Author: Zhen Troy Chen, PhD, FHEA , Dr. Calogero Giametta, PhD , Dr. Jacob Johanssen, PhD & Dr. Irida Ntalla, PhD Source: Nature Publication Date: 13 April 2025 (used) Link: The manosphere and networked misogyny
Stephan:
One of the many negative effects of social media is the rise of the manosphere. I had no idea until I began to research this the weaponization of misinformation how many American men, particularly young men, are weak, psychologically disturbed, insecure about their manhood, and threatened by women. In the United States right now women are better educated, and more psychologically stable than men.
The “manosphere” refers to a heterogenous group of online communities that broadly promotes anti-feminism, misogyny, and hateful ideas about women, trans, and non-binary people. These communities attract, among other others, involuntary celibates (Incels), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and Men’s Rights Activists (MRA). Although these communities are different, they share a broad ideology that women are to blame for a society in which men are victims, and that feminism is the cause of societal ills. These communities frequently endorse pseudo-science to justify male supremacy and produce hateful and violent narratives, which can lead to extremist behaviour with dangerous and fatal real-world consequences.
First appearing in social media in the late 2000s-early 2010s, these groups are broadly understood to have historical roots from movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the numbers of individuals who frequent these online spaces are hard to determine, the communities they have come to represent have become more prominent in the mainstream due to well-publicised violent (and often tragic) actions undertaken by self-proclaimed members. Additionally, some prominent influencers, who share overlapping ideologies with the manosphere, find audiences beyond the online community in […]
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing . . . I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
–Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Wikipedia
At the University of Toronto, just across the street from the football stadium, workers are putting up a 14-story building with space for classrooms and faculty offices. What’s unusual is how they’re building it — by bolting together giant beams, columns and panels made of manufactured slabs of wood.
As each wood element is delivered by flatbed, a tall crane lifts it into place and holds it in position while workers attach it with metal connectors. In its half-finished state, the building resembles flat-pack furniture in the process of being assembled.
The tower uses a new technology called mass timber. In this kind of construction, massive, manufactured wood elements that can extend more than half the length of a football field replace steel beams and concrete. Though still relatively uncommon, it is growing in popularity and beginning to pop up in skylines around the world.
Mass timber can lend warmth and beauty to an interior. Pictured is a unit in the eight-story Carbon12 condominium in Portland, Oregon.CREDIT: KAISER + PATH
Today, the tallest mass timber building is the 25-story Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee, completed in 2022. As of that year, there were 84 mass timber buildings eight stories or higher either built or under construction worldwide, with another 55 proposed. Seventy percent of the existing and future buildings were in Europe, about 20 percent in North America and the rest in Australia and Asia, according to a report from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When you include smaller buildings, at least 1,700 mass timber buildings had been constructed in the United States alone as of 2023.
Mass timber is an appealing alternative to energy-intensive concrete and steel, which together account for almost 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Though experts are still debating mass timber’s role in fighting climate change, many are betting it’s better for the environment than current approaches to construction. It relies on wood, after all, a renewable resource.
Mass timber also offers a different aesthetic that can make a building feel special. “People get sick and tired of steel and concrete,” says Ted Kesik, a building scientist at the University of Toronto’s Mass Timber Institute, which promotes mass timber research and development. With its warm, soothing appearance and natural variations, timber can be more visually pleasing. “People actually enjoy looking at wood.”
Same wood, stronger structure
Using wood for big buildings isn’t new, of course. Industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries led to a demand for large factories and warehouses, which were often “brick and beam” construction — a frame of heavy wooden beams supporting exterior brick walls.
As buildings became ever taller, though, builders turned to concrete and steel for support. Wood construction became mostly limited to houses and other small buildings made from the standard-sized “dimensional” lumber you see stacked at Home Depot.
But about 30 years ago, builders in Germany and Austria began experimenting with techniques for making massive wood elements out of this readily available lumber. They used nails, dowels and glue to combine smaller pieces of wood into big, strong and solid masses that don’t require cutting down large old-growth trees.
Engineers including Julius Natterer, a German engineer based in Switzerland, pioneered new methods for building with the materials. And architects including Austria’s Hermann Kaufmann began gaining attention for mass timber projects, including the Ölzbündt apartments in Austria, completed in 1997, and Brock Commons, an 18-story student residence at the University of British Columbia, completed in 2017.
In principle, mass timber is like plywood but on a much larger scale: The smaller pieces are layered and glued together under pressure in large specialized presses. Today, beams up to 50 meters long, usually made of what’s called glue-laminated timber, or glulam, can replace steel elements. Panels up to 50 centimeters thick, typically cross-laminated timber, or CLT, replace concrete for walls and floors.
These wood composites can be surprisingly strong — stronger than steel by weight. But a mass timber element must be bulkier to achieve that same strength. As a building gets higher, the wooden supports must get thicker; at some point, they simply take up too much space. So for taller mass timber buildings, including the Ascent skyscraper, architects often turn to a combination of wood, steel and concrete.
Historically, one of the most obvious concerns with using mass timber for tall buildings was fire safety. Until recently, many building codes limited wood construction to low-rise buildings.
Though they don’t have to be completely fireproof, buildings need to resist collapse long enough to give firefighters a chance to bring the flames under control, and for occupants to get out. Materials used in conventional skyscrapers, for instance, are required to maintain their integrity in a fire for three hours or more.
To demonstrate mass timber’s fire resistance, engineers put the wood elements in gas-fired chambers and monitor their integrity. Other tests set fire to mock-ups of mass timber buildings and record the results.
These tests have gradually convinced regulators and customers that mass timber can resist burning long enough to be fire safe. That’s partly because a layer of char tends to form early on the outside of the timber, insulating the interior from much of the fire’s heat.
Mass timber got a major stamp of approval in 2021, when the International Code Council changed the International Building Code, which serves as a model for jurisdictions around the world, to allow mass timber construction up to 18 stories tall. With this change, more and more localities are expected to update their codes to routinely allow tall mass timber buildings, rather than requiring them to get special approvals.
There are other challenges, though. “Moisture is the real problem, not fire,” says Steffen Lehmann, an architect and scholar of urban sustainability at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
All buildings must control moisture, but it’s absolutely crucial for mass timber. Wet wood is vulnerable to deterioration from fungus and insects like termites. Builders are careful to prevent the wood from getting wet during transportation and construction, and they deploy a comprehensive moisture management plan, including designing heat and ventilation systems to keep moisture from accumulating. For extra protection from insects, wood can be treated with chemical pesticides or surrounded by mesh or other physical barriers where it meets the ground.
Another problem is acoustics, since wood transmits sound so well. Designers use sound insulation materials, leave space between walls and install raised floors, among other methods.
Potential upsides of mass timber
Combating global warming means reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector, which is responsible for 39 percent of emissions globally. Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, an environmental scientist at the Central European University in Vienna, says mass timber and other bio-based materials could be an important part of that effort.
In a 2020 paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, she and colleagues cite an estimate from the lumber industry that the 18-story Brock Commons, in British Columbia, avoided the equivalent of 2,432 metric tons of CO2 emissions compared with a similar building of concrete and steel. Of those savings, 679 tons came from the fact that less greenhouse gas emissions are generated in the manufacture of wood versus concrete and steel. Another 1,753 metric tons of CO2 equivalent were locked away in the building’s wood.
“If you use bio-based material, we have a double win,” Ürge-Vorsatz says.
Like Ikea furniture, mass timber buildings are assembled out of prefabricated pieces. The Origine condo in Quebec City went up an estimated 25 percent faster than a conventional building.CREDIT: CECOBOIS
But a lot of the current enthusiasm over mass timber’s climate benefits is based on some big assumptions. The accounting often assumes, for instance, that any wood used in a mass timber building will be replaced by the growth of new trees, and that those new trees will take the same amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere across time. But if old-growth trees are replaced with new tree plantations, the new trees may never reach the same size as the original trees, some environmental groups argue. There are also concerns that increasing demand for wood could lead to more deforestation and less land for food production.
Studies also tend to assume that once the wood is in a building, the carbon is locked up for good. But not all the wood from a felled tree ends up in the finished product. Branches, roots and lumber mill waste may decompose or get burned. And when the building is torn down, if the wood ends up in a landfill, the carbon can find its way out in the form of methane and other emissions.
“A lot of architects are scratching their heads,” says Stephanie Carlisle, an architect and environmental researcher at the nonprofit Carbon Leadership Forum, wondering whether mass timber always has a net benefit. “Is that real?” She believes climate benefits do exist. But she says understanding the extent of those benefits will require more research.
In the meantime, mass timber is at the forefront of a whole different model of construction called integrated design. In traditional construction, an architect designs a building first and then multiple firms are hired to handle different parts of the construction, from laying the foundation, to building the frame, to installing the ventilation system and so on.
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In integrated design, says Kesik, the design phase is much more detailed and involves the various firms from the beginning. The way different components will fit and work together is figured out in advance. Exact sizes and shapes of elements are predetermined, and holes can even be pre-drilled for attachment points. That means many of the components can be manufactured off-site, often with advanced computer-controlled machinery.
A lot of architects like this because it gives them more control over the building elements. And because so much of the work is done in advance, the buildings tend to go up faster on-site — up to 40 percent faster than other buildings, Lehmann says.
Mass timber buildings tend to be manufactured more like automobiles, Kesik says, with all the separate pieces shipped to a final location for assembly. “When the mass timber building shows up on-site, it’s really just like an oversized piece of Ikea furniture,” he says. “Everything sort of goes together.”
10.1146/knowable-100824-2
Kurt Kleiner is a freelance writer living in Toronto.
Sam Keen was a philosopher, scholar, and author of life-changing books including Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (1986), Your Mythic Journey (1990), and Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (1991). He was also a mentor, friend, and colleague. The April 4, 2025 obituary in The New York Times, headlined: Sam Keen, Philosopher of the Men’s Movement, Is Dead at 93.
“Only men understand the secret fears that go with the territory of masculinity,”
Keen was quoted saying and the obituary went on to say,
“His message resonated: His book Fire in the Belly was a best seller.”
The article went on to say,
“Mr. Keen, who described himself as having been ‘overeducated at Harvard and Princeton’, fled academia in the 1960s for California, where he led self-help workshops and wrote more than a dozen books.”
“The acceptance of weakness and strength is a crucial part of the warrior’s journey home.”
In his book, Fire in the Belly, Sam Keen gives a magnificent description of this phase of a man’s hero’s journey:
“This isn’t the fun part of the part of the trip. It’s spelunking in Plato’s cave, feeling our way through the illusions we have mistaken for reality, crawling through the drain sewers where the forbidden ‘unmanly’ feelings dwell, confronting the demons and dark shadows that have held us captive from their underground haunts. At this stage of the journey, we must make use of the warrior’s fierceness, courage, and aggression to break through the rigidities of old structures of manhood, and explore the dark and taboo negative emotions that make up the shadow of modern manhood.”
One of the most honest and revealing aspects of the modern male shadow that we discuss and explore in the groups that Sam and I were involved with is our ambivalence towards women. In my most recent book, Long Live Men! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Men, Close the Lifespan Gap, and Offer Hope to Humanity, I shared Sam’s revealing insights in section I titled, “Males Feel Engulfed by WOMAN.”
I said,
“I’ve known Sam for many years, and I believe he offers insights into why men are the way they are that can help us better understand men’s hunger for women, along with our anger and fear of women.”
In Fire in the Belly, Sam says,
“It was slow in dawning on me that WOMAN had an overwhelming influence on my life and on the lives of all the men I knew. I’m not talking about women, the actual flesh-and-blood creatures, but about WOMEN, those larger-than-life shadowy female figures who inhabit our imaginations, inform our emotions, and indirectly give shape to many of our actions.”
If you knew Sam, who was tall, good-looking, and successful, you might be as surprised as I was when he shared the deeper truth about his life.
“From all outward appearances, I was a successfully individuated man. I had set my career course early, doggedly stuck to the discipline of graduate school through many years and degrees, and by my mid-thirties was vigorously pursuing the life of a professor and writer. Like most men, I was devoting most of my energy and attention to work and profession.”
I could identify with Keen’s early experience. My own life trajectory was similar as was “the rest of the story.” Sam continues saying,
“But if the text of my life was ‘successful independent man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.’ All the while I was advancing in my profession, I was engaged in an endless struggle to find the ‘right’ woman, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create a good marriage.”
Sam went on to say,
“I agonized over sex — was I good enough? Did she ‘come’? Why wasn’t I always potent? What should I do about my desires for other women? The more troubled my marriage became, the harder I tried to get it right. I worked at communication, sex, and everything else until I became self-obsessed. Divorce finally broke the symbiotic mother-son, father-daughter pattern of my first marriage.”
Sam’s story is like my own and that of millions of men. When we are engulfed by WOMAN, we are out of touch with our true selves. We project all our hopes for a life of passion, joy, and meaning on to this or that woman, but it never works out because we are really longing for the mythical WOMAN of our dreams. Yet, we continually deny the reality and the power that this mythical female figure exerts in our lives.
“I would guess,” says Keen, “that a majority of men never break free, never define manhood by weighing and testing their own experience. And the single largest reason is that we never acknowledge the primal power WOMAN wields over us. The average man spends a lifetime denying, defending against, trying to control, and reacting to the power of WOMAN. He is committed to remaining unconscious and out of touch with his own deepest feelings and experience.”
It took a long time for me to understand my anger and fear of women and to begin the journey of becoming my own man. Sam’s experiences and his words have helped me.
“We begin to learn the mysteries unique to maleness only when we separate from WOMAN’s world,” says Keen. “But before we can take our leave, we must first become conscious of the ways in which we are enmeshed, incorporated, inwombed, and defined by WOMAN. Otherwise we will be controlled by what we haven’t remembered.”
As long as we are controlled by what we haven’t remembered, we will continue to hate and love women, to hunger for them and also be afraid of them, to touch them tenderly and also want to hurt them. We don’t all have to get a divorce to separate ourselves from the hold that WOMAN has on us, but I do think that we need to be in a men’s group where we can, in the words of another friend and colleague, Robert Bly,
“Men need to be with other men in order to hear the sounds that male cells sing.”
My own men’s group lasted 46 years. My wife, Carlin, says that one of the main reasons we have had a successful 45-year marriage is because I have been in a men’s group for 46 years. I would add two additional words of wisdom. First, it should be noted that my wife has also been in a number of women’s groups over the years, which I believe have helped her deal with her own issues as well as contributing to our successful marriage.
Second, most men get themselves to a men’s group because someone cares enough to guide them to one. I was lucky to have found Sam’s books and gotten mentoring from older men. Other men find a men’s group because their wives, girlfriends, or other caring women have suggested, (or sometimes highly suggested, as in “if you don’t get in a men’s group this relationship is over”) that we go.
Unfortunately, my men’s group came to an end last year. Four of the seven members have died and the group needs more than three to be viable. I believe I have at least twenty good years ahead of me and I have a lot I’d like to share with other guys. I’ve put the word out and have gotten a number of responses, but I’m still talking with men who would like to join. I describe what I’m looking for here. Take a look and reach out if you’re interested.
Sam Keen will always be a mentor to the group, wherever his spirit may be flying. Thank you, my friend.
In “Unshrunk,” Laura Delano chronicles her struggles with mental illness — and the endless parade of pills meant to treat it.
Repeatedly diagnosed and treated, Laura Delano has now become an unrelenting advocate for those hoping to get off psychiatric medication.Credit…Mariah May
By Casey Schwartz (NYTimes.com)
Casey Schwartz is the author of “Attention: A Love Story.”
March 20, 2025BUY BOOK ▾
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UNSHRUNK: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, by Laura Delano
Laura Delano was 13, a studious, budding squash champion in Greenwich, Conn., when she looked in the mirror one night and felt her world dissolve. The life of pressure and privilege to which she belonged — she is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt — became unreal to her, meaningless, “a performance.”
Lashing out at her parents, begging to be sent away, led to the first of many mental health professionals, then to her first psychiatric diagnosis: bipolar disorder. Soon after, she would swallow her first mind-altering prescription pill.
Though she went on to Harvard — and made her debut at the Plaza in a floor-length white gown — she did so while binge-drinking, cutting and burning her flesh and wrestling with her sense that her life was hollow.
After college, as her friends soared, her life became an endless round of psychiatrists, institutionalizations and outpatient programs. An incomplete list of the drugs she has been prescribed: Depakote, Prozac, Ambien, Abilify, Klonopin, Lamictal, Provigil, Lithium.
Delano was the subject of a 2019 profile in The New Yorker, on the cascading effects of prescription pills and the challenge of getting off them. In “Unshrunk,” she tells her own story, and she tells it powerfully. Her memoir evokes “Girl, Interrupted” for the age of the prescription pill, a time when more and more Americans are on at least one medication for their mental health, including millions of children and teenagers.
Delano nearly didn’t live to tell this story: After years of treatment, she hid behind a boulder near the ocean in Maine and swallowed three bottles of pills. Somehow, miraculously, her father found her before it was too late.
Recently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and being treated by a male psychiatrist whom she experienced as misogynistic and tyrannical, she had an epiphany.
In a bookstore, she ran across Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” Although the meds she was on made her foggy and reading was a challenge, she bought it, and saw her own experience vividly and alarmingly reflected. “I’d been confronted with something I’d never considered before: What if it wasn’t treatment-resistant mental illness that had been sending me ever deeper into the depths of despair and dysfunction, but the treatment itself?” she writes. There is a technical term for this, she tells us: “iatrogenic harm.”
Delano’s story is compelling, important and even haunting, but plenty of readers will chafe at her lack of interest in those who have actually been helped by these medications — especially today, when they’re facing criticism from some quarters. Writing about the effects of lithium, still considered the gold standard treatment for bipolar disorder, she analyzes the writer Jaime Lowe’s powerful 2015 article “I Don’t Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium.” Lowe, living with bipolar disorder, wrote of the mania that came on when, feeling better, she experimented with coming off her lithium
But Delano sees this testimony through a different lens. Rather than take Lowe’s story at face value, Delano instead wonders whether Lowe has ever asked herself if these manic episodes were actually brought on by lithium withdrawal, rather than by bipolar disorder itself.
One wonders about this assertion, and whether Delano is looking at the treatment of mental illness, and mental illness itself, through a particular lens, one that can feel reductionist in its own right, even as she accuses American psychiatry of doing the same.
But Delano becomes more and more unapologetic about her views. She meets Robert Whitaker and begins to write blog entries on his website, spurred by the emails she receives from readers describing similar experiences. When she writes about her suicide attempt, she definitively breaks from the Greenwich code of discretion and perfection, and her mother and sisters cut off contact.
By the end of the book, Delano has become an advocate for those hoping to get off their meds, speaking at conferences and helping to develop a schedule for safe withdrawal. She gets married and has a baby. She assures the reader from the outset that she is not against psychiatry, but that when it comes to the D.S.M., American psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, “I no longer view this textbook as a legitimate or relevant source of information about myself.”
She does not pretend to be cured; she does not claim that her mind is an easy or comfortable place to live. She knows that her immense privilege helped provide the scaffolding that ultimately enabled her to get off the medications.
But she makes a more universal point, one that bears repeating and applies not only to mental illness but to the struggles of daily life: “We’re built for tribes and villages and neighborhoods and potluck dinners. We’re meant to feel it all and bear it all, together.”
UNSHRUNK: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance | By Laura Delano | Viking | 337 pp. | $30
A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025, Page 9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lessons in Chemistry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
The Lord of Wealth is a card which talks about the manifestation of the fruits of our labours, in whatever area they have been directed. When we have aimed all our energies in a single stream of force toward one end, there comes a point, inevitably, where we shall attain our objective. And that is what the Ten of Disks indicates.Often, commentaries on this card warn that once sufficient wealth has been attained, you should make sure you distribute excess fairly and generously. This is because energy which remains unused eventually corrupts and dissipates.But there’s another aspect to the right use of energy which is not so often addressed. This is to do with the way the Will works. There’s a common misunderstanding about the use of Will among us – we tend to think that applying Will is something that we only do consciously. This is incorrect. The human Will works all the time. It runs around happily creating whatever seems most pressing in your mind.This has a rather unfortunate side effect. For many people, the most pressing emotions and responses in their minds are connected to fear, pain, unhappiness or deprivation. Once seized by feelings such as these, it can be very difficult indeed to keep your mind off them, and engage in positive thoughts, affirmations and actions.You know the feeling – something comes along and hurts you. Then you suffer. You keep circling the issue in your mind. You build up a nice collection of fears. You make a lot of (often wildly illogical) painful associations. And you do not find a relevant affirmation and repeat it with extraordinary fervour until you have your feelings back under control. You do not go and do something nice for yourself. You do not deliberately force your thoughts and feelings onto a more positive track.All the time that cycle is taking place, your Will is wildly scampering after all those negative feelings and channelling your energy out into life, attempting to create the things it thinks you want!DOH!!! Dissipation of power causing chaos!The Lord of Wealth teaches us the invaluable lesson… by bringing our thoughts and emotions to a conscious level, and by making positive choices about how we direct those energies, we create our world. So we need to decide what we what, and then think about that… not linger on the things that we don’t want. And we need to trust our own energy to fly out into the Universe and come back to us completed.Then we are endlessly wealthy.
My body is a gift, enabling me to ground my spiritual journey within the illusion of time and space. It is neither my ultimate reality nor my true identity. I use the body as it was meant to be used – as a vessel through which to express my love.
I protect my body from the assaults of modernity – from thoughts of chaos to the contaminants of the physical environment. I do so by infusing my body with the light of the divine, seeing with my inner eye the spirit of God as it pours into my every cell.
Dear God, I dedicate to You my body. Pour into it Your spirit. Protect it from the forces of fear And use it for Your purposes. Turn my body into a holy thing. And so it is. Amen
My body’s cells are suffused with light
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What if doing your chores were as easy as flipping a switch? In this talk and live demo, roboticist and founder of 1X Bernt Børnich introduces NEO, a humanoid robot designed to help you out around the house. Watch as NEO shows off its ability to vacuum, water plants and keep you company, while Børnich tells the story of its development — and shares a vision for robot helpers that could free up your time to focus on what truly matters.
Ian Berwick • Oct 25, 2015 Hymn of the United Nations Organization (الأمم المتحدة, 联合国 , Organisation des Nations unies, Организация Объединённых Наций, Naciones Unidas) Music – Pablo Casals Written by – Wystan Hugh Auden
Eagerly, musician, Sweep your string, So we may sing, Elated, optative, Our several voices Interblending, Playfully contending, Not interfering But co-inhering, For all within The cincture of the sound, Is holy ground Where all are brothers, None faceless others.
Let mortals beware Of words, for With words we lie, Can say peace When we mean war, Foul thought, speak fair And promise falsely, But song is true: Let music for peace Be the paradigm, For peace means to change At the right time, As the world clock Goes “tick” and “tock”.
So may the story Of our human city Presently move Like music, when Begotten notes New notes beget Making the flowing Of time a growing Till what it could be, At last it is, Where even sadness Is a form of gladness, Where fate is freedom, Grace and surprise.
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