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.”

  • NobodyElse@sh.itjust.works
    186·
    10 months ago

    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.

      • maynarkh@feddit.nl
        291·
        10 months ago

        Boys feeling they don’t have a voice and people are not listening to them? It’s right there in the article

        • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
          102·
          10 months ago

          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.

          • Jax@sh.itjust.works
            84·
            10 months ago

            Or, we could not hijack it and actually focus on making sure young men are heard

        • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
          25·
          10 months ago

          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)?

          • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
            12·
            10 months ago

            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?

            • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
              11·
              10 months ago

              Surrounded by groups supporting and helping women do all this

              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.