What Adolescence gets wrong. Violent misogyny wasn’t invented overnight

[IwantToRetire]

It would be easy to blame the manosphere for this dire predicament. That’s partly what Adolescence implies, with mentions of incels and teenage boys “taking the red pill”, much to the bewilderment of coppers and parents who aren’t as steeped in internet culture as their own children.

But, as the Centre for Social Justice warns, Andrew Tate and his merry band of masculinist blow-hards are merely symptoms of an underlying problem

This is not to downplay the threat of online radicalisation or the shocking levels of misogyny on the internet. But there are plenty of young men who don’t succumb to the siren call of Tate and the manosphere – we should be asking what makes a person vulnerable to their influence in the first place.

Violent misogyny wasn’t invented overnight. In 2010, the now-defunct Zoo magazine printed advice from actor and advice columnist Danny Dyer telling a heartbroken reader that he should “cut his ex’s face so no one will want her”. Dyer said he was misquoted and does not condone violence against women.

The manosphere isn’t a momentary blip – it’s the latest continuation of a long history of hatefulness, now made hypervisible and accessible on a scale that even the unrepentant lads mag hack would find shocking. But the factors behind the alienation and disenfranchisement of young men have been brewing for years now. Tackle those first, and the rest will follow.

Extracts from article in the i https://inews.co.uk/opinion/columnists/what-adolescence-gets-wrong-3590919

Can also be read at https://archive.is/ZFkqy

How many of these teenage trouble makers have positive role models in their lives especially from a young age? it is not really hard to join the dots to be brutally honest

Exactly, men and boys have always been vastly more of a problem in terms of violence and criminality yet the default response of society has traditionally been to control what women are allowed or not allowed to in order to control the problem men and boys. Fundamentally wrong.

What is uniquely difficult about being a man or boy anyway?

Linked but on a slightly different aspect.

Someone on facebook was talking about her day as a teacher in an all boys school.

In three different sessions she had problems. One they just ignored her. Another where the class appeared to be going okay was disrupted by a stray boy wandering in, and egging the class to stop working. And another was personal insults and swearing.

There has long been this traditional notion that you need to have women (and girls) around to "socialise" men. We seem to have got to the point where this supposed female (feminine) calming rational influence no longer exists. (If it ever did)

Judging from comments by women whether as teachers, or just being a pedestrian in a public space its all gone a bit "Lord of the Flies". Or maybe that pack behaviour has always happened.

And yet newspapers are all going on about a crisis in masculinity, when is seems the problem is an apparent need to emmulate extreme machismo.

Maybe the problem is too many boys are feeling pressured to be some sort a macho style predator, and would actually prefer just to get along with life in a not overly masculine way.

Maybe it isn't a crisis in masculinity, but the failure to allow boys to just be whatever type of young person they want to be.

Although I find it strange this notion of because boys are discriminated against they dont do well in school, when it has long been said that girls do better at schools, because they work harder, are more conscientious.

Added to which even if girls do better in exams and start off getting better jobs, they soon lose this advantage once they become mothers.

I instinctively never liked Danny Dyer but without any good reason - just a gut feeling. Good to now have a reason.

I realise not the main point of your post, OP, apologies, but that stood out to me.

Greater physicality

"Maybe it isn't a crisis in masculinity, but the failure to allow boys to just be whatever type of young person they want to be."

To an extent, yes, but isn't the issue how boys and men learn to use their strength for good?

My DD has an interesting observation, she’s a Teacher in a very rough High school, been there 10 years now and is a HoD.
She’s called a fucking bitch daily by boys twice her size, even though she is ‘respected’ for being ‘tough’ - ALL the nasty/ violent ones have Fathers who are drug dealers/ minor gang members. She had a Father threaten to slash her face when she was 8 months pregnant, he’s now dead, killed in prison.
All the nicest, kindest, gentle boys she’s ever taught have been brought up by single Mothers who were DV victims, witnessed by the Son and who had decent Male role models in a GF or Uncle.

The change in the expectations/lifestyles of women absolutely can't be underestimated.

I think it's a really valid point that women were around to tend & befriend, spoil & sooth & be the emotional support animal for millenia.

Only the last 40/30 years have women become truly independent through gainful employment. We have our own homes. We don't have to stay in shit relationships to feed our kids. We don't have to accept sexually charged 'banter' as part of the package in our workplaces. We can get business loans & homes & cars.

Men (as a class) are rapidly losing control & the new expectation to see women as normal sentient beings is making some men fucking furious.
This is, of course, womens fault for changing the balance very slightly in their own favour, and is not seen as an opportunity to improve their own behaviour.

Men have the choice to either change and mellow and become someone who contributes positively to maintain a relationship, or they rail & fight & thus a Tate is born.

What influences the choice?

I haven't been able to get all the way through it yet, and while I agree that this problem has always existed, right now we are dealing with a new problem, which is parenting by algorithm.

All children who are using social media are being groomed by algorithms which are quickly able to identify what interests the child, and show them more of it. The interest has to be there in the first place, obviously, though the child may not even be consciously aware of it. But once it's identified the child is then firmly pushed in that direction. So we've got 9 year old girls obsessing over anti-aging serums and posting videos of themselves dripping it on their face (and there's something very similar shown in porn, isn't there), twelve year olds talking about gender identity, and adolescent boys developing an obsessive interest in wanting to reenact (and film and post) violent acts.

It's true that we've never worked out a way to deal with what seems to be the innately violent nature of men but this does seem to be making things worse right now (and adolescence just holds up a mirror to that, it doesn't suggest any solutions).

The dad never hugged him once,just tapped his shoulder,where was the mother on an evening?why do they not know where their 13 year old was at 10.30 at night?

What is so depressing (and there are very many depressing trends on this) is the view that it’s a zero sum game - the view that any progress addressing centuries of sex discrimination of girls and women causes a loss (of status? Face?) for men and boys. Society is better if circumstances improve for everyone.

@BorgQueen I'm a single mum bringing up a son after escaping DV, so thank you for that...I worry every day that I'm not doing it right, that my benign influence will not be enough to cancel out his dad's malign emotionally abusive (and every other way abusive) input...but most of the time DS is a kind, thoughtful and considerate boy and I hope to be able to make that all of the time before too long...

Yeah I really did not buy that a seemingly fairly intelligent boy with a normal family like that would turn around and be so violent tbh. I work in mental health and usually there's some trauma or the male role models are similar in terms of violent behaviour etc
Obviously it's true that any boy from any family can get weird ideas in their heads from being online.. but the step up to actual serious violence is a big one.
Sadly sexual coercion, domestic violence and sexual assault would have been more realistic than stabbing/murder.

But yes misogyny was rampant even when I was at school and it had nothing to do with being online. Anywhere there's a bunch of similar aged adolescent boys together you'll get some of that rhetoric.
Hardly new. Ffs you've got classic philosophical texts with chapters devoted to how women are not real human beings.. we've got hundreds of years of history.
I do get the criticism that this program made it look a bit like 'wow where could he have got these terrible ideas from. SOCIAL MEDIA!! WWOOOOOO BE AFRAID!!' As though there haven't been incidents like this throughout all of our lifetimes and we know full well boys and men do not need social media to think and act like this.

Another thing I thought about was the similarity to high school shootings in the US which pre date social media. Bullied ostracised kids who feel entitled to attention they feel they aren't receiving. Mostly boys

Don't get me wrong I thought it was good TV. It just irks me when people start saying 'really makes you think!' As though i haven't thought about this my entire life.
And if you have kids surely you'll habe thought about this before?? Surely you've had the conversations with your children? My 10 year old son knows what misogyny is. He knows who andrew tate is because we listened to some and then discussed it together.
Because I know full well what he will get exposed to at school, the ideas he will hear. And that's even if he has no social media whatsoever.. which obviously he does not as he's 10.

I read an article written by a female
to male transgender transitioner. The article described the overwhelming impact of testosterone in terms of feelings of competitiveness and how quick anger turned to feelings of aggression. That individual learned to control those impulses and ultimately found them quite empowering, but it got me thinking more widely about how we may underestimate the impact of hormones on men and the importance of giving them strategies to manage them as they go through childhood and adolescence.

As a parent of boy-girl twins I also feel quite well placed (albeit on an anecdotal level only) to look at the impact of socialisation. In my case DD was the one into rugby, tree climbing and adventure and DS was the one into nail varnish, cooking and animals. I’ve never believed in gender-specific interests so we just had a range of toys/activities and they were free to choose what they wanted. Despite this equality in the home environment, it always struck me how much more physical DS was when it came to expressing anger. He would take it out on things or his sister. We had a few years of quite robust parenting required to overcome that. He’s now a very affable peacemaker type as an adult. But I can easily see how he’d have become a violent man had I not been so hard on any display of violence as a child. By comparison, his sister had some terrible hormonal rages as a teen but these were far more inwardly directed and never involved breakages of anyone’s belongings other than her own.

When I first became a mum, I used to get annoyed at the gender stereotypes forced on girls. The fact that shoes were of far poorer quality because girls aren’t expected to be so active was just one example (we ended up having to buy boys’ shoes). As my children grew, I saw how damaging it also was for boys, with qualities deemed feminine often being subject to at best teasing, at worst scorn and bullying. Fortunately, my son was never bullied (I think the fact he was really god at football - an ‘acceptable’ sport for a boy - helped) but we had many a conversation trying to undo some of these harmful messages, many of which were from wider society rather than his local community. I’ve developed a real interest in this messaging since and I think some of the difference in how male/female aggression is manifested is definitely explained by socialisation.

I'm far from a perfect parent but I’m proud of the adults my two have become. I think giving them the intellectual understanding that it’s ok to just be who they are, like what they like, and above all be a good person who doesn’t use violence or manipulation to get what they want but instead use proper communication is one of the best things I’ve managed. And for the formative years I did that as a single parent, where all my friends were also female, so I’m not sure I fully subscribe to the fact that boys need a father figure either.

What boys need is the feeedom to develop a personality not ‘become a man’, and guidance on how to manage anger and frustration - just as girls do.

I think it has been shown in relation to high school shootings that the risk of another shooting goes up in the 6 weeks after one has happened, and that how it is reported on in the media can influence this because people who are that way inclined often feel admiration for the shooter and want to be like them, and so copy them. This was shown in the Nicholas Proctor case, when he talked about wanting to be famous like the shooter at sandy hook. What media they are consuming does have an impact. Centering the victims rather than the perpetrator makes it less appealing to people like him. Yes, media promoting violence against women has always existed, but not in the current form.

It also seems to be the case that all of these boys have a long history of behavioural problems/violence before they kill someone. It doesn't just appear out of the blue in boys who were decent up to that point.

I think that there's a lot in this. And it doesn't just affect the violent men. Historically men haven't had to do the juggling act between work around the home (be it cleaning cooking childcare or laundry) as the wife/mother was pretty well forced out of the work force (often after marriage rather than after children). Men don't seem to like not being the centre of attention/looked after at home - hence the almost daily threads here about men who walk out on their responsibilities especially once they are parents. Sadly society is all too well set up to enable them to do this - see the DC EOW, pay a pittance towards their costs which is nowhere near the childcare bill the mother has to enable her to work. So either the state foots the bill for them or the mother is on the bones of her arse working and and doing all the day in day out grunt work of child rearing and domestic labour and Disney Dad waltzes in to show the DC a fun time (or doesn't bother once he's shacked up with the new female support animal cooing all over him).

@BorgQueen@chaiformeplease
Where does this leave theories about absent fathers? Aren’t the drug dealers absent fathers? Or does this show that the kid grows up more rounded if the father is absent generally?

Agree this has all been brewing for years

Excuse me for a derail into the anecdotal, but I want to say something positive to the single mothers of sons here like chaiformeplease :
some of the kindest, most 'human' men I know were brought up by single mothers. Their mothers were their positive role models on how to be a decent, thoughtful, respectful human being, regardless of sex.

I recently spent a few hours in the company of one such young men, who I knew as a little boy, and what impressed me was that he could talk in an amiable manner to the four women he was with, as if <gasp> we were all just people having coffee and a chat. In fact we were mixed: older/ younger/ lesbian/ straight/ female/and one male, but he just fitted in and interacted delightfully.

The principal positive role-modelling he got was from his single mother showing him how to be a good adult human in a world of lots of other kinds of adult humans.
He is now a role model to boys, showing them that being a man doesn't mean copying the Tates or ConorMcGregor.

Anecdotal, I know, but I really wanted to point out that many successful, balanced, respectful men were brought up with an excellent positive role model:
their mother.

From what I can tell, other men, so obviously they all blame women.

Hard agree and also note that when a man leaves a family it is unlikely they would have been a positive role model. Their idea of social norms and cultural beliefs that child neglect abandonment is fine are not what any child deserves. Tax dodging to evade maintenance and other petty crimes (which it should not be seen as) should be more regulated.

Of course it's not new, either in fiction or reality.

Yes we have always had problems with disenfranchised boys and young men, whether they are turning into US school shooters, getting tied up with Islamic terrorism, jumping into gender identities or dragged into Incel culture. The fact there has always been an underlying problem doesn't negate the fact that these new issues are a problem and one that a lot of parents are not really aware of. A lot of boys, a really large amount, spend the majority of their time in their rooms on computers while parents are downstairs thinking they are doing a great job without seeing any looming issues.

Personally I think the issue lies with the fact that young boys are told they are intrinsically better than females from a young age, they get away with more, they win at primary school sports, are allowed to be more violent, they get praised for less. Add in the parenting that holds kids in general to such low expectations and praises them for doing baseline things - you get a generation of boys expecting praise, expecting the world to recognise their intrinsic brilliance. As they get older they become aware enough to look around and see that, in fact, they don't have much going for them at all. That girls are ahead and uninterested in them, that society in moving on without their input, that they might have to put in some effort to have the life they expect, they feel cheated and angry at this.

These cultures offer a short cut, a lazy way to get what you want without having to work, empty praise and a supportive community without hard work. You can shoot up or bomb people and go down in history, with a lot of virgins waiting for you in some cases. You can put on a dress and be praised to high heaven, which is easier than keeping yourself clean and healthy and attractive. You can choose an avatar and be someone else entirely, often thinking this is your true self. You can work the system to get girls rather than brush up on actually being nice to them - shortcuts, praise, a sense of belonging all ready for the taking without anything like studying or exercising or reflecting on your own behaviour.

I don't think the show did try to pretend it was all down to the online "manosphere". Episode 3 clearly demonstrates Jamie's low self esteem, and low sense of self worth. He believes he was a disappointment to his dad, because he wasn't good at sport. He firmly believes he's ugly (wonder who planted that in his head?). The bullying at school, being spat on /pushed around /tripped up all compounded the feelings of not being good enough, plus if course the online bullying. One of the most important things we can do for our kids is give them self belief and self worth, it will them in good stead to deal with all the shit they have to deal with every day. Somehow Jamie's parents had failed to do that.