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.”
Feminism is a political movement in the same way the civil rights movement was/is a political movement or that the gay rights movement is a political movement. It’s a rights movement. It’s a resistance movement, resisting patriarchy and misogyny.
It is self evidently true that women deserve rights. It is not the job of women to convince you they deserve rights. Feminism organizes women against the systems that oppress them. It does not appeal to the humanity of misogynists.
I agree it is self evidently true that women deserve as many rights as men. I’'m 100% in favour of this. But words ae important and “feminism” is not called “woman rights”. Feminism is often framed as being against patriarchism, which is implied to be a male-generated problem. In reality patriarchism is enabled and often enforced by both men and women, when they pass down to their kids a particular set of toxic and limiting cultural values. I was grown up with the idea that I have some specific duties towards my family such as providing for them. My wife has a job that could never provide for all of us, but somehow that’s ok, while I have to strive to get a high paying job or feel like I’m a failure.
Ok this is going to be longer than I expected but I have things to say. I have been on both sides of interview panels. As an interviewer I always used methods as purely objective as possible to evaluate candidates, but i still ended up knterviewing 48 men and 2 women in one of the rounds. Why? Because I didn’t receive any CV from women. I mentiond this to my boss (a woman) and within three months all the management layer above me was populated with women. I can’t say I liked the solution, especially as the actual teams were still 95% male.
In personal life, maybe this is just anecdotal but my parents never taught me any housekeeping skill and they actively tried to dissuade me when I tried, whether I was trying to iron a shirt or wash some dishes. This is systemic, as the girlfried of my flatmate saw me passing the hover once and said that she would leave her boyfriend if she saw him do that.
So my position on this is actualy whataboutist and the point here is that maybe it’s not you but a considerable chunck of women is actively participating in patriarchism while others react to it in a sort of class warfare which puts men, especially ones that are younger and less experienced at navigating life, in a very difficult spot where they are shamed by both sides and end up feeling like failures. Of course they will follow whoever tells them they deserve better.
Soooo maybe I’m full of shit, I actually don’t know. I grew up in the 90s, which was a different planet, and I’m just trying to be reasonable.