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.”
Yeah, may the almighty line keep going up.
But that’s beside the point, work is one side of it, my point is that there is no “ideal man” picture out there, nothing to aspire to. The ideal male identity is only described in context of how they treat women. Which is important sure, being kind to everyone, but still, what makes a man these days?
Kids are asking these questions, looking for role models, and all they see answering is Tate. Everyone else in the mainstream just tells them that their ideal is “not to be a rapist”.
Why don’t boys look up to their fathers? I’ll tell you! It’s because daddy is always at work.
Girls have the same problem with their mothers also working, but the schooling system has actually (partially) solved the problem. Teaching, especially pre-K, is dominated by women. Even if class sizes are too large for any one female teacher to fulfill the role of a model they still have a huge field to choose from and I think that helps a lot. We need men to become teachers if we aren’t going to liberate men from work.
Women hate it when men have anything to do with young children. Try being a dad and taking your own child to the park in this country. There’s a good chance you’ll have to prove which child is yours to a cop, because parenting while male isn’t acceptable behavior. And you want a man to accept the liability of existing near 30 children that aren’t his, possibly without one of his own around? That’s just asking to get SWATed.
No, society hates it when men have anything to do with young children and we are products of that society. Women didn’t make caring for young children into “women’s work”, society did that. Women didn’t make men having a life outside of work unacceptable, society did that.
Don’t blame women for what is a societal problem. That’s incredibly reactionary.
Although, I’m skeptical that male kindergarten teachers get SWATed all that often at school 🙄
I will blame the individual women who call the police on a man taking his child to the park, and I will blame you as an individual for enabling them.
What the fuck, how am I enabling them? This is a societal problem! Under class society the reproduction of labor is for women (so care-taking, childbearing, child-rearing, early teaching, etc) and commodity production is for men (so engineering, manufacturing, construction, skilled and technical labor, etc). Men who break this societal role and engage in the reproduction of labor are seen as freaks and deviants that must be put back in their place, by force if necessary. This is a serious problem, but it’s certainly not women’s fault (or mine) that society has these rigid gender roles that we need to struggle against. It’s all of our jobs, men and women, to fix society and thus fix this problem.
You are enabling them by talking out of your ass on their behalf. I mean, rigidly adhering to and strictly enforcing traditional gender roles is what feminism is all about, amirite?
When a man takes his child to the playground, and some mom there calls the cops on him for being near children while male, I suspect there’s nothing about “traditional gender roles” going on here. But for a moment let’s pretend there is. You’re telling me that women are trying to gatekeep childcare in the same way men have tried to gatekeep, say, STEM jobs. Okay, why is it “That’s their problem and they need to sort their shit out or else” when men do it, but “No we’ve got to go fix society together” when women do it? Is it because you’re a god damned hypocrite?
I’m more likely to believe that, just as Republicans are told by their preachers that Democrats are baby eating evil demons, women are similarly told to believe men are all sexual predators. A man shows up and it’s “okay, who’s he here to rape?” If I were to ask you “Okay, what action does our innocent dad who’s just taking his child out to play need to take to not have that happen to him?” Your response will almost certainly be “Oh I dunno, have you tried not being a rapist?” To which the reply will come back “Yep. I’m in my 36th year of not raping anyone. But I still get treated like this.”
Naw man, women aren’t responsible for how they think or act, ya gotta fix society. So, millennial dads have been stepping up, they’re considerably more present in their children’s lives than previous generations of men, way less likely to report having never changed a diaper, and they’re treated like shit for it by women. This is not women’s fault, it’s “society.”
I think it’s society’s fault that there are diaper changing stations in women’s rooms but not men’s rooms. That’s society’s fault, whatever agency is responsible for the ADA, that governs how wide bathroom doors have to be and how high light switches go above the floor needs to get on that shit.
What I have seen of feminism is it’s okay for women to say “I miss when men died in wars” but it’s not okay when men say “Get back in the kitchen.” I’ve been often told - and NEVER shown - that feminism is about “equality.” Which is why I ain’t one. Feminists would rather have me as an enemy and a boogieman than an ally. I shall oblige.
Women aren’t the ones in charge of society and they never have been. It’s not like there’s a matriarch that’s telling women “men are all coming to kidnap your children”. That’s something created by the literal government in the form of the Stranger Danger propaganda campaign and then spread by mass media. Women didn’t do that. I hate to break it to you, but men did.
But it’s also not your fault, just because other men did this.
You’re really confusing liberal feminism with feminism as a broader movement. Liberal feminists love to individualize sexism and claim that the cause of sexism is bad individuals. That’s an incredibly wrong headed idea that fails to actually address the root causes of sexism (class society) and instead just heaps blame onto individual men for being baddies. Sadly, because we live in a liberal society, liberal feminism has become a dominant ideology and so then men like you see the obvious problems and just assume this applies to all feminism.
And that’s not your fault either. That’s the fault of class society, again, which wants to atomize and individualize feminism so we don’t build solidarity.
That’s the problem right there. Feminism (our at least your brand of feminism) somehow removes women from society absolving them from any responsibility of the negatives they may be a part of.
At least in America the second most powerful group in society has always been white women so the idea that men have dictated all the negatives of American society is bullshit. How is it that men are responsible for 40% of slave owners being white women and 52% of Trump voters in 2016 being white women? It’s 2024 at what point do we hold women responsible for still holding on to ass backwards gender roles and stereotypes when we have so much info that prove most if not all of it is bullshit?
I get your point. I am not saying I didn’t cry a bit the first time I actually listened to Cats In The Cradle’s lyrics. Or the other times.
Also, I’d rather have my kid have their own role model, not to have to share a government issued one with 30 other kids. Fuck.
In that case, men need to work less so we don’t have to use pre/elementary/middle/high schools to replace the parental figure.
Also maybe abolish the nuclear family and go back the premodern gens (i.e. extended family community) so that boys have lots of men in their family to look up to. Even if they don’t have a dad they might have an uncle, grandpa, or one of their 20 older cousins to look up to.
It’s as if you are saying people should be brought up by their families and not mass media, ads and random influencers
I’m really worried about the iPad toddlers and who they’re going to grow up to be.
This is one of the reasons I’m terrified to have kids. How the hell do you deal with other parents’ failures? Your kid either gets to be a mindless consoomer due to peer pressure, or a social pariah because he doesn’t live his life on a screen.
Hell, I have problems with maintaining ties IRL. How is a kid supposed to deal with that?