THE OLDMANOSPHERE
Notes from the heated toilet seat
CHAPTER 1
The Manosphere
The manosphere, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is a sprawling online ecosystem for young men who have decided, after extensive research on YouTube, that modern life is rigged against them. It’s built around a handful of influencers with names like Blazze Steele, Joe Rogaine, and Dax Maximus. Most of them have been banned from at least one platform and they all consider that proof of their authenticity.
The foundational concept is the red pill, which these men have all taken. Taking the red pill means you’ve awakened to the truth about dating, women, society, and your own untapped alpha potential. It also means you’ve seen the movie, The Matrix, which you quote extensively.
Once awakened, you rank yourself. Of course, the ranking always comes out either Alpha or Sigma—the Beta and the Simp are categories for other guys. The Alpha dominates every room, and the Sigma is a lone-wolf alpha who dominates rooms by refusing to enter them. The Beta has a wife and seems content, which means he is lost. The Simp is a man so hollowed out by femininity that he has at some point held a purse for somebody.
You must also optimize physically. This means 5 a.m. weight sessions, and enough chicken breast daily to keep a Tyson plant in business. It also includes a process called looksmaxxing, which involves three hours at a barber having your beard sculpted into geometric patterns, hitting yourself in the face with a hammer in a practice called bone smashing, or having both legs surgically broken and stretched to add three inches of height. And every morning, you submerge your testicles in ice water, which is allegedly done to boost testosterone but which I suspect is mostly done to prove to yourself you’re not gay. All of this is real. I want to be clear about that.
For the manosphere man, feelings are suspect, crying is weakness, and therapy is for Simps. For them, a real man processes trauma by going to the gym, lifting something heavy, and grunting at it until the trauma is gone. This is called stoicism, a word borrowed from the Greeks, who used it to mean the disciplined examination of one’s emotions, not the refusal to have any.
The sexual marketplace is a scoring system. Women, supposedly, rate men on something called Sexual Market Value, and men maintain a running tally called a body count, not of people they’ve killed, which would at least be interesting, but of women they’ve slept with. Women over thirty have allegedly hit the Wall, a phenomenon where they become invisible overnight. Men hit no wall, because the manosphere was invented by men in their twenties who will address this question when they turn fifty.
The goal of all of this is to become a High-Value Male: commanding, wealthy, attractive, and, above all, not a Simp. The path runs through paid courses, supplement stacks, and monthly “brotherhoods” hosted by men who want your credit card number. Somewhere in here there’s also a movement called MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way, which is guys who have decided that women are the problem and have therefore stopped talking to them. This is presented as a solution, though I suspect it helps the women only.
The Oldmanosphere
This is what those in the manosphere do not realize: while young men online are busy ranking themselves and refusing to hold purses, Old Guys have been running a parallel operation for forever.
Everything they optimize, we’ve given up on. Everything they avoid, we’ve accepted. Their highest value is dominance; ours is a nap nobody interrupts. They keep an ice tub in the garage; we installed a heated toilet seat in the bathroom. Testosterone is their currency; ibuprofen is ours. They want to be High-Value Males; we want to leave the house with our fly up. They have a hierarchy. We have a recliner.
Physical Optimization
The goal of the manosphere is to optimize the body to win. The Oldmanosphere maintains the body to function. Their goal is to be unkillable. Ours is to get to the end of the day without tweaking something.
They get ready for a workout in four minutes: a heaping scoop of green dust, a couple of activation drills, and they’re ready to go. We need forty-five minutes. We grind out the lower back on a foam roller, dig a lacrosse ball into a hip that’s been complaining since Tuesday, and work through a couple of resistance bands to convince the shoulders to participate. We need longer to get ready for the workout than to do the workout itself.
The manosphere takes training seriously. The workout often involves heavy compound movements: squat, deadlift, bench, overhead press. They use a technique called progressive overload; week after week, they add more weight on the bar. The result is that they get bigger and stronger. Our workout is mostly just a list of things we used to do that we no longer can. We don’t deadlift because of a recurring disc problem. We don’t bench press because we tore a cuff muscle in 2011. We don’t squat with anything heavier than the bar because the left knee will object. Strongly. What’s left is a circuit of cable machines, the resistance bands we already used in the warm-up, and one of those arm-rowing machines nobody under 60 uses. We’re not getting stronger. We’re negotiating with what’s left.
The manosphere has the stack: creatine, ashwagandha, tongkat ali, fadogia agrestis, and lion’s mane. Three of these are roots, one is a mushroom, and one sounds like a Bond villain. We have a pill organizer, and it runs the show. It’s plastic, has seven compartments labeled S M T W T F S, and it sits on the kitchen counter next to the toaster. We take glucosamine, turmeric, fish oil, magnesium, vitamin D, a baby aspirin, a statin, something for the prostate, and an MSM tablet because a guy at the gym said it fixed his knee.
They wake up, check their Oura ring and use the recovery score to plan their day. We wake up and run a body inventory. The first question is whether we tweaked something in our sleep. If the answer is yes, we think about plan B. Either way, getting out of bed now requires its own warm-up. Sometimes the warm-up is enough exercise for the day and we get back in.
For the manosphere, sleep is the foundation. They wear a Whoop, take magnesium glycinate at 9pm sharp, and tape their mouths shut. The bedroom is 65 degrees and the blackout curtains are medical grade. They are in bed by 10 and close all screens two hours in advance. We fall asleep in the recliner watching an episode of Law & Order we’ve already seen. We wake up at 11:40 with the TV still on and a crick in the neck, stagger to the actual bed, lie down, and are now wide awake. At 1:20 we get up to pee. Two hours later we get up to pee again. At 4:40 we are lying in the dark thinking about the neighbor who never gave back the power tools he “borrowed” in 1994. We give up at 5:55 and get up to make coffee.
Peter Attia spent a decade trying to convince people that 180 minutes a week of Zone 2 cardio adds years to your life: steady-state movement, conversational pace, heart rate in a specific aerobic band. We’ve been getting our Zone 2 for years without knowing it. We search for the glasses on our head, go to the basement for one thing and come back with another, and go up the stairs twice because we forgot what we went up for.
Looksmaxxing is the manosphere’s whole presentation project. The face, the frame, the fit, the hair, the skin. Looksmaxxing in the Oldmanosphere is getting dressed with your shirt right-side out, both socks the same color, and your fly up. Bonus points if the socks are also the same length. We are not trying to turn heads. Our mission is to not look like the guy on the bench at the bus station.
The manosphere thinks of testosterone as something you build, defend, and post about. They go out of their way to optimize it with TRT and then post their numbers. We are leaking testosterone the way an old car leaks oil. The doctor looks at our numbers, looks at us, and says “this is normal for your age,” which is the medical profession’s way of telling us the leak is never getting fixed. With an old car you top it off, change the seal, take it in a few times, but the car still leaks. We drive it anyway.
The Feelings Thing
The manosphere’s emotional doctrine is denial. A man does not cry, does not complain, and does not admit anything is bothering him. Vulnerability is weakness. Therapy is for Simps. A real man processes trauma by going to the gym, lifting something really heavy, and grunting at it until the trauma is gone.
The Oldmanosphere cries at a commercial for auto insurance.
This is not a choice for us. I’m watching TV one evening when a woman appears on the screen to tell me about bundling my policies. There is a dog in the commercial, a shaggy terrier that reminds me of Cooper, our most recent dog that died. The dog shows up in the first scene and then disappears. He comes back at the end, older and gray around the muzzle, and walks slowly across the kitchen toward the woman’s daughter, who is now also older. I make a guttural sound in my throat that Dyan hears from the kitchen. “You okay?” I tell her yes, I just saw Cooper.
The ambushes come from everywhere now. A war memorial reminding me that my dad served in WWII and lived to tell me stories. My favorite baseball player, Ernie Banks, throwing out a first pitch and not being able to quite get it to the plate. A photograph of myself at thirty, looking like someone I used to know. I didn’t used to feel any of this. Now I feel all of it. The man I was at forty would not recognize me.
I don’t fight any of this. Fighting it is what younger men do, and it costs them something I’m not willing to spend anymore.
The manosphere believes a man should not cry. I cannot remember a week in the last year when something didn’t get me at least a little. The young men in the manosphere would diagnose me as terminally beta. They are correct, and I do not care.
The manosphere is what young men do before they learn the harsh realities of life. That every Alpha is a future Old Guy, every High-Value Male is going to be sitting in a doctor’s office someday hearing “this is normal for your age.” And best of all, that every guy in the ice tub is going to want that heated toilet seat instead. They just don’t know this yet.
The Oldmanosphere is what they will become. My body talks back, my feelings show up uninvited, the old dog jump-starts memories of all the dogs we’ve lost over the years, and I am sixty-eight and not pretending otherwise.
Coming soon — Chapter 2: every guy has a guy and every thermostat is a battleground
*****
What did you stop doing that made life better without it?
*****
What was the last thing that ambushed you?
As an ol’ geezer one sneeze away from total paralysis, let me just say if you don’t have a Toto heated bidet seat on your crapper you’re an idiot.
You're only 68? Reading all of this I was under the impression your were old. I do enjoy your take.