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.”
As a (formerly young) man myself, I can say with experience that boys are gullible. If something just had a veneer of plausibility, then that was good enough for me!
Still, this hit hard, because it’s so true:
I faced a lot of pressure to be “tough” and “perfect” (I’m not sure where that pressure came from. My parents weren’t the problem). I also misunderstood that feminism only means fairness and equality. “Fortunately”, I was trying to control an anger management issue, and I only recently realized that the experience had the side effect of teaching me that imperfections are normal and nothing to be ashamed of. Being fair was, well, only fair, so although I didn’t notice it, I never had an issue with basic feminism. I didn’t know much about it, but I wasn’t against it, and recognized that guys who were proudly anti-feminist were almost always jerks that I didn’t want to emulate.
I think a lot of it comes from schools, and in particular physical education and competitive sports. There is nothing wrong with competitive sports but the attitudes around it in schools can be so toxic, and in particular it can be used to create hierarchies. The idea of being good at sports and that being masculine was something I certainly experienced a lot at school. Also people who weren’t as academic but thrived in sports were lauded.
My school had various sports teams and clubs, and fuck all academic activities. Sports aren’t toxic but the attitudes around them can be, and particularly adults who feed in toxic attitudes and values around it.
He is a bad response to a real problem, as is the toxic misandrist movement that seems to pull people away from productive feminism these days.
But as long as reactions to these extreme positions keep us from discussing the underlying problems or reasonable solutions to them, we’ll never find any real solutions.
What “real problem” is he a response to?
Boys feeling they don’t have a voice and people are not listening to them? It’s right there in the article
Personally this is why I think people should be amplifying the messages of worker rights as much as possible. Improving worker rights in this country would make so many people feel heard including many young men.
Or, we could not hijack it and actually focus on making sure young men are heard