The Attention Business
On violence, outrage, and who profits from both.
Salt Lake City, Utah. Thursday morning. A video drops, and the internet finds its conscience right on schedule.
You know the one. You’ve seen the discourse. Taylor Frankie Paul, the woman Disney built four seasons of television around, is at the center of it. Again. Except this time, the footage wasn’t produced. It wasn’t scheduled. It wasn’t a cliffhanger designed to bring you back for episode six. This time, the footage was real, and that made all the difference.
That’s the tell.
Disney put the arrest footage in the pilot. Read that sentence again. They didn’t stumble into the drama; they opened with it. They sent her to the Oscars. They greenlit four seasons of a show built around the spectacle of a woman’s life coming apart in real time, and they called it entertainment. The audience watched. The sponsors paid. The algorithm rewarded everyone in the ecosystem.
Then TMZ dropped a video on a Thursday, and suddenly every executive, every advertiser, every person who clicked play all sixteen times across four seasons discovered, simultaneously, that they had morals.
They don’t have morals. They have a threshold.
There is a difference between the two, and it matters enormously.
Dakota did something wrong. I’m not here to litigate that and I’m not building him a defense. What he deserves online, he’s getting. But I want to ask a question that nobody seems interested in asking, because asking it gets you lumped into a category of men the algorithm has decided are dangerous.
How many men absorb situations like his quietly, without cameras, without platforms, without a single person organizing a cancellation campaign on their behalf?
That’s not a rhetorical jab. That’s a real question about a real population of people who will never trend on anything because what happened to them was never filmed.
The footage business doesn’t cover them. There’s no footage. There’s no content. There’s no arc. Just a man sitting somewhere trying to figure out what happened to his life, carrying a story he doesn’t have language for, because the culture handed him exactly two options: perpetrator or punchline.
Here’s what the culture has decided men are allowed to be: Homer Simpson or Andrew Tate. The lovable idiot who can’t figure out the dishwasher, or the predator radicalizing teenagers in a Romanian compound. Pick one. There is no third option offered. There is no lane for a man who is trying to think clearly about his own experience without being handed a red pill or a laugh track.
Louis Theroux made a documentary about the manosphere. It’s well-produced. He’s a skilled journalist. The frame — here are dangerous men radicalizing other men — is real as far as it goes. Tate and his orbit are a genuine problem. Agreed.
But Theroux does what the culture always does. He points at the fire and never asks what dried out the wood. He shows you the symptom in high definition and never sits with the condition. Here are the broken men. Here is how silly, sad, and dangerous they are. Now back to you.
What he doesn’t say is this: men are being radicalized into those spaces because there is nowhere else to go. We have stripped out every traditional structure that used to hold a young man’s development, the rites of passage, the mentorship, the initiation, the earned sense of belonging, and replaced it with nothing. No ritual. No threshold to cross. No elder handing you something real on the other side of the hard thing you just did. Just an algorithm full of men who are angry about it and willing to give you a framework, however poisonous, for why.
I feel that pull myself. I step into this conversation, and I can feel one foot drifting toward a category I don’t belong in. I was raised by a single mother in the LDS church. I’ve sat with women in pain. I’ve seen what certain men do. I am not confused about that. But I also have a foot in the camp of men who have been through something real and couldn’t find the language for it, and I add my voice as a voice of reason in the hope that it still lands somewhere useful.
Theroux saw the problem. He just wasn’t willing to be part of the answer.
The manosphere didn’t make that show. Netflix did.
Here’s what I know about the systems that generate this discourse: they are not built around truth. They are not built around care. They are built around footage.
Footage of the arrest. Footage of the confrontation. Footage of the breakdown. Footage of the apology tour. Footage of the comeback. The machine needs all of it. It needs the violence, and it needs the outrage about the violence, because both generate engagement, and engagement generates revenue, and revenue is the only metric that actually matters inside the building.
When the footage stops being entertaining and starts being evidence, that’s the moment the machine pretends it never wanted any of this.
That’s not a moral position. That’s a liability assessment.
The TikTok therapists will give you vocabulary for what you watched. Reactive abuse. Trauma bonding. Coercive control. Some of those terms are real, and they matter, and they belong in the conversation. Some of them are being deployed so fast and so loosely that they’ve become a way to close a conversation rather than open one. A way to assign roles before anyone has to think too hard. Hurt people use borrowed language to land blows without accountability, and an algorithm that rewards the velocity of the take over the accuracy of it.
Here’s what rarely gets said about reactive abuse: it often isn’t a choice. It’s a nervous system responding faster than the person’s self-awareness does. Sustained provocation rewires your responses before you have the language to name the pattern you’re inside. You can’t interrupt what you haven’t learned to see.
But the moment it turns physical, that explanation ends. Not because the pattern wasn’t real. Because your body knew the line before your mind caught up, and you crossed it anyway. The unconscious response is no longer unconscious once your hands are involved. I can’t speak to how women navigate that threshold. What I know is that men need to understand their own nervous systems, not as an excuse, but as the only way to interrupt the cycle before it gets that far. That’s not a soft idea. That’s the hardest work there is.
None of that is justice. All of it is content.
And before anyone assumes I’m only talking about men: feminism has done this to women, too.
Not feminism as a principle. Feminism at its best was built to name something real, and it did. But feminism as an institution, the framework, the model, the approved narrative, has a threshold of its own. A woman whose story doesn’t fit gets the same treatment a man does. She was the aggressor. The dynamic was complicated. She fought back. She contributed to the cycle. Tell that story in certain rooms, and watch how quickly the framework that was supposed to protect her becomes the thing that reassigns her role.
Erin Pizzey built the first domestic violence shelter in the world. London, 1971. She opened it, ran it, and then reported what she actually saw: that many of the women coming through her doors were themselves violent, caught in cycles that predated their current relationship. She published her findings. The response from the movement she had helped create was death threats, bomb threats, and professional exile. She eventually fled the country. Her data wasn’t refuted. Her character was destroyed.
The Duluth Model, the framework that has shaped DV intervention in seventeen countries for forty years, was built on the premise that domestic violence flows from patriarchal power. Its co-creator, Ellen Pence, admitted as much in a 1999 essay published by Sage. Writing about her own work, she said the framework “did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with” and that her commitment to the model had been so total that contradicting evidence “went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers.” That is a scientist describing confirmation bias in her own published words. That is an architect admitting the building didn’t hold.
The institution kept building anyway.
Every system that stops asking hard questions about its own blind spots eventually produces the damage it was designed to prevent. That’s not a conservative argument. That’s not a liberal argument. That’s what happens when a moral project becomes a machine, and the machine starts serving the narrative instead of the people standing in front of it.
Violence is not a gender issue. It is a human issue. The systems that produce, protect, and profit from it are not selective about whom they damage. They are selective about whose damage gets a platform.
The ones who get the platform are the ones with footage.
I’ve been close enough to this to know that the people it damages most are the ones who never make the cut. No footage. No arc. Just the cost.
Justice doesn’t trend. It doesn’t generate engagement. It doesn’t need a clip to be real. It just requires someone to care whether it happened, not whether it was filmed.
That’s the standard. That’s always been the standard.
No Quarter Given. Not to the violence. Not to the performance of caring about it.
At least for today.
~Tyler