Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers
Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers
“As soon as I mention feminism, you can feel the shift in the room; they’re shuffling in their seats.” Mike Nicholson holds workshops with teenage boys about the challenges of impending manhood. Standing up for the sisterhood, it seems, is the last thing on their minds.
When Nicholson says he is a feminist himself, “I can see them look at me, like, ‘I used to like you.’”
Once Nicholson, whose programme is called Progressive Masculinity, unpacks the fact that feminism means equal rights and opportunities for women, many of the boys with whom he works are won over.
“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,” he says.
But he is battling against what he calls a “dominance-based model” of masculinity. “These old-fashioned, regressive ideas are having a renaissance, through your masculinity influencers – your grifters, like Andrew Tate.”
“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,”
The same could be said about "communism" and "socialism". The words have been turned dirty, such that people shy away from what is objectively a good thing when done honestly and to the letter of the principle.
In all honesty, 3rd wave feminism chased away a lot of male allies. Like a whole lot.
But I don't think that's what led to Andrew Tate, that is no failure of feminism.
Andrew Tate is the product of hyper capitalistic individualism being held up in all forms and media and real life as 'the ideal lifestyle', a rich, aggressive asshole that has enough clout that most people can't back them down.
The Tates, Trumps, Elons of the world are having their day because our current generation conflates wealth with competence.
And it's going to ruin our world.
That said, feminism as it stands now is far more welcoming and inclusive to men than it has been in 25 years and I applaud the change.
I actually agree.... We simply ignore the needs of men who are suffering. When was the last time you read a story about a male domestic abuse victim who WASN'T laughed at.
People hyperfocus on the 1% of crazy feminists instead of the other 99% who are actually normal and reasonable. Sadly that 1% are doing more harm to the public image of feminism than good.
We live in an age of twitter screenshot outrage and that pathetically emboldens some peoples beliefs so the root cause really is social media. Nothing more nothing less.
As a (formerly young) man myself, I can say with experience that boys are gullible. If something just had a veneer of plausibility, then that was good enough for me!
Still, this hit hard, because it’s so true:
He says [about boys]: “It’s not showing that emotional weakness. It’s also the expectation to always be right. Like you are not able to show that you can fail; that there’s more shame in doing something and making a mistake than there is just sort of sitting it out or dropping out.”
He stresses that many of the men he deals with have positive attitudes to women and feminism, but he says some can feel they are being stereotyped, or blamed for others’ actions.
I faced a lot of pressure to be “tough” and “perfect” (I’m not sure where that pressure came from. My parents weren’t the problem). I also misunderstood that feminism only means fairness and equality. “Fortunately”, I was trying to control an anger management issue, and I only recently realized that the experience had the side effect of teaching me that imperfections are normal and nothing to be ashamed of. Being fair was, well, only fair, so although I didn’t notice it, I never had an issue with basic feminism. I didn’t know much about it, but I wasn’t against it, and recognized that guys who were proudly anti-feminist were almost always jerks that I didn’t want to emulate.
I also blame CBC and other supposedly legit sources for giving this fuck air time and even asking him about the Israel/Palestine war as if his opinion matters.
Also so called journalists like this who remove all responsibility from Tate for being a rapist piece of shit
So Andrew Tate is a human trafficker scum of the earth, and we are trying to combat his message. That's alright, I agree, he's not a disease but a symptom.
Tate is taking an existing problem, which is the fact that young boys feel left out by society at large with feminism being mainstream. Don't get me wrong, go and empower women, but when boys have "a growing sense that somehow they must be mistreated and hated because they are boys and men" and "some can feel they are being stereotyped, or blamed for others’ actions", and things like “My son is reluctant to go to school due to bullying by a group of girls, he feels that there is a big power difference in schools, where boys are always punished, not listened to, and not believed.” happen, then that's a problem separate from the problems that feminism wants to solve.
Telling boys to help solve women's issues in response to them telling you they have problems of their own is what's causing this. And it's either you listening to them, or it's going to be people like Tate or Trump.
I think slacktivist corporate feminism is an easy punching bag which makes it an easy case to dismiss the message.
That and with internet allowing every village idiot a voice, it is very easy for someone to say something incredibly batshit insane which becomes a punching bag for the rest of the people.
I feel like a lot of people confuse feminism for straight up misandry. #killallmen? #maletears? These were started by so called "feminists" but this is the definition of misandry.
And people wonder why young men don't like feminism when this might have been their only exposure to it.
If men and boys are finding current models of masculinity to be difficult - which is what Tate et al prey on - perhaps they have more in common with feminists. The patriarchy harms everyone.
I’ve always felt like these things are cyclical in a way - just in that people are constantly rebelling against the last generation.
When I went to high school in the early 2010s there was this huge movement of like… positivity and sunshine and wellness and feminism and good times for all. Bob Ross was on everyone’s mind and Pharrell’s “Happy” blasted on the stereo, people wore really bright and mismatched and often gaudy outfits.
This was seemingly “in response” to that mid 2000s emo/grunge/depressed aesthetic which was very dark and moody. And now, in response to that 2010s positivity we seem to get this really jaded, “actually, feminism sucks and becoming a ‘trad catholic’ is chic” movement.
It’s annoying, and I’m sure we’ll see an opposite shift again in 5 years.
A big problem - for ages now - is, that young men just don't have fathers. There's a male around, often, but these are rarely "fathers" that convey a whole picture of a male person. I grew up without one, and I can tell you, how confusing that can be. You attach yourself very easily to ideas other male persons have. Thinking for yourself is another skill that's kinda rare, not only today, it was at any time. It's hard to navigate these years.
If you cannot name, let alone quote, a single piece of feminist literature, are you really against feminism, or are you just railing against your own fucked up projections?
Andrew Tate himself is absolutely a problem, that doesn't preclude there from also being other, related, broader, problems. Usually, when you see an argument in the form of "X thing (small, defined, addressable) isn't the problem, Y thing (large, nebulous, intractable) is the problem!" Then what is happening is someone is re-framing the debate from a cognizable issue to an unsolvable issue, to defuse any actual action. It's a great tactic!
Lack of actually good and well-known male role models leads to scum filling the vacuum.
Disproportional push in favor of girls and to the detriment of boys is also to blame. Doesn't look like it's gonna fix itself anytime soon though.
Men benefit significantly from feminism, through the breakdown of male stereotypes, and the expansion of how normative masculinity is defined. Not that benefiting cishet men is necessarily the most important thing in the world, but the idea that feminism puts men on the losing end of some zero sum game is simply wrong.
Honestly it could not be more clear in my own experience. There is a ton of diversity in the human experience, and the masculine experience is part of that. You deny your own freedom when you put yourself and others in a conformity pigeonhole. And you additionally deny yourself access to this diversity of experience when you do it to others. But I also kind of understand why this nuance is initially lost on children, and suspect that experience plus education will help immensely.
Most things come down to people don't want to unlearn things. Con-men like Tate pick up on that empty void for young men since there isn't much guidance and lead them down the wrong path. It isn't the end of the world to learn the way you're brought up thinking may have been bad or harmful, and do better in the future.
I see this on my school campus quite a lot. When the male teachers direct students from using an exterior door, they usually just say ok and then around.
When the female teachers are on duty and day the same things, they get verbally abused.
If I'm out there with the female teachers, there aren't any issues.
While feminism is far from perfect, especially smaller circles that want to have unfair divorce rights for women or whatever, people like Andrew Tate are both the problem (as in, spreading the classic incel rhetoric) and the symptom (why young adults and teens follow people like him).
Though not only him, but also a lot of right-wing youtube channels are pushing false narratives in order to get outrage clicks and to radicalize people against things like feminism. You have youtube videos that say how "feminism is trying to ruin men" or "crazy feminists want to remove sexy girls from video games" or "feminists don't care about men", and given the amount of right-wing youtube videos that get hundreds of thousands and not millions of views, a lot of people do believe it. In reality, however, men do have issues and feminists are acknowledging them and are trying to do something about it (for example, toxic masculinity being responsible for male loneliness for instance), but also things like patriarchy, discrimination and so on.
Hating feminism and/or women isn't going to solve male loneliness. Actual societal-level change, something that feminists are striving for, is the answer.
Men are turning against feminism because the supposed benefits they enjoy have been disappearing for decades. Women by the very statistics they used to promote feminism now have advantages in many areas. The "patriarchy" that once existed is well and dead but feminist would never accept that they are in the privileged position now in many ways. A simple example that many boys learned when I was younger is the boy scouts. Girls are allowed to join the boy scouts but boys are not allowed to join the girl scouts. Boys are told this is done in the name of equality but it doesn't take a genius to see that if girls are allowed to have their own dedicated social groups but boys are not and must allow girls into every aspect of their life that is not equality. It's giving girls privileges that boys don't have.
Feminists will throw tantrums like the old fire alarm trick and call men sexist if they speak about men's rights. They will violently and illegally resist any threat to their attempted domination of discussion about gender rights. Some of the comments here show exactly that kind of mentality. Feminists want to be the only ones to speak and frame issues and essentially own the entire concept of gender equality. Men who want to talk about divorce, child custody, domestic violence, treatment at schools, and so on are immediately branded as sexists who must hate women. Feminists aren't and never will be uncomfortable admitting to their own privileges and the very definition of the word is rights for women. People who are for equality of the sexes are called egalitarians not feminists.
These comments, if viewed objectively, are a great example of why men are turning away from feminism. You have that woman saying "men cause all the problems in the world" then you have another person saying "I don't see where feminists ever make men's lives difficult" and you have the male feminist saying "men who are sick of being insulted if they bring up men's issues just hate women." Collectively feminism and it's impact on and impression given to men is extremely negative. The majority of feminists can't even begin to listen to the issues men face without immediately either trying to one up them or dismiss them as being incels, sexists, or some other derogatory term.
My personal view is that women did indeed have a lot of valid grievances in the past but those are mostly resolved now. However, feminists are unwilling and by definition incapable of doing anything other than continuing to ask for more for women. There will always be more that could be done for any issues women face collectively. The problem comes when feminists are also unwilling to see how the world has changed over the last 50 years and acknowledge their own progress and how it has shifted things.
Boys today will typically have entirely female teachers their whole life. They will told endlessly that women are oppressed and deserve equal rights. Yet they will also see any "safe space" for men infiltrated by women and criticized by women as problematic whereas girls and women will maintain their own in group spaces free from criticism. They will hear stories from older men about the supposed "patriarchy" actually favoring women in terms of the court systems, schools, and workplaces. They will eventually experience the same for themselves. They will see all the statistics about things like women graduating college at higher rates, earning more money, living longer, having lower suicide rates, and so on. They will see the media focusing on women's issues endlessly while ignoring men are often in worse places by the same statistics. A big example being suicide and workplace deaths. When female suicide ticks up the media runs articles declaring it an issue requiring urgent examination and often concluding in some way that men are behind whatever is bothering women. When something like 99% of workplace deaths are men they won't hear a peep about it from feminists but they will constantly hear about the pay gap which is often explained away by women simply choosing careers that don't pay as much, not working as many hours, and so on. Men will hear things like women are the true victims of war because their husbands die. They will consider that men are still subject to the draft. Men are still required in many ways to uphold masculine roles even by feminists.
They start asking questions and the response they get is vitriol. Any attempt to refute any of this, say that maybe things aren't so biased in their favor, that maybe women are the ones who have a lot more privilege in western nations they will be insulted, their lives will be threatened in terms of systemic or social punishment, and so on.
I remember learning that more men are raped than women if you include prison rape. I suggested to my now wife that she ask her feminist Mom about that and her Mom told her, in private, that it's good men get raped in prison because they deserve it. If a woman is open minded enough to actually listen to men and challenge feminists in the same way men challenge them they will get the same exact hateful or vitriolic response and start to understand men's perspective.
I challenge any feminist here to take up an issue that men bring up often and earnest attempt to debate in favor of positive reform for men with any of their feminist friends. Just as a simple academic debate concept where they are taking the "pro" side of an argument they might find distasteful personally. I'm not talking about picking an issue men face that feminists have decided is okay, I'm talking about the issues that men bring up which result in them being insulted. Pick one from these comments as an example. They will likely be shocked at the response IF they engage honestly. Once women step outside the box of solely advocating for women and only advocating for men within a framework of how men should change in ways that women approve of they can quickly learn for themselves why boys and men are turning away from feminism.
All I see is a whole lot of pandering toward people who don't like feminism because they don't want to admit men are largely responsible for a lot of problems in the world.
And I'm sure some of you dumbasses will prove my point by trying to argue with me about it in the comments. I'm not gonna capitulate to the same people who largely ruined life for everyone for the existence of our species just so women can get the rights they were entitled to in the first place, nor will I give you the fight that you want.
Yes, you probably did find the feminazi they're denigrating. I don't care. Those feminazis are right.
Every single day I see a new reason why I am glad I pulled my daughter out of the hell that is public middle school and put her into online school.
She told me yesterday that boys got into fights in the hallways almost every week. There were definitely fights between kids my middle school, but usually not on school grounds, almost never during the school day, and not constantly for sure. This isn't some low income, underfunded urban school, we're in a small city in Indiana.
On top of that, the couple of friends my daughter had in that school vaped and smoked weed. They're between 12 and 13. Sure, I tried a cigarette at 13, but one cigarette. I didn't smoke weed until I was a junior in high school.
What the fuck is happening in our schools?
I just wish more parents, especially of girls, had the option to do what we did. We're lucky that we can survive (just barely) on a single income.