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.”
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.
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The mis-characterization of feminists into “feminazis” started with Anita Saarkesian. I remember gamers coming after her hard during gamergate for literally no reason at all. If you go back and watch old Feminist Frequency episodes she wasnt saying anything insane at all. They were all solidly rational observations about the way women were portrayed in games.
The term feminazi began long before gamergate and the movement was a genuine protest against the relationship between game studios and the people pretending to be journalists and honest reviewers.
I watched as the incels and right wing nut jobs rolled in and made it about who Zoe Quinn was fucking. What people don’t remember is that she was a narcissistic sociopath who ruined anyone who crossed her and got actual feminists chased off the internet. Reframing the debate to be about slut shaming allowed the incels and the faux feminists to hijack any meaningful dialogue and all the reasonable people distanced themselves from the issue.
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?