion, has long outsourced his judgment. Most people no longer trust their own internal narrator, only the consensus on the screen. And that erosion didn’t start with smartphones—it began long ago, when newspapers and televisions became the household oracle. What we’re seeing now is just its final software update.

So if today’s man finds momentary peace in some sanitized reboot of a childhood TV show—if that helps him weather a world where a figure like Conan the Barbarian is not only ridiculed but prohibited as an ethic or archetype—it doesn’t mean he’s lost the plot. It means the plot is twisted. The fantasy of hyper-control and competence has become contraband, even as every real lever of control is systematically pulled out of his hands.

To summarize: the systematic attack on property, agency, and independent judgment doesn’t just affect consumers. It surgically strikes the foundations of male autonomy. What’s under fire isn’t just ownership, but the principles of maleness—territoriality, custodianship, mastery, and the right to say “no.” Remove those, and you don’t just change a marketplace. You change the man.

Postscript: While the emphasis of this article and the point made are defensive of maleness, men, and masculinity, the trappings of these qualities, sought-after values, indeed, in the origin of Abolitionism, Suffrage, then Feminism, and other later forms of liberation, are not wholly exclusive, nor principally possible to exclude completely from those who aren't men. In a world rushing to enforce feminine virtues and effeminate preferences, one wonders if the commonality it shares with historical conditions favoring, and possibly favored by, the less masculine among us will not themselves come to predominate on account of it. Which does beg the question, then, in the absence of traditional male caste roles and responsibilities: Who rules, actually?

Jdawg actually would prefer to rule his own worlds in his video games, truth be told. Do not think for a second that is because of lack of comprehension, however. It may just be because of it!

J-Dawg is a die-hard gamer, devoted fan of traditional 2D animation, GBAMFS' founder, CEO and pointman.

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This article was adapted by AI from an original impromptu rant on X. When the muse hits; you listen. https://x.com/gbamfs/status/1940355321559388361

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