The “Mediocre Man” as Online Hate Figure

What are we willing to give up for true egalitarianism?

As the empowerment of women has progressed, the sexes are directly competing for the same cultural space in a way they never did in the past. In some parts of respectable and popular culture - pop music, progressive politics, fiction - women have made stunning in-roads, with men seemingly reduced to out-group status. The change has happened so suddenly that our cognitive biases about men and women lag far behind. Women in the 1st world are powerful and agentic yet we still venerate ideas that originate from, and were legitimised by, their status as a marginal and powerless group. These include innate female moral superiority, toleration of a far greater in-group preference amongst women, and the sense that men and their preferences must always be a determining factor in an individual woman’s success. Hand in hand with this is our continued belief in the disposability of men, which has evolved but not disappeared, despite the decline in men’s cultural power and their changed roles in everyday life. Online, all of these factors collide to produce the ubiquitous hate figure of the Mediocre Man. I want to write about why this figure became such a common reference point, and the lack of inquisitiveness of men’s inner lives that powers the meme.