"You get your own little mood board as a man. You get a mood board and that's your identity. You get a vibe. You don't get masculinity, because you have to renounce that."

"It is far more virtuous to virtue signal that you care about trans people than to make sure a city has electricity — even though you might never do anything for trans people at all."

"The guy keeping the lights on in my house is doing a lot more for people than this woman. Maybe he should be considered more moral. The guy who fixes the sewers is doing a hell of a lot more than any of the sociologists of men and masculinities."

Brian and Alison work through a Medium article instructing men that the route to freedom runs through renouncing masculinity, and play REPO between arguments.

Alison's counter is that the piece never describes masculinity at all — it describes allyship, and measures men entirely by signals that cost the signaller nothing. It also measures every man against exactly two reference points, Andrew Tate and Pedro Pascal, one of whom apparently functions as a magic spell: invoke the name, get the reaction.

Plus the moral circle problem — why the most virtuous possible object of concern is the one with no claim on you, and what that means for the men actually keeping the water running.

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