THE OLDMANOSPHERE-Chapter 2

More Notes From The Heated Toilet Seat

Last time we left off, the manosphere was busy ranking itself, optimizing whatever it could, and dunking its testicles in ice water. The Oldmanosphere was running its parallel operation — getting through the day, taking ibuprofen, and going to bed without injuring anything new.

All of that was about the body. None of it was about how we actually live.

The manosphere doesn’t just have opinions about gym routines and supplements. It has opinions about who you should look up to, who you should sleep with, how you should treat your wife if you have one, and how you should act in the world when you walk out the door. It has answers for everything.

The answers are bad. Usually, real bad.

The Oldmanosphere has answers too. Ours are quieter, less profitable, and based on having actually lived through some of this. They’re also, in most cases, the opposite of theirs.

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Who You Look Up To

The manosphere ranks men Alpha, Sigma, Beta, and Simp, with everything apparently hinging on whether you’ve ever held a purse. At the top sits the High-Value Male: a guy on a balcony in Dubai, leasing a Lamborghini, selling a course on how to lease a Lamborghini.

The Oldmanosphere doesn’t rank men at all.

It ranks guys.

A guy is someone who handles a thing. He might be a professional. Or a neighbor who’s good with cars. He could be a friend who happens to own a truck. What makes him a guy is not status, dominance, beard oil, or a podcast microphone. He’s a guy because when you need him, you call him, he shows up, and he handles it.

Every Old Guy I know has guys.

Not a guy. Guys.

A plumber guy, a car guy, a garage door guy, a lawn guy, a tree guy, a guy who sharpens things, and a guy who comes by twice a year to do something with the gutters that I still don’t fully understand. Their numbers are in my phone under names like “Dave Plumbing” and “Frank Tree,” because I don’t know their last names and it’s never once come up.

I call Dave, I say, “Dave, it’s Mike,” and he says, “What’s it doing now?” because Dave knows me by what’s broken.

A different Dave handles my insurance. The only time we’ve ever met in more than thirty years was the day I signed up with him. We talk several times a year, and I trust him with my house and both cars, but I have no idea what he looks like anymore. If I bumped into him on the street, I wouldn’t recognize him, which is fine because our relationship is not based on the cut of his jib. It’s based on what discounts he can get for me this year.

Aging Sucks. But We’ll Always Have the Discounts!

But no Old Guy has a guy for everything. There are always gaps. I don’t have a roofer or a tile guy, and I’ve never needed a mason in my life. But the day I do, I’ll have no idea who to call. This is where the second-tier system kicks in: the guys my friends have.

Finding a guy through the network works like cutting a key. Sometimes you cut it from the original, sometimes from a copy, and sometimes from a copy of a copy — and the further you get from the original, the less likely it is to work.

It’s the premise of the 1996 Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity, where the clone makes a clone, and that clone makes a clone, and each one is dumber than the guy he was copied from. My first-order guy is one I’ve used for years. He’s reliable, the original. A second-order guy belongs to a friend and has been vouched for — a clean copy. A third-order guy is someone your friend’s brother-in-law uses. He’ll probably work out fine, but there’s always some doubt, starting with whether he shows up at all.

By the time you reach fourth-order, the key doesn’t open the door anymore. You’re the fourth Michael Keaton in Multiplicity; a copy of a copied-copy, wearing goggles, trying to eat a rubber ball, and proving that the system has clearly broken down. Every Old Guy I know has a story about the fourth-order guy who turned out to be a disaster.

Losing a first-order guy is a crisis. If either Dave retired tomorrow, I might have to sell the house, because the alternative is starting over: interviewing strangers, apologizing for thirty years of jerry-rigged code violations, learning to trust somebody I just met, and trying not to think he’s ripping me off.

Finding a new guy at my age is like starting to date again, except the pickings are even slimmer and there’s no alcohol to dull my senses. This is why Old Guys hoard their guys. When somebody asks me if I know a good plumber, I think hard before I answer. I don’t want Dave getting too busy. I’m generous, but I’m not insane.

Some guys come with sub-specialties that younger people don’t appreciate. I have a garage door guy who is, without exaggeration, the most knowledgeable man I’ve ever hired. He knows every brand, every opener, every spring, every failure mode, and he explains all of it to me whether I want him to or not. He is a world-class expert on the most boring topic on earth.

His work is impeccable. When he dies, the car lives outside.

I also have a Russian handyman who speaks almost no English. We communicate by holding our phones up to each other with Google Translate open, nodding, and studying our screens like two diplomats who fired their interpreters. He’s fixed things in my house I didn’t know could be fixed. Neither of us has ever understood what the other was saying, and neither of us has ever needed to. An app sees us through.

Dimitri is also mine. If another Old Guy asked me for his number, I’d again think hard before sharing.

Old Guys don’t pay $99 a month to join a brotherhood run by a guy named Dax. We have a distributed network of men whose last names we don’t know, whose numbers we protect like state secrets, and whose retirement will genuinely ruin our year.

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The Marketplace Is Closed

The manosphere runs a scoring system: men rate women, women supposedly rate men, everyone has a Sexual Market Value, and women hit something called the Wall at thirty. Somewhere in the middle of all this is a concept called the Sexual Marketplace, which sounds like a farmer’s market but with a lot more buyer’s remorse.

The Oldmanosphere marketplace closed a long time ago. Most guys close it in their thirties. I took the scenic route.

For years I had a faux wife. We lived together, and I used the term to keep my mother at a safe distance. Once we got engaged, she became my pre-wife. At 55 I walked into a building, signed a paper, and retired the prefixes for good. I’ve been happily operating without the market ever since.

Date night still exists in the Oldmanosphere, but it’s not a date in any sense the manosphere would recognize. It’s dinner at 5:30 at a restaurant we’ve been to so many times the waitress knows our order. She just asks what we’re drinking, which is the only part that changes. The whole thing is over by eight.

This is not a complaint. Eight o’clock is plenty late, and it gets me home in time to watch an episode of my show — not to kill time before bed, but because it’s one of the featured activities of my day.

My wife knows where everything is. Not most things. Everything. I could blindfold her, spin her in a circle, and she’d still pin the tail on the donkey — and then tell me where I left my keys and the thing I bought, put away, and forgot about years ago. I don’t know where I put my glasses five minutes ago, but she knows they’re on the kitchen counter because she watched me set them down while I was looking for them.

She also handles the logistics. She knows which doctor I’m seeing on which day, which prescription needs refilling, what we’re doing on a Saturday three weeks from now, and whether the guy coming over on Tuesday is the HVAC guy or the duct cleaning guy. I nod at all of it.

I used to try to track it. In recent years I’ve accepted that her operating system is simply better than mine. Hers handles the calendar, the medical appointments, the social commitments, the house, and whatever human beings are expected to bring to other human beings’ houses. Mine handles remembering to let the dog in from the backyard.

Marriage is not a game we’ve been playing. The manosphere teaches men to maintain frame and never supplicate, which as far as I can tell means treating a dinner preference like a border dispute. If you want Chinese and she wants Italian, you don’t compromise. You hold frame. You either both eat Chinese, or nobody eats.

Either way, I’m out.

When she asks me what I want for dinner, the correct answer is not whatever I actually want for dinner. The correct answer is “whatever you’re in the mood for.” I’ll also throw in, from time to time, “make whatever’s easiest for you,” and “everything you make is great, I’ll eat anything you put in front of me.”

By manosphere standards this is total collapse. I don’t care; I’ve surrendered my frame and accepted the quinoa-lentil bake.

I have never been happier.

Before any departure from the house, I’m asked whether I need a jacket. I’m sixty-eight years old and have been dressing myself since the Kennedy administration. A younger man might bristle. But not me. I have aged out of bristling. My wife is the only person on earth still tracking whether I am warm enough. That is what love sounds like at sixty-eight.

This is not to say that our Oldmanosphere operating system is without problems. The central conflict of the Oldmanosphere marriage is the thermostat. There is no resolution, only a temporary truce that holds until the next seasonal shift. She is cold. I am not. The thermostat lives where she needs it, and I’ve learned to peel off a layer rather than negotiate. This is why Old Guys dress in layers — not for weather, but for peace.

Pre-bed used to be a quick step toward something else. Now the something else is sleep. There are pills, teeth, things applied to faces. There are phones that need charging, lights that need turning off, and doors that need to be double-checked even though neither of us remembers who locked them. The whole sequence takes forty-five minutes. It may not sound romantic, but after a certain age, intimacy includes asking whether the front door is locked.

MGTOW — Men Going Their Own Way — does exist in the Oldmanosphere, but nobody calls it that because we already have enough to remember without memorizing another stupid acronym. We call it going to Home Depot alone.

It’s two hours of wandering the aisles, thinking about what to build next. It’s sitting in the car in the garage for a while after I get home because it’s quiet in there. The Oldmanosphere version of male separatism is not a rejection of women. It’s a five-minute pause before I walk back inside and find out what she needs me to do.

The Awakening

The red pill is one of the foundational myths of the manosphere. You take it and suddenly see the world as it really is: society is rigged, women have all the power, and the whole system was built to keep men paying for dinner. It is their creation story, their moment of alleged clarity.

The Oldmanosphere awakening happens elsewhere.

It is muscular, skeletal, and gastrointestinal.

And it arrives without warning. One day you’re getting out of a chair you’ve gotten out of ten thousand times, and you hear yourself grunt. It’s not a big grunt, just a small involuntary sound, somewhere between a sigh and a verb. Apparently, your body has added sound effects.

From this day forward, every chair, couch, and low thing you sit on will trigger a small involuntary noise from somewhere deep inside you. The manosphere grunts on purpose, in the gym, lifting something heavy. The Oldmanosphere grunts involuntarily, bending down for a sock.

This is the moment when you realize the system isn’t the problem. It’s your hardware. Your body has been sending error messages for a while, but you just kept clicking “remind me later.”

The awakening continues in small humiliations: you instinctively reach for your mini-flashlight before you pick up the menu; you frequently request someone to repeat something because you’ve come to realize that the issue was hearing rather than comprehension; something falls on the floor and, for a moment, you wonder if you really need it.

And you fall asleep.

Everywhere. All the time.

At your own dinner party, while someone is telling a story you asked them to tell. Rereading, for the umpteenth time, the final pages of the novel you swore you were going to finish. In a chair you claimed you were “just resting in for a second,” which is one of the great lies of all time.

The great irony of the awakening is that you become aware of it by falling asleep.

And then a young person offers you their seat. They are polite about it and smile. You accept because refusing would turn a small kindness into a public incident, and that would somehow make everything worse. So you sit down, grateful and humiliated in exactly equal measure, and understand that you have been reclassified.

It is not something you applied for, and it is not something you can appeal. Somewhere along the way, the world stopped seeing a man who happens to be getting older and started seeing an Old Guy. It had been treating you that way for a while, and the seat offer is just the first time someone said it out loud.

The awakening is complete. You are not waking up to the truth about society. You are waking up to the truth about where you now fit in it.

This is where the Idiot’s Guide to Being Old begins.

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What is the most inappropriate place you’ve ever “rested your eyes”?

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What did you drop recently and decide you no longer needed?