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.”
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:
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 think a lot of it comes from schools, and in particular physical education and competitive sports. There is nothing wrong with competitive sports but the attitudes around it in schools can be so toxic, and in particular it can be used to create hierarchies. The idea of being good at sports and that being masculine was something I certainly experienced a lot at school. Also people who weren’t as academic but thrived in sports were lauded.
My school had various sports teams and clubs, and fuck all academic activities. Sports aren’t toxic but the attitudes around them can be, and particularly adults who feed in toxic attitudes and values around it.
i mentioned in another comment in this thread; i like physical activity, just not intense sports (even ‘amateur’ or ‘casual’ floor hockey/basketball was intense), would like it if there were more options. i just ended up working out and that was good for getting the physical activity i needed. it’s only, i wanna do stuff outdoors sometimes and there aren’t as many convenient options as a gym.
He is a bad response to a real problem, as is the toxic misandrist movement that seems to pull people away from productive feminism these days.
But as long as reactions to these extreme positions keep us from discussing the underlying problems or reasonable solutions to them, we’ll never find any real solutions.
What “real problem” is he a response to?
Boys feeling they don’t have a voice and people are not listening to them? It’s right there in the article
Personally this is why I think people should be amplifying the messages of worker rights as much as possible. Improving worker rights in this country would make so many people feel heard including many young men.
Or, we could not hijack it and actually focus on making sure young men are heard
Can you give a more concrete example what, in your opinion, gives them a feeling to not have a voice or to not be heared (on comparison to other groups)?
Boys are graduating high school less, going to college less, and graduating college less. They are also surrounded by groups supporting and helping women do all of this, that don’t help them at all. Questioning any of this is essentially forbidden, is it really surprising some of those kids hate feminists?
In what kind of reality are you living? Manosphere-dimension?
Men are btw not failing at university at all. The number of men successfully attending higher education continued to grow over the last centuries and it still does, with no significant change in rate.
It’s just that women’s successful attendance grows at a faster rate in the last ~10 years. And the reason isn’t that you have a handful of programs teaching girls for a few days “how to code”. It’s that there are simply more women who believe that higher education is worth it.
More of them decide to go to university lately. If you want men to also decide more often that higher education is worth it, instead of blaming feminism, you should encourage that more boys and men turn their backs on the idea that it’s unmanly to do your homework and learn.
If you read online about current discussions regarding nature VS nurture, people are actually influenced more by a combination of peer pressure and media/cultural influence than their parents.
Sadly this also means that it’s unlikely that, as a parent, you have much of a chance to work against those influences.