No they're right actually and they should say it.
The lefts descent into obsession with identity politics means all these boys get from these spaces is essentially being told they're inherently monstrous or will grow up to be so.
12 year old boys are not evil. They're children. And they're susceptible to manipulation from these fucks on the right who have sadly correctly identified that large swathes of the left will ignore and shun them. People turn to extremist factions when they feel ignored and dehumanised.
A 12 year old boy online isn't going to be able to read the nuances in your uber ironic but not really actually ironic "all white men are inherently trash" hot takes. They're going to take that at face value because they're 12 and that's what 12 year olds do. And they're going to feel angry, rejected and judged by your words. And then fucks like Andrew Tate get to swoop in and tell them that you're wrong and start the ball rolling on that indoctrination.
If you're an adult leftist and you honestly think teenage boys possess the wherewithal to purposefully follow dangerous Misogynists like Andrew Tate in order to "preserve their own privilege long term" then I'm sorry to say you're too far gone and I'd suggest logging off and actually trying to have a conversation with a kid who is vulnerable to the grooming of these uber misogynists and treat them as a human being instead of a reflection of an identity you've boxed them into.
You may tick more diversity boxes but you are still the adult. Start acting like it.
If Iām allowed to add onto this, I can say with 100% certainty that being open and honest with a 12 year old boy and allowing him to ask questions that may seem concerning to you absolutely works.
My youngest sibling is 8 years younger than I am, so he was a preteen when I was in undergrad. Heās firmly planted in Gen z territory while Iām at the tail end of millennial, which isnāt important except to say that his unlimited access to YouTube and Reddit was not something I really had when I grew up.
My brother started to fall down the alt-right pipeline. He confessed that his YouTube recommendations were mostly guys talking about gamergate and how the feminists are feminazis and are actually evil (side note: ever notice how the term āfeminaziā has stopped being used since the rise in acceptability of nazism again? Horrible to think about). It could have been really scary, but he pulled himself out.
The key here is that my brother trusted me enough to come to me and ask me questions.
Ive been a very vocal feminist pretty much all my life, and itās a long and glorious tradition in my family, and my mom is the one who taught me babyās first feminism. Because my brother trusted me and knew Iād never discount his opinion for no reason, he asked me what my responses were to some of the videos he was seeing. He said āI think there are some good pointsā and I watched the videos and talked to him about some of the rhetorical techniques or logical fallacies they used. Then I talked to him about why Iām a feminist and what that means.
That dialogue changed everything.
My brother is now starting his first year in college and is taking feminist and gender studies classes, just for fun. He is himself a vocal feminist, and heās so damn proud of himself.
Iām proud of him too, and Iām honored that he trusted me enough to ask me what I thought.
So please donāt write off young men the way the op of the original tweet does, ESPECIALLY not the young men in your life. Be someone they trust to ask questions. Itās the frontline of this battle.
In this same vein, I really feel like people need to lay off on the "so they want a cookie/medal for doing the bare minimum/for having basic decency?" rhetoric. because whatever ends up driving it, the actual effect is to drive people away at the door, to convince them that there's no point in trying because nothing they ever do will be good enough.
social response affects social behavior! if we want people to continue a certain line of behavior, then yes, it has to be encouraged! if you, personally, do not feel up to handing out said cookies, then maybe consider... just not engaging at all? The uncharitable thoughts can stay on the inside maybe?
because if you're so determined to make sure they do not feel welcome here, I'm afraid that there is no lack of welcome to be found on the other end of the rabbit hole
This is the post (posted to r/curatedtumblr) that got me to make a tumblr account.
Seeing this kind of messaging be accepted erased like 10 years of anxiety and tension bitter resentment I had over how leftism and feminism (and to some degree, society in general) views men. A resentment and tension that i'm sure a lot of boys who fall down alt right pipelines feel themselves.
How do you think young boys feel hearing phrases like dudebro gymbro berniebro techbro be used by mostly leftists and feminists to tie a negative connotation to their gender? What about manspread mansplain manchild?
Do you really think they are gonna believe the same people using language like that when they say toxic masculinity isn't saying all masculinity is toxic? Because to their eyes feminists/leftists do seem to use the male gender in hateful rhetoric that suggests a default toxic assumption to masculinity.
Gendered products existing for women is never seen as evidence women think or feel a certain way, but (correctly) seen as evidence marketers are out of touch and don't understand women. Yet we don't give men and boys that same benefit, gendered products existing for men is seen as proof men are all universally insecure. Reflexively jumping to a negative assumption when the same thing we fight against for women, happens to men.
You think boys haven't picked up on that, subconsciously at least?
Talk about male defaultism, the biggest form of male defaultism boys will notice is how often the world defaults to negative assumptions with boys and men.
Back when I was in 1st grade a friend and I went around the school and we showed each other the other gender's bathrooms. Making sure they were empty first and standing guard by the door so we could get out if anybody was coming. Teacher saw this from the other side of the yard and knew we were both doing it because she saw us switch it up as she walked down.
Which one of us you do you think got suspended and spent the rest of the school year not being allowed to be near his classmates of the other gender because he was presumed to be a threat to them and which one do you think didn't even get a phone call to their parents?
In 4th when i asked about the time a girl randomly kissed me without my permission on the school yard i was told it i shouldn't bring it up again because the policy was to always suspend the boy for any kissing on the school yard.
Some years before a girl I meant in after school rec class who was (from my limited memory) very likely ND like me told me one day that she can't hang out around me anymore because her mommy forbade it saying "boys only want one thing". It would be a few years before i'd actually understand what that thing was, but by the time I did. I had such a subconscious shame for my own sexually and anxiety around how hyperpoliced my behavior seemed to be around girls, that it still impacts my ability to get close with people at 34.
I see a lot of the same hesitation I had in high school at even looking at women in some of my younger cousins and nephews. And I hear their younger or more internet obsessed family members already calling them incels over it behind their backs. (Something i'm sure they hear from their classmates too.) No misogyny or bitterness yet needed. They vaguely seem like the stereotype (because part of the stereotype is awkwardness around women) so they've already been cast into it.
I have a said a lot of words on this blog about how we treat and respond to lonely men and boys standing at this fork. On one side, apathy at best that maybe leads to change and hope (this is how the fork will look to them), and on the other side, cathartic bitterness that if left unchecked leads to that one forum.
So over a year after this post erased all of my bitterness overnight, I would like to give back:
We really need to stop throwing that fucking word around like a Scarlett Letter.
Doing so reduces the number of young men who can come back from taking a few steps down the wrong path, and our over-willingness to apply the incel label to boys who haven't even taken those steps just for trying to debrief the emotional load of dealing with their dating anxieties only to get presumed to be speaking from a place of entitlement to sex means we push young men who haven't even taken those steps down the path to bitterness and that one forum.
To quote the op post:
People turn to extremist factions when they feel ignored and dehumanised.
RE the last reblog:
men are rewarded for conforming to patriarchal demands made upon them, any benefit women might get in comparison is potentially getting less harassment (i.e tangible oppression) the policing of mens behavior doesn't derive solely from feminism, yes some of the lexicon comes from terms liberal feminism has popularised, which comes from an oppressed group of people who are economically disempowered and consistently undermined in work places etc - but the policng of men isn't the result of the gains of womens rights, its the internal workings of patriarchal societies exclusivity, where ones maleness is under constant questioning as a function of the way patriarchy maintains the gender norms of male hegemony.
when products are marketed to people, its because we are in a society that is organised around a dictatorship of capital,it is a generalised issue that affects everyone, yes, but on the gendered axis, it is not because they are men that they are targeted, it is because they are proletarians (or a demograph the market seeks to extract capital directly from) under a system controlled by the bourgeoisie and despite it being overwhelmingly patriarchal, it does not undermine that on the gendered axis men are the ones with privilege and potentila access to significantly more privilege so long as they tow the line.
there is something to be said about the way sociological concepts and phenomenon are reduced to individual pathology/psychology, which is also a primary problem with the concept of "toxic masculinity" a term coined by old timey mens rights organising that lack luster branches of feminism latched onto and popularised - despite it being hyper individualistic and overly moralised (I personally think its a useless term) since its only being used by liberal feminism which is just garbage cooption of decent longer standing feminist thought.
when someone is constantly bogged down by social norms that dehumanise them and materially disempower them where only by the good graces of the men in power around them might they get to avoid being harmed or have their gender put to the side so they might get a promotion, it is no wonder that people sometimes fly off the rails and vent in uncharitable and seemingly personalised ways - this is normal and makes sense - what is bad however, si when the contents of venting become a political lines uncritically, which is a problem, again, with liberal feminism, as it is rather conservative with the way it opportunistically uses stand point epistemology to garner authority in inappropriate ways (it can be appropriate but it needs to be principled in more than reformist/liberal schools of thought).
as far as consumerism is concerned, its a non issue and only reflects a very shallow "feminism" this is a non issue unless someone hasn't engage with feminism beyond its most opportunistic and shallow presentations in society, which is plainly a skill issue.
the bathroom stuff in this example is more to do with the way schoolings themselves are authoritarian hell holes that are about teaching discipline to children to obey authority and to act in accordance with their expected gender - when boys deviate from that they are policed, often violently, this is not new, but again, this policing is about directing them towards where they will be most privileged, so the bathroom school incident is largely a moot point other than it being a useful discussion on the way gendered ontologies are see within patriarchal society - which, just because there have been aesthetic incorporations of liberal feminism (a cooption of feminism as a radical social movement, the same as any social movement that capitalism assimilates in order to defang in) does not change the fact that this is patriarchy self policing the people it wants to head it in the future - its ageism and it reinforced the patriarchal notion that men are biologically predisposed to violence and that that inevitability is on the shoulders of women to manage - but in this case it was simply the violence of schooling enaged in gender discipline.
4th graders are not exempt from experiencing rape culture and there is something to be said, again, about gendered ontologies around who is and isn't ontologically capable of meaningfully causing sexual hurt etc - again, patriarchal self policing to weed out men who are seen as less because they are being made less by being affected by the lesser gender, managing membership to the society of men that's membership comes with benefits exclusive to men.
the rec class example, and I have a lot of sympathy here, again is that same policing of the mens club stuff - the very nature of male privilege is that it maintains itself through the constant denial of access to it to other boys/men though the violent policing of what it expects4 - the way you internalised that sounds eerily like potential dysphoria as I personally never felt like the ways I was expected to be and the ways I was assumed to be, automatically, did not fit me (mainly hit hard in highschool) and I was very distressed about this until I ditched the idea that I was more than just a man, that I was also genderqueer and so I found it easier to parry these things because I knew me better than other peoples vapid reductive assumptions - it has been a long journey however since then to unpack a lot of this stuff.
with the term incel, it is, once again, just simply gender policing and reinforcing what is expected of them to be successful or what benefits they receive if they align themselves with the demands of masculinity within a patriarchal society, everyone experiences gender policing, its just the difference is is that there are far more benefits to falling in line for men than for women, though women who fall in line often benefit from that but only at the expense of other women or otherwise marginalised people/men on another axis of oppression other than gender
so while there is truth the the way people who have been victimised by opportunistic power moves that have the aesthetics/lingo of feminism, the power at play is patriarchy's self policing of men as the nature of male privilege is its conditionality.
this isn't to deny that some people have a pathological fear of men (androphobia) but rather that if we be sociologists about this and not give in to the very logics of capitalism, we can see that patriarchy is at play here and that its not solely on the shoulders of women or even feminism itself to fix this, its on everyone to do something, with the one condition that spaces that seek to address these issues do not disregard the role of patriarchy here and do not create a meat grinder for women etc in these spaces when we come together to combat terrible analysis and opportunistic pop feminism.
my main point is, however, is that there are multiple institutions and structures in society that commit violence against people and exploit people, that this is wide spread but does not necessarily constitute a gendered equal to misogyny or transmisogyny, and that through understanding not just generic feminist analysis but also things like class analysis, bio power, etc, we can come to understand this violence and therefore come together in solidarity to give equaity/equality a better shit. thank you for your time reading this
This shit is so exhausting.
1230 words 7339 characters.
Their reblog is 1230 words and 7339 characters of subtly talking down to me about why/how the negative experiences I experienced as a young boy, or other young boys in general experience, are actually good things for men or examples of how women have it worse.
This is your brain on oppositional sexism.
You started running defense for aspects of feminism I never critique.
You talked down to a sexual assault victim (she jumped on me and kept kissing me after i told her to stop) about how what he went thru in early primary school is actually an example of hatred against women and something he benefits from as a man.
Oh, and you missed the entire fucking point of this post. it's not the reality or the logic or the right terms to use to describe what happened. But about how boys feel being subjected to this kind of hyperagency and hyper policing of their behavior, and how they might associate these things with the left or feminism. Even reasonable accountability measures will be rejected by them if they feel they are being singled out for that accountability because of their gender.
(Having every discussion about their issues get redirected to how women have it worse under the patriarchy doesn't help either.)
I can't stress enough how important it is to understand: that a world without bear vs man, or a world where incel wasn't used as a scarlett letter for people who might be growing bitter or misogynist from a lack of success in the dating scene. Or a world where boys and men could talk about their issues without assholes like jezabaeddell talking down to them about how women are more oppressed or how their issues are actually examples of how the world is better for men. Or a world where we treated boy's insecurities not by attacking or mocking them, but the same way we treat girl's insecurities. (with dove commercials).....
Is a world where dems won Nov 6.
Young boys aren't moving right out of some machiavellian desire to gain more power.
They are moving right because they feel like the left only talks down to them.
