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.”
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.