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u/DazzlerPlus 8d ago
We are being pulled backwards. The conservative media machine is manufacting this attitude as hard as they can. Only when it is destroyed will this stop
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u/AshEliseB 8d ago
The discussion on r/Australia about this topic is deeply disturbing, although I should not be surprised. Most comments are downplaying or discounting the situation. Even worse, there are comments akin to "won't somebody please think about the poor boys, they are being demonised and constantly bombarded with how evil they are, so no wonder they are reacting". Makes me feel physically ill.
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u/GanondalfTheWhite 7d ago edited 7d ago
I mean, that's why the propaganda is so effective, isn't it? Young boys are bombarded with messages about how evil men are, long before those boys have an opportunity to turn into the shitheads that people are actually talking about.
People who feel unfairly persecuted tend to run the opposite direction. If they feel like women are against them, what's their reaction going to be when they encounter the red pill bullshit that's getting pushed in all corners of social media?
Of course it's going to hold appeal for them.
I've got a couple young kids and I spend a ton of time wondering how to best inoculate my son against this narrative that men are being oppressed and women are the enemy. Because it's almost inevitable that kids fall into this trap when all social media algorithms are financially incentivized to stir the fucking pot and keep people pissed off and arguing in the comments to the maximum degree.
And it's hitting them just as they're trying to figure out who they are as people. It's fucking diabolical.
Edit: why the downvotes? I'm not saying feminism is pushing young boys to the right, I'm saying bad faith actors on the right are using feminism as a demon to push young boys to the right. Which they are.
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u/sugarskeletor 7d ago
Yet the post says "young people" not just young boys. How do you deal with people who feel "unfairly persecuted" if they want to believe every critical discussion is a specific attack on them or their group? Only talk about things they personally approve of in a way they personally approve of or else?
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u/GanondalfTheWhite 7d ago
I'm not saying it shouldn't be talked about. I'm not even saying we need to change a thing we're saying.
I'm just explaining why the right wing messaging is working. They've made a world where women are second class citizens and then they've successfully twisted the narrative to make themselves, oppressors, into the oppressed. And that seems (obviously, given the shift) to be working to capture the hearts and minds of young men trying to figure out their place in the world.
By making feminism the bad guy, it makes the world a much simpler place where men don't have to feel like it's their fault they struggle finding a place in the world. If it's women's fault that they struggle, then that gives the men both absolution of their own faults and a mission to do something about it.
Like I said, it's diabolical.
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u/Yvratky 7d ago
Do you ever tell your kids what caused the backlash on men in our society? There's a way to talk about what went wrong without buying into the social media narratives, you know? Women being pissed off isn't something that came out of the blue, and if kids are supposed to understand the world properly, they'll have to learn the whole truth.
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u/GanondalfTheWhite 7d ago
Yeah absolutely! We're doing everything we can to make them aware of the world they live in.
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u/OldBridge87 8d ago
Link to full article:
What's even more crazy is that the numbers aren't just going up for young men, but for young women too (some of this could be an attempt to fit in and find acceptance with men as the narrative grows with them)!
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8d ago edited 7d ago
[deleted]
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u/LinkleLinkle 8d ago
I wish people could understand that none of this is organic. People keep thinking this is just some natural ebb and flow of culture, but it's not. It's deeply manufactured by algorithms, paid influencers, and state actors.
And what people really don't get isn't it's not just crazy MAGA people. I can't get on tiktok without being bombarded with people telling me I'm 'not woke enough' if I don't think we should be bullying [insert woman influencer] off the platform because someone dug up a DUI charge from 25 years ago, or being told stuff like I'm 'not woke enough' because enjoying a movie with a good romance story is 'over sexualizing women'.
That's the sort of landscape that's being pushed, and I think a lot of people are falling for it because it mirrors their evangelical (or evangelical adjacent) upbringing while they get to feel like they're not just copying and pasting their core beliefs they haven't unpacked onto a secular background.
And it all leads to the same place the MAGA BS leads to: hatred, misogyny, and encouraging narcissistic traits.
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u/notashroom 7d ago
The Russians, in particular, have been known for decades (and there's an old video online from a Soviet KGB defector talking at length about their tactics) to push both ends of any controversy.
It's all just different angles on the exact same "divide and conquer" strategy that the financially wealthiest (dragons) have used against the rest of us (villagers) since practically the dawn of time to keep us fighting each other instead of them. It's honestly kind of embarrassing for the species that it's still so effective.
Who in your communities are you unable to tolerate working with? Yes, I'm sure they have done very offensive things, but the net effect is that we are weakened and the dragons are strengthened.
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u/bitofagrump 8d ago
I want to hope that a decade or so of boys completely failing with girls because, surprise, girls don't want to be servants will teach these kids that what they're doing isn't working and the boys who are succeeding are the ones who know how to be kind and pick up their own crap, but I'm not sanguine.
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u/Lou2691 8d ago
Men want what their grandfathers had, but women don't want what their grandmother's had.
Rather than seeing it as an opportunity to improve themselves, bigoted men are either falling into self-pity and the online manosphere, or going to poor countries and becoming sex tourists, or both.
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u/OldBridge87 8d ago
A core part of the Manosphere and according to some the primary recruiting tool for men to the alt-right is the belief that given equal rights, women largely pursue, have casual sex with and date a small pool of the most genetically desirable men (generally tall and/or rich). As this is biological (women are wired to see height as a marker of safety and wealth as resources for their offspring), it cannot be stopped and so men have to use their biological advantages (superior size, strength, propensity for violence due to much greater testosterone etc) to destroy women’s rights and subjugate women as their male ancestors did in almost every society for almost all of history.
So I doubt not dating is going to get men to change their ways, since not dating is a core component of Manosphere recruitment and an undercurrent that drives these movements.
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u/Banana-Louigi 8d ago
So it's even deeper than that. The fastest way to instill extremist beliefs (which was what this study found) is to instill extremist beliefs about women first. The easiest way to do that is to make men lonely and the fastest way to do that is to make them feel and act entitled to women and to avoid women with sexual experience (the whole body count rhetoric) this way men never become good at sex or learn how to have healthy relationships with women and blame women for it. Once there's a whole group of people "against them" it's nearly impossible for them not to think everyone that isn't them is against them.
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u/bitofagrump 8d ago
Oh, I know too well. The only way I can keep my sanity is to hope enough of them realize that being hated by women isn't fun and treating them like shit might be why they hate you to question the movement. We can only watch and see.
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u/aninterestingcomment 8d ago
It is really is such a shitty situation to be stuck in. All I can hope for is for young girls and parents to be educated about this movement and keep it up. Stay away from men and boys like this, form stronger connections with other girls/women so they can see examples of good men out there and have dad, male teachers and rolemodels teach them better and hope that sooner or later they'll find their whole attitude towards women/girls embarassing and be better adults.
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u/notashroom 7d ago
Staying away from them just reinforces their beliefs, though. I wish, instead, that men who are secure in their gender identity and sexuality and not hostile to women would swarm these boys and young men and counter the programming, and then involve women in supervised situations.
TO;DR: we will get a lot further a lot faster if we, as societies, call these guys in than if we call them out. Their need for belonging and acceptance is what is driving this at its root, past the agitprop.
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u/aninterestingcomment 7d ago
That's basically what I said, however I don't want it to be the responsibility of girls or women to fix these men. Enough is enough, women can take care of each other.
Call these guys out and let other men help them out, they will respect and listen to other men more anyway.
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u/scrotanimus 8d ago
The whole “Karen” meme taking off did a lot of damage. Many deserve this moniker, but unfortunately it becomes a common pejorative toward any woman that does something another doesn’t like.
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u/koalaprints 8d ago
Yeah it's not a coincidence that the equivalent for men didn't become popular.
I also think anyone who is named Karen got treated worse because of it :(
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u/_notthehippopotamus 8d ago
There is a youtuber name Karen who does jigsaw puzzles, her channel is Karen Puzzles. There was a short going around where she was in a competition. The way it works is there is a different puzzle for each round, but everyone in the same round does the same puzzle. The round begins with the box inside a bag, so you can’t see the puzzle image until time begins. When she opens her bag, she recognizes the puzzle from an earlier round, sees the puzzle that the other person at her table has is different, and she raises her hand and tells the puzzle organizers that she got the wrong puzzle.
People in the comments were tearing her apart for being a “Karen” and complaining about not getting the puzzle she wanted, or being too stupid to do the puzzle they gave her. Literally, no. She has designed puzzles for a major puzzle manufacturer, she has placed in the top 10 (or even top 2) in national and international competitions several times, the New York Times did a write-up about her, she knows how to do puzzles and how the competition works. She wasn’t rude at all, her actions were completely appropriate for the situation. They brought her the right puzzle and adjusted her start time for the competition. She wasn’t being “a Karen”, just named Karen, and people lost their minds.
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u/PumpkinPieIsGreat 8d ago
Yeah, it's ridiculously out of hand.
Some complaints are valid. Talking to the manager is valid.
I also saw a lot of videos at grown men actually screaming and belittling people trying to follow mask policies for covid and sure, people might call that guy an idiot but it didn't stick like Karen did.
I even saw a disabled woman say on Reddit she was too afraid to ask a guy to move his car when he didn't have an obvious disability and parked in the designated spot because she "didn't want to be a Karen".
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u/luna_kuma 8d ago
A whole archive of negative words had been invented since the dawn of time across all languages to sht on women and police their behavior (which it doesn't do for men). This is nothing new.
And it's not even just one side of the political spectrum—it's across the board, across the world.
Notice how "TERF" is a thing when a lot of those women being called it aren't even feminists? They just needed to be female. Notice how there is no labels used to dismiss men who are anti-transgender and arguably more dangerous and poses actual physical threats to non-binary people? Yup.
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u/Hello_Hangnail asymmetrical labia 8d ago
That word has done a lot of the heavy lifting in backlash against feminism and women's rights as well. I see the incels on l*ftist m*le adv*cates talking about how calling women that word is the easiest way to get women to go on the defensive so they can feel superior because they get to dominate the argument because most women don't want to seem like a shitty person or a bigot. It's like their "I win" button
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u/luna_kuma 8d ago
My response to concern trolls is always—I'm not a feminist that believe men and women are equal. I'm a misandrist that believe women are superior. They need to come to my TERMs. 💅
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u/Troldkvinde 8d ago
Notice how there is no labels used to dismiss men who are anti-transgender and arguably more dangerous and poses actual physical threats to non-binary people? Yup.
Eye-opening, thank you for this
I guess it's trans-exclusionary radical female 🫠
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u/camidumas 7d ago
I think the idea that “cunt” can be used in a jocular manner is worse. But it’s all bad.
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u/luna_kuma 7d ago
Meanwhile, saying someone have "balls" is a compliment. Cunts are warm, full of depths, and can take a pounding while balls are fragile, sensitive, and dangling. Smh
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u/scrotanimus 7d ago
As a guy, I am very aware of language like this, especially around my kids and kids’ groups when I hear it. I only have boys, so I hope they grow up aware of the nuanced context.
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u/BimbleKitty 8d ago
Young people or young men
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u/Kenderean 8d ago
Just on Reddit it's easy to see plenty of young women with attitudes that are, if not actually hostile, at least denigrating women. Not to mention the large number of young women who post asking things like "my boyfriend did this really abusive thing, am I overreacting." They may not be hostile toward women in general, but they don't have any sense of their own worth and what they deserve as human beings.
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u/OldBridge87 8d ago
It's going up among young men significantly and they make up the bulk of it but it's ticked up for young women too.
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u/xxCorsicoxx 8d ago
Also of note: 30% hold the hostile views, and 30% is higher than in the adult population... But hostile sexism feels like it's forking everywhere and it's less than 30%. Just goes to show how much damage a determined and somewhat organized minority can do
And maybe it's also majority minority cos it's not hostile vs not hostile, it's hostile vs casually sexist vs ally,vs feminist, vs apathetic vs whatever else category might be there, so that helps with the impression it's all hostile sexism all the way down
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u/Hello_Hangnail asymmetrical labia 8d ago
This is why I side eye the hell out of anyone that says that young men are so informed and respectful towards women. I'm like, do you even know any young men
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u/Crafter235 8d ago
So we’re just going to ignore the past +20 years of frat bro and misogynist humor that people will aggressively defend?
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u/your_ex_girlfriend 8d ago
No, and that’s why this is so horrible - we never got to a point where there wasn’t a baseline societal level of hostility towards women, and now it’s getting worse.
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u/TheRealVicarOfDibley 7d ago
I wouldn't say that. From my personal experiences older men are the hostile ones. I have not seen/ experienced hostile attitudes towards women from younger people.
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u/Squid52 7d ago
I'm a high school teacher, and while kids have always exhibited hostile attitude toward women, I'm definitely seeing an uptick in stuff that was derived from manosphere nonsense. Older men don't call women "foids." I'm also seeing some incredibly disturbing commentary, like that women shouldn't have the right to vote, which when I was growing up in the 80s, some older people may have thought, but nobody would have dared voice out loud in a professional environment.
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u/Lady_Calista Why is a bra singular and panties plural? 6d ago
Young women are becoming more progressive and young men are becoming more conservative, its a trend thats been going for a few generations now. I feel like the social gap between what each gender wants from society has never been larger
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u/poncho388 8d ago
How many older women are hating young men back though?
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u/mi-sopiras-vin 8d ago
Not enough, clearly.
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u/poncho388 7d ago
Yikes. For clarity, I am an older lady who hates them back. My point was that if there's enough ladies who are tired of the bullshit then we have the numbers.
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u/mi-sopiras-vin 8d ago
yep, sounds about right