This is totally true, except for the fact that it is NOT “a lot” of men, if by “a lot” we mean a significant portion of them, rather than what is a very tiny but also very visible group of deranged men posting on the flaming pile of garbage and seething neuroses that is X.

It is disturbing to see these guys behave in a manner that is immediately identifiable as the standard behavioral mode of mean girls in 7th grade.

Thing is, there's a reason 7th grade mean girls act that way: because they are newly thrown into the churn of ruthless social and romantic status competition at puberty, with a bunch of similarly insecure and moronic pubertal peers in the same situation, and they are constantly having enormous and intense feelings of envy, terror of being uncool or unliked, status anxiety, burning desire to be loved and admired, and hatred for rivals, all at a time when they have zero accomplishments, zero credibility, zero experience, and zero real resources at their disposal to wield in the churn…not even the ability to threaten to beat anyone up. The result is the mean ones who have no capacity to advance themselves otherwise just focus on reputational destruction of perceived rivals. The good news is that the vast majority move past this horrific phase and calm the hell down a few years later when things sort out and they've gained more self confidence.

So, apparently that's what the Internet does to a subset of guys, by mimicing the conditions of being a 12 year old girl. The internet constantly provokes their fears and envies, yet they feel they have no resources at their disposal other than being perpetually nasty, mean-spirited orcs. Plus, no one's going to punch them online. And they don't have the same skills as they would if they’d gone through the IRL churn as an actual 12 year old girl, which might have taught them not to show their own ass and reveal their own neuroses quite so much. They just unashamedly let the orc flag fly, full mast.

The worse part is that this kind of orc-ish behavior is so easily recognizable as coming from a festering wound that 95% of people want nothing to do with it and won't touch it with ten foot pole. All it results in is a redirection of their fury at you, and calling you a simp or a slut or a white knight or a boomer, and most people are neither masochists nor so stubborn that it's worth risking attracting the attention of a new orc stalker. Nobody wants to deal with people with this level of neuroses. But that leads to a sorry situation where they receive very little push-back and seem way more numerous than they actually are, bc so few people are willing to engage with orcs in the first place.

This gets revealed whenever platforms do reader polling and it turns out most entirely disagree with the most stridently rude and mean-spirited people who post most frequently.

Which is to say: putting out undiluted rage and nastiness works to its intended effect, and intimidates normal people into staying quiet lest they acquire their own personal orc dedicated to following them around sniping at them. Sort of the mirror opposite of woke scolds intimidating everyone into silence via displays of moral superiority, orcs intimidate people into silence via displays of sheer malice and unvarnished envy and hostility.

Horrible incentives.

Why anyone wants to rot their brain on X is hard to understand, but whoever the adults in charge are (anyone? anyone?), they've almost universally abdicated any responsibility for letting almost two full generations come of age in this gruesome digital environment. And turns out, that weird feeling you get that people are just becoming worse in general? Actually it's true. On every metric, people’s personalities are just becoming worse and worse the past decade, with youngest way more effected than everyone else.