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.”
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.
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.
And how much of that is actually created to stoke anti-feminist attitudes?
Almost none of it is created to stoke anti-feminist attitudes, but it is certainly spread to do so.
There was this great tumblr post a couple years ago that I can’t seem to find anymore about how when feminists spread phrases like ‘all men are trash’, even if in context it doesn’t seem offensive or bigoted, people who dislike feminism will spread it to people offended by it without the additional context and say “look, see! Feminists hate all men! They hate you! Why would you as a man want to help people who hate you unconditionally?!”, and unfortunately the people most vulnerable to that type of manipulation are teenage boys, who aren’t exactly likely to seek out the context that’s been removed
Of course, we both understand how “all men are trash” could be said without bigotry within the right context, but for everyone else that doesn’t understand, would someone mind explaining or clarifying?
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.
Is it really that hard not to be a fucking cunt?
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?
