What's happening to the young men?

[MrsSchrute]

This post is prompted by an article in the Guardian about the murderer of Amie Grey, who has been sentenced to 39 years.
His psychiatric report said he had: 'repressed socially induced trauma resulting from a combination of real and perceived rejections and social humiliations resulting in him feeling alien from general society, a social misfit, somebody who had hardly any friends at school, had never had a girlfriend and seemed to be avoided”

He came from a loving family and had never been in trouble before.

Now, obviously he should absolutely be in prison for what he did, and there is no excuse.

Why is it that more and more young men seem to be so seperate from society? Has it always been the case? Is it the easy access that the internet allows to extremist material that's the issue? What can we, or society, do to stop this??

if the internet is to blame, then how do people explain all the behaviours before the internet ?

Radicalisation of young boys and men’s brains with incel culture, hard core pornography & violent games via the internet & social media -from an extremely young age. Unregulation of access to weapons online & normalisation of “blades” gang culture & the manosphere. Toxic environment = toxic masculinity. No responsibility taking by SM companies & no regulation means more brainwashing. Children being able to access the Dark Web. Normalisation of & exposure to extreme toxic communities via the internet. Young minds need protecting from this. SM & internet access needs to be restricted & Australia banning phones in schools etc should be followed here imo.

I know of so many teen boys, really nice boys with great parents, who just don’t seem to have the confidence to actually go out and socialise in person and spend all their time in their rooms. Only socialising in person is via their parents.

I really don’t know what the solution is now. Honestly it’s too late for this generation of teen boys (& girls) but banning social media for under 16s may not be the solution (or it may be) but it’s a definite start.

Could not agree more.

It’s all interlinked. Porn, online gaming, social media, identity politics. Kids are seeing such extreme things we never dreamed of on the 80’s, and every single online forum is geared towards directing traffic into monetised content which is DESIGNED to be addictive. Games where you never lose. People are obsessed with pigeon holes and finding their tribe, and then the same algorithms drive all their viewing to the same places which reinforce and normalise and then spiral into ever more extreme or narrow communities. Disagreement is hate, everyone I don’t like is an oppressor attitudes just reinforce isolation and dependence on the same ideas and communities.

Schools don’t encourage real competition or achievement - everyone wins a prize. So when these boys hit the real world, which is NOTHING like that, the sense of failure is massive. All compounded by a lack of real world interaction and the funnelling of online content towards porn and hate.

Misogynistic culture is off the charts. Mothers are birthing people, girls are not allowed to
question the hairy bloke in their toilet. Bonnie Blue is making a fortune, heroin chic and women acting like toddlers while making the biggest films of the year is back while woman of the year awards get won by grotesque caricatures made of plastic and synthetic hormones. Women are objects and ideas in a man’s head, objects to be tortured and abused in their pockets 24/7. And then once again young men hit the real world and can’t understand why it isn’t exactly like that at the snap of their fingers.

I’m an older parent and the conversations about Roblox access in my year 1 WhatsApp group are astounding to me. The level of access parents are allowing 5 year olds to unregulated content and contact is shocking and I think indicative things are going to get worse, not better.

What about a disabled woman? Have you ever attended any support groups or social activities aimed at other disabled people like yourself, maybe you'd find someone with similar struggles might understand and you might find someone interested in dating?
Or are you unconsciously discounting disabled women?

I love the internet because it has allowed people who don’t necessarily conform to what society sees as the norm to find each other and find A place to be less alone.

I hate the internet because it has allowed people who don’t necessarily conform to what society sees as the norm to find each other and find A place to be less alone.

It’s very simple as far as I’m concerned. Men are having a wobble because women are surpassing them, and instead of working on their own self development they are taking it out on us.

In two generations women have gone from not being able to open lines of credit in their own name to surpassing men in various aspects (e.g. women are higher achievers in education, more single women own their own homes compared to single men etc. and doing it while still facing discrimination) and men are struggling with this as their sense of self worth is fundamentally linked to their need for superiority over women.

So when you have new generations of men who see the women around them doing so well and doing well without men (and in most cases, in spite of men), rather than doing some self reflection and working on their own self development, young men are instead deciding to lash out at women and working to try and degrade them.

Because we have spent millennia telling men they are entitled to their superiority over us. Men have been told for millennia that they can claim, own and use women as they see fit. Men have spent millennia dehumanising us. So when young men are now being expected to respect, listen to, defer to and give space for women, the spiral begins. And the problem is further exacerbated by the fact that all those men who want “traditional” wives cannot be “traditional” husbands, because they do not have the earning potential, emotional intelligence or strength of character to be sole
providers and leaders. So they want the title and the respect without the work. And more and more women are seeing through that.

They hate us but want access to our bodies. They hate us but need to reign over us to have a sense of self worth.

I am in my thirties and literally all of the women I know (whether single or in relationships) are flying. All the men are floundering. Why? Because the male psyche has not had to do any development for generations. You don’t have to think about who you are or your place in society when you are at the top from birth. And women have surpassed them. And they are angry.

I work with autistic people. A lot of the people I work with have quite ‘fixed views’ that can be hard to challenge.

some of the people I work with have difficulties empathising with others.

This manifests in various ways. I do wonder whether some autistic males are more vulnerable to these sorts of online communities that present very one-sided views and extreme lack of empathy.

I have felt for a very long time that our autistic young males are really vulnerable to getting into trouble along these lines. I don’t think enough is being done to help.

Have you ever heard how gamers talk about women while playing? Or how they talk to women and girls who try and join their sessions online? This behaviour is everywhere I’m afraid.

And why would girls not be kind to him? Is he owed female attention? Should girls be expected to give boys attention? Your way of thinking is part of the problem.

I have just tried to find the original post you quoted because I was so appalled by it but it seems to have disappeared. Yet another man thinking he has a right to female bodies. It’s infuriating! We are not toys to be hounded out to men who are “kind” or “successful”. Being a “good” man does not give them any rights to have a woman for god’s sake. It’s absolutely insidious.

It'll only get worse. A lot of men can't get a date or a relationship these days or otherwise have no direction in life.

We have to stop telling young men that they are shit and that they are problematic for a start.

Young men have grown up in a society with this narrative about them. It’s all they know.

Phrases like ‘toxic masculinity’ are really, really unhelpful.

For anyone interested in further reading, this report is excellent. I first saw it linked to in a MN thread discussing Netflix’ Adolescence. https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/library/lost-boys

It’s very simple as far as I’m concerned. Men are having a wobble because women are surpassing them, and instead of working on their own self development they are taking it out on us.

But we need to do something differently when they are boys instead of just hoping they work on self development surely?

The 80/20 thing tends to be about online dating where there's far more men on the apps than women to begin with.

Honestly I don’t know.
Ours aren’t autistic so what we do might not be effective.

I would make sure I knew what he was looking at online, what YouTubers he watches and watch them myself, if he was communicating with anyone, whilst gaming or whatever.

We are on high alert for the poison that can feed into their minds via WiFi.

And would try and find anything in real life to get him involved with.

Depends on his ability to understand but we continually take to ours about online dangers, ideologies, porn (they are fun conversations), self esteem, worries, they don’t have to be long lectures just loving, checking in, normal things. We watch some inane babble on YouTube with them, their screens are in rooms with doors open and we can see the screens, we turn their log ins off at 10/10.30pm.

I guess we just put as much space as we can between them and “intel” content as we can. What else can we do?

I agree with this. My Ex was autistic.

Unfortunately there is a lot of politics around autism and autism advocacy, where the narrative seems to be similar to the ‘social model’ of disability where it’s the job of society to accommodate, and autistic people have a different but equally valid way of seeing the world.

However if someone’s expression of autism gives them fixed and rigid thinking combined with an inability/ profound barriers to understanding other people’s perspectives ( or perhaps even really grasping that other people have different perspectives from their own), then this is going to create great difficulties for them in relating to other people, and can lead them to being, effectively, psychologically and emotionally abusive in relationships, even where this is not their intention. It’s the one type of damaging relationship where women ( and some men) are not allowed to name the cause or speak the reality.

I think we really need to invest intense resources into helping people with expressions of autism like this to gain the intellectual understanding ( even if they can never have an emotional or intuitive understanding) that other people have perspectives and how they need to grasp and respond to these to have successful relationships.

( And yes Not All Autistic People, but the ones like this deserve support to better understand and navigate relationships).

Does he have a special interest and is that something you can support through a club of some kind. My ds has autism and friendship looks different for him than me. He can do a shared activity on a shared interest and he finds that valuable. He isn't going to sit around chatting.

It also means less time online where harmful content is. This is more important to avoid as he is naive so isn't good at critically thinking through stuff he sees online

The other thing is aee there any autism society youth clubs as some (not all) asd people find friendship easier with other asd people. Also adhd and asd seem a happy mix.

Lots of valid (and some bonkers) points raised here but I also think the utter breakdown of real-life society has a massive part to play.

Children are forced to grow up too quickly (from accessing adult content online to only a 30 minute lunchbreak in secondary school from aged 11, no recognition of the human right of children to play), yet simultaneously completely babied.

Say what you like about organised religion but by God it kept the average person on the straight and narrow. The idea of being shunned by society for things - though imo these were often the wrong things - is such a powerful idea. If boys had irl groups of mates who called each other out on bad behaviour, it would resolve - the problem is, not every teenager has that circle of friends and birds of a feather flock together so while one group of friends might be respectful of women, another group might be full of misogynists who normalise it in each other... Thst said, media / society, backed up by law and then peer pressure worked to make drink driving social-pariah-making, so why can't there be a similar public health campaign about misogyny?

I think social democracies rely on balance and a natural equilibrium. Conservatives are in for a while and have conservative values and then Labour in for a bit who will liberalise more. There was more of a natural balance.

The problem is everything has been so liberal for so long that there's been no balance. Conservatives were just as liberal as Labour. Their most notable achievement under Cameron was gay marriage coming in. Now that was a nice policy but the fact such a liberal policy was the crowing achievement of a conservative government says a lot about the direction of travel we've had. There's been no conservative values for many decades now.

Liberalism has done a lot of good things for women, but taken to its extreme and you end up with Bonnie Blue, Lily Phillips, Only Fans and porn culture being mainstream and normalised/

So women should do even more labour to try and stop the next generations of men degrading and killing women? We should try and reason with our main predators so they stop wanting to kill us? Give me a break. I will not take responsibility for yet another piece of bullshit created by men to destroy women.

There is so much to take in, just within this thread and so many valid points. Lack of investment by Governments, stuffed curriculums that need unpicking and life skills replacing into it, support and places to go for young people in communities. The falsehood that social media sells our kids - be a boss, make loads of money, treat others like s*, what others think is all that matters…. Their young brains aren’t hard-wired to know what bull this is. SM is a fake showreel. The fact that society’s problems have been laid at the door of people on benefits or people in boats is CRIMINAL. While that non-taxed, ‘take the lot’ millionaires just walk away with the lot. It’s brainwashing at its best. We’ve failed young people and allowed toxic people to infect their lives online (Tate et al) and it’s going to take a strong leader to change that.

Society has to do something. You can disagree though.