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.
George Orwell, before he wrote 1984, wrote a treatise on the weaponiziation of language. It seems like he was right to warn people.
To clarify my post: the thought of what the word “feminism” or “feminist”, etc could be twisted into, reminded me of Orwell’s treatise, and how someone could easily get it in their heads that feminists have an overarching agenda to feminize everyone,. I’d imagine this is especially true for young boys,/menn. The anti-trans and anti gay movement or has pretty much always been framed that way, like the existence of them is going to affect Cis people or some other nonsense that is most assuredly a talking point of the alt right and GOP,. This becomes even easier to achieve if bad actors are being depiberately obtuse to manipulate a populace of young and misguided men, who’ve been left by the wayside by earlier generations who have regressive, “fuck you, I’ve got mine” attitudes.
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
The problem is that people aren’t familiar with what feminism actually is, so that leaves room for that kind of nuttery to get pushed.
There was a video awhile back of a “feminist” combating the practice of “manspreading” on trains by dumping water mixed with bleach onto men’s crotches. Outage naturally ensued, but later it was revealed to be a Russian psyop.
So, yeah, some of this stuff is manufactured to produce rage and sow division. How much? Who knows?
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?
Gladly! I’ll use an example that I myself witnessed (and helped pull me out of the alt right pipeline, funnily enough) but unfortunately no longer have the link to corroborate my story, as it was deleted by the original post author some time afterwards, I’ll also include a timeline of how it gets into the right wing circles and gets spread around, bolded part for those who just want to know the context:
A young feminist makes a post on a personal blog that includes the text “all men are trash” as part of a larger critique on masculine culture and how it negatively everyone, including men. IIRC it was something like “all men are trash, they do bad things [other examples, leading paragraph type stuff]” and then continues in the next couple of lines “That’s what men are supposed to be and are lead to be under a patriarchy, but these values are harmful to everyone, them included, that’s why the men who don’t end up like this, and end up kind and nice, are demonized by those men who did end up evil and cruel, they disprove the need for a patriarchy, [the rest of the article]” (again, this is just what I remember, it may not be fully correct)
Effectively, the author was pointing out that a patriarchal masculine society demonizes men who are kind and help others, while rewarding men who are ruthless and cruel, with the statement “all men are trash” probably being used as an inflammatory statement to make the reader keep reading.*
At some point in the following year, someone in the alt right circle of twitter picks up on this blog and screenshots the paragraph with “all men are trash” and some other minor details that don’t include the part about how the feminist actually critiques the negative influences on men
This screenshot then spreads to right wing indoctrinators, who happily run with it and use to to paint a picture of how feminists hate all men and think they are trash, so as a man you shouldn’t be a feminist, and should hate feminists because they hate you!
Fringe right wing content creators see the indoctrinators takes on this and edit it together with similar examples, some of which are genuine ‘hate all men’ people, others are also taken out of context.
Right wing & right wing adjacent content creators release videos using the edited content to make videos with titles like “FEMINISTS think ALL MEN are trash?!”, where it eventually reaches me,
I find the original blog in order to try to understand why they could possibly think I’m trash and read the rest of the article, I question why the content creator left this out and then start questioning what else they lied to me about, I start watching left wing content creators for alternate perspectives and end up the way I am now: hard core left wing gay guy who cringes at the fact I was ever even right wing adjacent
Ah, ok, I was having a hard time imagining how it could be just taken out of context without just being entirely misquoted. I was making the mistake of trying to imagine the author saying that themselves rather than saying it as a hypothetical quote to then criticize. And perhaps it’s even possible the other way, too.
I appreciate you taking the time to elaborate. At times, I haven’t been too sure what any given “ism” most generally means when different people might misunderstand or even deliberately skew the meaning, and, at least for me, this helped me see a really good example of how that’s done in the context of misrepresenting feminism, in particular. Even without referencing an original source, it’s helpful to see examples to learn how to recognize that when it does happen.
However much is intentionally inflammatory controlled opposition, it will never catch up to the work of people like Dworkin, Solanas, or more recently Julie Bindel.
There are plenty of established, respected feminists, who you could never in a million years claim are a psyop, whose work is taught in academia on a regular basis and whose contents would immediately get me banned off of most social media platforms if I were to swap the genders they’re talking about and post an excerpt.
And this is just the theory aspect.
Let’s not forget the revolutionary additions to the legislative side of things like the primary caregiver standard, or the Duluth model for domestic violence.
There is a reason “feminism” is not called “egalitarianism”.
Yes more modern waves have put some token effort into at least presenting a path for men to improve their lot in society, but let’s be real, conservatives do that for women too, it’s hardly in good faith and it’s fundamentally useless because the focus of the ideology isn’t to improve the lot of everyone.
It can’t be, because it starts from the presupposition that men’s lot is the best lot, and women’s needs to catch up to men’s.
Even when it nominally factors in facts like men being expected to put themselves in harm’s way and die for society it also handily blames men for making the choices that, for instance, lead to war, and it implies that therefore it’s not as important because the fact that the person sitting at a desk sending men to get shot on the front lines also happens to have a penis somehow makes it less problematic.
So yeah, there’s plenty to criticise.
Feminism has some very valid complaints, hell, a lot even, but there’s also a shitton of reasons why your average man can look at your typical feminist and ask himself “why the fuck would I ever side with you?”
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.
Oh no some people were mean on the internet, better throw out all of feminism!
As we all know what small numbers of people on twitter say defines entire groups, that’s how we know all gamers are nazis…