- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Trying to understand why I had these opinions, I recalled how much different being a man felt at 18 versus 28. I had no money which I presumed meant I had no value to the opposite sex. I wanted the company of women and girls, but I also resented them because I lacked experience in dating and my few experiences were rocky. A lot of magazines and headlines focused on the shortcomings of men and boys in the early 2010s, and it was easy for me to get negatively polarized into thinking it was a personal attack. Academic feminism did and does a much better job explaining patriarchy better than blogs and news sites which boiled down systems of sexism to individual behaviors.
My experience as a resentful teen boy wasn’t unique. It’s the same experience that millions of boys are going through, which they’d ordinarily grow out of by the time they hit their twenties. In my case, it was happening during a period of social revolution on gender and during an evolution in mass communications. Many of these early communities on Atheism, which captured me for their sensibility and anti-orthodoxy, evolved into anti-progressivism and eventually evolved into the Redpill and Manosphere which is how millions of young boys today engage with their gender. At least my period in this mindset was short lived: about two years. By the time 2016 rolled around, I had clearly lost interest in online gender wars as tyranny seemed a greater threat. I was now 24 and actively attending college; I had plenty of friendships and dating experiences with women, and that teenage resentment was forgotten.
The big crisis we’re dealing with today is that the resentment is not only not expiring when men get into their twenties, but it’s being weaponized globally by parties against men’s material interests. What young boys like me didn’t realize when we were being lectured about patriarchy and the problems of men, is that being a man is an extremely privileged position over women, we’re just not old enough to benefit from it yet. This presents a problem on how we teach oppression and discrimination to young people who have little autonomy of their own and feel bad when you imply your immutable characteristics harm people you seek validation from.
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This is something I’ve been harping on for years, ever since I saw my partner’s cousin (16 at that time) falling down the manosphere hole, and had to work to pull him back from it:
There is not an established “pipeline” / messaging to young men, that shows them their place in a positive masculinity culture without being condemning or accusatory. In a vacuum, without any opposing messaging, guys learning this stuff organically or through simple social maturation might be enough in a leftward-shifting society, but there’s an entire developed pipeline to capture young men into right-wing, misogynistic rhetoric, and it’s clearly very successful, and it’s part of a feedback cycle/ political apparatus used to push society rightwards.
I don’t think there are many left wing guys in the US who can speak with credibility to the interests, experiences, and worldview of young guys who feel ostracized by traditional US progressive/ center-left rhetoric. It was actually a “Defend Equality” sticker of an AR-15 over a Progress Pride flag on one of my gun safes that prompted said cousin to ask me about LGBT+ people, which was my ‘in’ to discuss all the rightwing rhetoric he was being steeped in. That’s not the kind of thing that you generally see welcomed in most progressive spaces.
In a vacuum, without any opposing messaging, guys learning this stuff organically or through simple social maturation might be enough in a leftward-shifting society, but there’s an entire developed pipeline to capture young men into right-wing, misogynistic rhetoric, and it’s clearly very successful, and it’s part of a feedback cycle/ political apparatus used to push society rightwards.
Yeah I’m with you there. As someone that lives in a relatively socially conservative country, I can’t think of too many older men I knew growing up that wouldn’t have been / probably have been sucked into this culture war shit. Because none of this is new, it’s a conservative push to restore gender roles and boomer humour and boys will be boys and greasy old film execs getting away with sexual assault.
I don’t think that the answer is necessarily older friends. If it was just a case of needing older male role models to talk to, then this conservative shift would’ve started with the older millennials already. Because every second person I knew came from a divorced, usually fatherless household.
The difference is that we weren’t listening to jackasses whose qualifications are hosting Fear Factor lecture us about gender roles and politics. We didn’t even have the kind of ‘media’ when I was in my early 20s, unless you count greasy TV preachers. So actually what the fuck has happened.
Maybe the answer is to get Guy Fieri doing a leftist podcast because the kids seem to love having reality stars from yesteryear lecture them about politics and social issues. But I dunno, I think the media that we consume in general is part of the issue. Why isn’t Sonic the Hedgehog an anti-authoritarian hero anymore? The kids need punk rock, not podcasts. Not whatever the entertainment industry is offering right now if it’s being beaten by Joe Rogan and a microphone.
Also just want to say, this author talks like going through a woman hating phase is normal for an 18 year old because of not having money and confidence. Which fuck that, it’s not only men that don’t have money and confidence or experience when they’re young. And that wasn’t a ‘normal’ phase for teenage boys to go through when I was that age.
Which after my long rant (sorry, I’m fairly stoned) brings me to what I’m actually agreeing with in the first place. It’s definitely this pipeline, as you said. And lack of a good leftist or progressive pipeline.
The thing this article touches on, and what I’ve found people really need to understand, is what privilege is and what it represents. It took me to a similar age as the author (early 20s) to recognize it. I find most people don’t even in much later years. They feel attacked for having it, and don’t think they do, so they resent those they feel are attacking and right wing groups feed that resentment.
I know I’m preaching to the choir given this community and server, but anyone else that comes across this statement, please understand you can still be privileged in some ways, even if you’re very much not in others. You can grow up in poverty, in a broken home, or no home, picked on and bullied, and still benefit from an interviewers racism or misogyny. You may even think “fuck that, I was the best qualified” or even “I was the only one that applied” but it’s always possible the company in question already had a reputation amongst disenfranchised groups to encourage exactly that situation. Without trying, you could benefit from a system that holds people back. That’s privilege. It’s not always getting a head start, sometimes it’s just not being set back as far as others.
Honestly, this may be one of the concepts that it would be better to bring to people once they’ve already found some kind of leftist solidarity. If you take someone steeped in right-wing rhetoric and the first hurdle you put in front of them is expecting humility and understanding before you even give them a reason to want to understand? I don’t think that’s a terribly effective approach.
If the first thing I say to a cis person is that they have privilege that I lack because I’m trans, I’m doing a few things right out the gate that probably aren’t going to get them to listen. First, I’m highlighting the separate categories that we’re in rather than the unified categories that we’re in. Second, I’m asking them to defer to my experience of the world and to show sympathy and understanding before I even attempt to win them over. Third, I’m asking them to start from a place of humility before I’ve shown that I can be trusted with the very vulnerability that I’m requesting.
I find it’s much easier to look for common ground first and foremost. Find the ways that they have to struggle and recognize that struggle. Show them that I have some of the same exact struggles that they do. Often this comes down to health, finances, or other experiences that are more universal. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a shared struggle, it can be a shared interest. But whatever it is, the first step has to be highlighting affinity. There’s a reason people talk about the weather, because we’re all in it together. Rain falls on everyone.
Once they see that we’re not so different, they tend to be much more willing to hear the stuff that’s outside their experience. You might even be able to highlight patterns like the interplay of intersectional privilege. But if you try to start from there? Good luck.
Complain about traffic. Complain about the price of eggs. Hit enough of those universals and they won’t be so skeptical when you bring something that requires them to stretch a bit to the table.
Our problem, I think, is that we’ve largely got the cart entirely before the horse.
Yeah, I personally struggle with the concept of ‘privilege’ because of this, and I’m AFAB. My introduction to privilege was a man telling me that my life had been easy because of my skin tone. He linked to an article about how privilege was ‘easy mode’ and tried to say that being a rape victim wasn’t an excuse for finding his rape jokes in poor taste, I was born more privileged than him and just needed to sit with my discomfort. I quit that particular activist group after that, since it was clearly not as feminist as they wanted people to think.
This was ten years ago, and I still can’t help but wonder what definition of ‘privilege’ people are rolling with when they use the term, because the pop culture version is so fucked up.
It doesn’t help that I was raised to have the ‘complaining is just insulting people who have it worse’ mindset. Thanks to that, even the ‘not being set back as far’ rhetoric has a big unspoken ‘so stop making a big deal out of it’ attached that the pop culture definition plays into. Like, I chose to be homeless to escape my abusive family, and I feel like a poseur when I talk about it because I’m alive and housed now, so it clearly wasn’t that bad.
