Young, Male and Anti-Feminist – The Gen Z Boys Who Hate Women

[MondayYogurt]

Sorry it's Vice, but possibly worth discussing: www.vice.com/en/article/dyv7by/anti-feminist-gen-z-boys-who-hate-women

Half of young men in the UK now believe that feminism has “gone too far and makes it harder for men to succeed”. These are the results of a significant study published in July 2020 by anti-extremism charity HOPE not Hate. The study, Young People in the Time of COVID-19, surveyed 2,076 16- to 24-year-olds on their ideological beliefs.

I'm proposing it's because they believe that some don't care about men's issues but expect them to care about women's issues that aren't caused by themselves - a good example being millions of men deemed responsible as a class for a fraction of a percent being murderers.

Male violence is indeed 'womens issues'. I see your point. Doesn't also affect males. Would not help everyone if something was fucking done

One of my nephews went through this phase . ' Everywhere I go there's someone trying to stop me. And it's always a woman' . The women in question were usually receptionists or secretaries. He is a film 🎥camera man and would be taking his show reels around various companies. So my brother had the Talk with him . About how feminisation of the workplace just means women getting lowly paid customer facing jobs. Where they get to tell people bad news. He is over it now than goodness.

But honestly I don't see many feminists putting the same effort into trying to understand issues like male suicide for example, and there aren't the same number of women claiming to support men's rights as there are male feminist allies. Insensitivity to men's issues is a common reason given by young women in rejecting the label of feminism so perhaps it is worth questioning this as well as why young men reject it.

Swap that round for any axis of oppression you like and it will appear ridiculous.

Why should feminists spend the same amount of time focusing on men's issues as vise versa? Women are the oppressed class.

It's like if you were designing a building and gave the men's and women's toilets the same square footage, then patted yourself on the back for making it "equal".

I think this article is missing the elephant in the room - pornography.

CakesOfVersailles

"I think this article is missing the elephant in the room - pornography."

Yes, in particular the way pornography has influenced behaviour in young men, the normalisation of violence during sex - strangling/choking etc. These were things which just didn't exist when I was a young man in the seventies/eighties. The unrealistic expectations of what women should be expected to do, how they should look and dress. Steroid use is rife in gyms, as young men try to attain their perceived view of body perfection. The steroids in turn can make them more aggressive, more dangerous.

It's like if you were designing a building and gave the men's and women's toilets the same square footage, then patted yourself on the back for making it "equal".

I’d say that happens quite a lot, along with finding women somehow comical and inferior for not fitting neatly into a workplace/car/PPE designed for men.

Such a shame this thread has got derailed into whether feminists care about male suicide.

I have a 17 y o son who behaves in a lot of the ways described in the article and it disturbs me a lot. For example last week he told me feminists were dangerous to women because they are doing #killallmen and if they are going to start threatening men with violence, men have to protect themselves.
Followed with a load of inaccurate and misleading "news" he showed me on tiktok.

It's scary that it's so hard to filter out credible info from bullshit and its really entrenching some unpleasant beliefs in our boys.

I'd say this attitude is nothing new. I remember when I was at university 20 odd years ago and being a feminist was not fashionable, as it is now. By my supposed male friends who would have considered themselves progressive, I would be asked if I was a man-hating lesbian for objecting to things such as men sleeping with underage girls, so I suspect this is just the general attitude of a lot of men: we want to be able to treat women in whatever degrading manner we want and to never have it questioned. Social media just allows these men to group together and bond with each other over their shared hatred of women, but they've always been there.

“honestly I don't see many feminists putting the same effort into trying to understand issues like male suicide for example, and there aren't the same number of women claiming to support men's rights as there are male feminist allies.”

I think men hate feminists because they have an ingrained entitlement that women will give up their time and effort for men. That women are expected to deeply care about men’s problems as much as their own and strive to fix them. And when women turn round and say “no” or “I don’t care” that is perceived as a massive psychological injury, as much as a mother denying her child emotional support. Feminism ultimately enrages men because it’s about women focusing on women’s issues and blaming men for some of them (domestic violence, sexual assault, etc.)

Feminists don’t put effort into understanding male suicide because it’s outside the remit of feminism. Women don’t cause men to kill themselves, nor does men killing themselves oppress women. Yet time and time again women are chastised for failing to centre men in their own civil rights movement. And look, I know many young liberal feminists who are desperate to please men so they say feminism is for men too, patriarchy hurts men, they do fundraising for movember and male mental health week... and yet I know young men who are anti feminist who think that Emma Watson and liberal feminists are all extreme man haters and their inclusion of men isn’t enough, they need to effectively turn feminism into a human rights movement.

Forget the article - a survey based on the opinion of just over 2,000 people of that age group with survey population of 6 million?
Very statistically valid.

The majority of people have too much going on in their lives to have an in-depth understanding of various 'isms'. They believe what little they come across. So if the majority of people who call themselves 'feminists' behave badly on social media that is what they will think a feminist is.

I work in a male-dominated industry(often called out for how sexist it is). So this is just anecdotal evidence from my experience. My boss, old white male put me charge because of how capable I was. I have worked with a lot of men and my sex has never been an issue.

If asked in a survey none of them would have any idea about what feminism is and probably rank it as having 'gone too far' given the enormous push for diversity quotas etc. But their actions are very much those of equality. So it's not that clear cut.

Also I don't know whether it's correct to say that women often end up with the lower paid jobs. When in fact more women go to university than men, and women are generally more academically able as we cluster around a higher median. While there are more men at the upper and lower end of the scale.

All these 'more women end up in lower paid jobs'? Why?
Is it because of childcare?
Or that men of similar life circumstance have access to magical highly paid jobs, such as the trades?
Why don't we encourage women to be more ambitious? We see this bullshit here all the time, women wanting jobs with 'satisfaction' and happiness . People still find it strange that a woman is ambitious, all out for money and hard as nails. THAT in my opinion is true sexism.

@TheLastLotus

Forget the article - a survey based on the opinion of just over 2,000 people of that age group with survey population of 6 million? Very statistically valid.

The majority of people have too much going on in their lives to have an in-depth understanding of various 'isms'. They believe what little they come across. So if the majority of people who call themselves 'feminists' behave badly on social media that is what they will think a feminist is.

I work in a male-dominated industry(often called out for how sexist it is). So this is just anecdotal evidence from my experience. My boss, old white male put me charge because of how capable I was. I have worked with a lot of men and my sex has never been an issue.

If asked in a survey none of them would have any idea about what feminism is and probably rank it as having 'gone too far' given the enormous push for diversity quotas etc. But their actions are very much those of equality. So it's not that clear cut.

If the selection method is sound 2000 people is plenty for a survey population of that size.

I spoke to some young guys who were anti-feminist a couple of years ago, and what struck me was they despised even the most milquetoast, men pleasing feminism. Their ire was very strongly directed at modern liberal feminism, and they hated Emma Watson. And this surprised me. I said: "but liberal feminists are very pro porn and pro prostitution, they say that patriarchy hurts men, that feminism is for men to...I don't really see how this is opposed to your interests." And then I told them about second wave feminism and how that would have really pissed them off, and one of them replied that second wave feminism seemed "threatening." I just don't get why young men are so upset by feminism when it has bent over backwards to accommodate and please them.

In other words, some of their criticisms will be valid, others will be just an excuse for their misogyny.

You can say exactly the same thing regarding the misandry wildly practiced by militant feminists.

I think Tritemale had a lot of worthwhile points, too.

It's not useful to totally mash together young disenfranchised men with incels. Or if you want to, you need to justify it.

It's also very significant that the attitudes of the young men to feminism are pretty similar to the attitudes of young women. What this says to me is that in some way, it's not speaking to them and even repelling them. And saying t's just because young women want men to like them is not only dismissive, it gets right back to the tactic of feminists only listening to the voices of women who say things they want to hear - the rest are handmaidens. It's self-serving in an immediate sense but it hasn't done anything for feminism in the bigger picture.

At a more basic level, some of the problem for these young men comes, as a pp said, right out of inequalities.

One of the biggest problems with identity politics is that when you have individuals who have are on the bottom of the pile, not much money, not many prospects, ad they are being told they are oppressing others because they belong to a particular race, or sex, or whatever, the outcomes of that are not good. When they know lots of other people in the same boat, so they are not individuals but a group, it gets worse.

Because from that perspective it looks very much like you yourself are being systematically oppressed, and one of the justifications for that is your race and sex and maybe even sexuality. The helps being offered to others, scholarships, classes, focus groups, etc, for minority students or women, aren't available to you. The mechanisms supposed to be helping those others begin to look like something of a conspiracy to keep you down.

It's like a textbook lesson on how to create a radicalised group. The fact that there is a much larger group who just feel some unease about it all should be no surprise.

Also - I think it's valid to say, in a thread about why young men don't like feminism, that they feel women don't have sympathy for their issues. It may or may not be true, but pointing out that they feel that way is not saying that FWR or even feminism should be about men. It's an answer to the questions raised in the OP.

There's really no point to discussing an article like this if we're not supposed to talk about how men feel or whether their needs in society are being met. Because those things will affect how they perceive women's issues too.

WeeBisom I'm intrigued to understand why such young men dislike liberal feminism as well since it's very pro prostitution and porn etc.
To be fair, there are a lot of contradictions in liberal feminism, but that's relatively true of many ideological positions.

I've seen 'Men are trash' a number of times in various young women's circles, especially those who tend to call themselves intersectional feminists. When pressed to clarify, I think they are likely to say they are referring to those 'awful cis white heteropatriarchal men'. I suspect that's why it's trendy for some young men in these sort of social circles to 'identify' as non-binary etc so they can claim they are one of the nice kinds of men or not even men at all.

A Facebook group I am in is predominantly for young women, and recently there was a decision to change the group name and description to make it clear it was 'inclusive' of non-binary and femme people. So essentially everyone really. But admin reassured members that men would never be allowed in the group. facepalm

@NonnyMouse1337

WeeBisom I'm intrigued to understand why such young men dislike liberal feminism as well since it's very pro prostitution and porn etc. To be fair, there are a lot of contradictions in liberal feminism, but that's relatively true of many ideological positions.

I suspect that maybe they don't really clearly differentiate the different streams of feminism. I think that's generally true of social movements, a great many people don't really look into the nuances. We saw that with some of the disagreement over BLM protests for example. For many people they were just a manifestation of an anti-racist perspective, and so anyone who criticised them for their more specific viewpoints was just some kind of racist.

Feminism to most young men is often going to just mean whatever things in their lives manifest themselves under that banner.

I continue to fail to see where there is any equivalence between misandry and misogyny. Men murder women at a rate of 2-3 each week in the UK.

Every. Single. Week.

When men hate women, they kill them.

In my experience, when women have strong negative feelings about men (I wouldn't even say hate, could even be mere ambivalence), their reaction is to avoid and ignore them.

When women are murdering men at similar rates that currently exist for women being murdered by men, I'll listen to misandry arguments. Until then idgaf. Too busy trying to help women not be murdered, or heal from trauma.

@SmokedDuck a very sensible and nuanced perspective.
Discussion of these sort among people ‘in the know’ often degenerate into discussion of different streams of feminism and their benefits etc etc.
But the general public isn’t going to know that.

Most people would either agree or disagree with specific statements presented (e.g should women have equal pay for equal work). But feminism itself is a range of social and political movements, not all of which are always logically consistent.

So for a lot of people the word ‘feminist’ is loaded. If asked whether they were for the dictionary definition of feminism, lots would probably say yes.

*dictionary definition of feminism as a opposed to asking whether they were feminists