Really good points in this piece.

I've been thinking lately that Substack is a particularly bizarre (and magnetic in a really accursed way) place for gender war content, when it’s basically a bunch of guys who most normal bros would barely recognize and who don't like and wouldn't fit into overtly male culture, arguing to women who are similarly not well accepted into normal girl groups bc they're too interested in ideas and arguments and not in whatever the normal stuff is that doesn't get you called a pick me. So they're both yelling at the other about how they are, and mostly describing an entirely different subset of people.

The most obvious way this stands out to me is that IRL, easily 80% or more of conversations I hear between men is about sports. It's how they start every meeting, every social gathering, it's what they talk about with a guy they just met, and it's what they can and do talk about for seriously hours and days and years on end. Yet Substack guys almost universally don't care about sports at all, or at least not the ones delving into gender war topics.

My first time working in a professional workplace was when I was a summer law clerk. I got put in an office with a male law clerk from another school (which he told me he strongly objected to being officed together, because he felt like he couldn't fart after lunch in an enclosed room with me there, and that it was upsetting his digestion having to hold it in). Anyway, he was a lot more macho/bro-like than the standard office norms. Like he came in with a black eye once and no explanation. And he used to make prank calls from the office line and pretend to be an old and confused recently widowed Jewish guy or an angry Tongan, just to make me laugh I guess. He drove a snowplow and hauled junk as a side gig while in school, so he definitely wasn't the standard EHC dude, though ranked first in his class. And one day he asked me what sports my then-boyfriend followed, and when I told him he didn't watch sports, he insisted that meant he was gay. I said uh no he's definitely not gay, he's an artist. He insisted nope, gay, and that he'd never met a man who doesn't watch sports unless they're gay, period, case closed. He also informed said boyfriend of that same opinion right to his face, when he later met him at the firm’s summer party. I think of this whenever I'm reading a guy on here writing a screed about how women ruined the workplace, and wondering how many times guys have told him he's gay at work.

I somehow went through most of life with almost no exposure to how much time average guys spend watching, talking about, betting on, and basically just obsessed with sports. It was not until I married into a family of sports people and was dragged to a few games before I realized 1. there are SOOOOO many more of them than us, and 2. the amount of time and headspace they spend on sports is truly appalling…hours almost every day of their entire life from age 5 to death, and that never bores them. Just guys running back and forth or around in a circle, endlessly, forever. Crazy stuff.