With “Adolescence” making waves on Netflix some of the convos we’ve been having about the radicalization of young men have just seemed “off” to me and a convo with a friend really brought it all together in my brain.
A lot of people are talking about T*te and his ilk like his views are new. Like the “manosphere” has created a new type of misogyny.
I think the reality is that he just gave a voice to what a lot of men already thought about women. He wouldn’t have blown up if his views weren’t already popular (just silently so.)
Like did we forget that physical abuse against women used to be normalized? And sometimes viewed as acceptable? Think about when marital r*pe laws were made.
It’s not like we went from a feminist society and the incel brigade started a shift to misogyny. What they /did/ do was give men permission to say these things publicly and out loud again.
The young men and boys picking up this language were already primed to accept it by a society that hated women, their fathers were probably already misogynist (whether that resulted in violence or not).
Is it disturbing that these views are not being proudly proclaimed? Yeah. But this isn’t anything that a whole lot of men didn’t already think - it just wasn’t said publicly with encouragement.
