I think there's a tendency to flatten the different cultural aspects of sexual politics into one globe spanning structure, but I think the history the United States is actually more at play here than people realize. Porn for certain has an effect on the men who consume it, there's studies bearing that out, but I think looking at it is the original source of the problem sort of misses the way that these ideas are pretty entrenched in American views of sexuality. American elite sexuality has often been constructed around access to female subordinates, whether in the plantation with the master and his slaves, or hardline Christian (and Mormon) denominations where access to young girls was part of the benefits that accrue to the leadership, or even politicians getting to fucks their interns. Remember Roy Moore? Remember Warren Jeffs? It doesn't have to be a deliberate plan to be a reactionary wave against social change, because that the bedrock foundation of a lot of American sexual relations are antagonistic. There's a reason that child marriage is way more common in the United States that is in Europe, and why 13 states still have no minimum age for marriage. I also want to point out that the mentality being described, while not applying to all men, is more or less spot on to how Jeffrey Epstein talked about women, and he had female enablers like Ghislaine Maxwell who were right there with him in the abuse. It's not elite men, it's the elite in general, who don't care if female subordinates are exploited. (Insert comparisons to the mistress of the plantation, or hell, Hillary Clinton, here)
There's also the aspect of economic insecurity, in the way it affects men's view of women and relationships. I wish I could find it, but I remember reading a really good blog post that talked about how depictions of sexuality and relationships in US media shifted noticeably with downturns in the economy, where economic insecurity leads to noticeable depictions of men in more dominant sexual positions, and women in more subservient traditional roles. I don't think it's possible to disentangle a lot of the modern shifts in depictions of heterosexuality from the general malaise that has existed since the financial crisis. People are reaching back to archetypal versions of American masculinity as a cope for the fact that the actual ability to create stable productive family structure as is eroding year-by-year.
E: I actually think that Troonery is in some sense a cope for economically insecure men. Gaining access to female spaces is a way of enacting the same entitlement previous generations of men had, by essentially coopting progressive movements to demand female participation in their wank fantasies. Suddenly, the language of trauma the feminism developed to speak to women's experience is, shorn of context, redeployed against women, to make their desire for safety 'transphobic bigotry'
Like you don't need estrogen or T blockers to not be a stinky greaseball. Let's keep handing out estrogen like candy to autistic manchildren who can't practice the most basic hygiene:
