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.”
This is the same argument as with “All Lives matter”. Why do people have to be against feminism to talk about issues men face? Because that is what I am seeing. On Lemmy or even Reddit, I didn’t see people laugh about male domestic abuse victims. But literally every discussion about it had misogynistic and anti-feminist comments.
The difference between All Lives Matter and this is that there really are gender-specific issues affecting men, and from their side, they feel as if they were All Lives Matter-ed. Think of it as not backlash to feminism, not a zero-sum game. Boys are just now getting to be against feminism because both the mainstream and idiots like Tate tell them that that’s what this is about, and they have no better ways to cope with it.
Because historically bearing rare exceptions, the Feminist Movements have largely been anti-male, anti-trans, and anti-gay (Unless it’s lesbians of course)
Seriously look into the Vagina Monologues, it’s considered THE definitive feminist piece… in it a woman and a man having consensual sex is considered this great tragedy, but an older woman turning a CHILD into a lesbian by traumatizing her with sex (I know, that’s not how that works, but it’s how the play says that works) is said to be a good thing… even including the line “If it was rape it was good rape”
The Feminist Movement simply aren’t the good guys (no pun intended), even if we do owe it for Women’s Liberation