While many believe young people are becoming more liberal, data shows that 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative compared to liberal. Around 25% of high school seniors identify as conservative while only 13% identify as liberal. In contrast, the share of 12th grade girls identifying as liberal has risen to 30%. Many factors may contribute to this trend, including the rhetoric of Donald Trump which appealed to disaffected young men, and the focus of progressive movements on issues of gender and racial equality which some young men perceive as a “matriarchy.” However, most high school seniors claim no political identity, and many boys in high school do not actively discuss
I keep feeling that there’s a disaster being brewed there, the only people paying attention to young boys seems to be the alt right, and there’s a need for this which everybody seems to dismiss, every single one of the old style support structures for masculinity have been dismantled over decades, and while they were right to be dismantled all these boys still need the support to actually grow into decent people, and no one is giving it, and these crazies have noticed and are using it as breeding ground for soldiers for their cause. The decent people side must create something for them even if it’s to avoid them falling into these dens of craziness.
Exactly. The response among the left seems to be “ha, fuck em” which is a terrible plan
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You also have issues where high-school educated men have not seen any major benefits to any typical liberal or conservative ideology within the past generation.
On the conservative end, the jobs that the men would have gone into have seen wages and benefits stagnate or drop.
On the liberal end, the status of white men in society has dropped to a more level playing field with class status or wealth being a more defining factor, something which they don’t have.
Alt-right conservatives are addressing the economic issues by restricting the work force (anti-immigration) and increasing the jobs in resource extraction (trashing all environmental laws). On social issues, the alt-right head of family is the man.
Leftists could address these issues better by supporting unions more.
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It’s the corporate-friendly “CeNtRiSt” democrats and MSNBC lib-pundits that don’t.
Like Biden’s admin shutting down railway workers trying to collectively bargain. And then a train disaster happened, like, the next day.
yes, that terrible anti-union Joe Biden, how dare he
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/15/business/railroad-strike-averted-tentative-deal/index.html
President Joe Biden called in personally to talk to negotiators around 9 pm ET Wednesday, according to a person familiar with negotiations. Biden stressed that catastrophic harm could come to families, businesses and communities if the rail system shut down. Sources within the unions were giving Biden’s call credit for helping to get the deal completed without a strike.
“We’re very proud of what was accomplished,” said Jeremy Ferguson, president of the conductors union and one of the leaders involved in the marathon session. He thanked Biden and Labor Department officials involved in the talks for the deal.
I partially blame the Left for not addressing mental health issues for our younger boys and men and not doing a better job at expressing what healthy, happy masculinity actually looks like. So the likes of Andrew Taint, Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh and the likes basically swooped in and took that over.
I’ve got a 15 year old nephew who’s starting his Sophomore year in like a week. I’ve already heard him say some rather disturbing extremist right-wing shit, and sadly his father fucking sucks at being a father so correcting him hasn’t been easy for me (I’m the aunt, his mother is not currently in the picture). And he says this shit with his little sister around too.
Because the right does such a good job addressing male mental health?
Maybe his parents (you and his dad I suppose) should monitor who he follows on social media a bit better?
I would love it if his father bothered to put in effort in raising my eldest nephew, but that isn’t going to happen sadly.
And I never insinuated the right was doing a good job???
Well you blamed the left when honestly that’s about two people in Congress, the liberals are centrists whose job it is to keep another general strike from happening.
Why not blame the right? They’re the ones literally pushing toxic shit on our kids and wanting to start child labor back up.
I sure as hell don’t blame the left. Without the left my kid and your nephew would be working in a mine or factory. And you and I would still be working 80 hours a week to survive.
You completely misunderstood my original post, and from the looks of it, you’re doing it on purpose. Bye.
The rate of girls identitying as liberal is significantly higher and unlike the conservative boys, the rate hasn’t started dropping off. Probably because the girls face actual threats to their freedoms, while the conservative boys’ complaints are about a bunch of imaginary nonsense.
But of course it’s boys who get the headline. The hill is a right wing dumpster bin.
while the conservative boys’ complaints are about a bunch of imaginary nonsense.
The verbalized complaints, yes.
The passive misandry that’s pushing boys right is a very real thing.
Please define passive misandry
A dismissal or lack of consideration for the unique issues facing men and boys and the unique solutions they require. Focusing exclusively on women and girls. Viewing boys as defective girls.
In this thread, here’s a few specific examples
Let’s use their own “reports” to show those women that their boyfriends/husbands/fathers think they own them.
The rate of girls identitying as liberal is significantly higher[…]Probably because the girls face actual threats to their freedoms, while the conservative boys’ complaints are about a bunch of imaginary nonsense.
I was a “Fox News”-viewing turd in high school, too[…]then I grew up.
It’s passive because it’s not direct and focused. It’s more neglect than abuse. Men’s problems are not just secondary; they’re not even worth consideration, and men should just Fix It Themselves.
Schools in particular are extremely geared towards focusing on girls and their successful development.
What male -specific rights are currently threatened or actively being removed?
Several boys only organizations or programs have changed to accepting all genders. Meanwhile, most girls only organizations or programs have remained girls only.
This is right wing nonsense right here ^
What you just said (even if it were true, which I don’t actually believe to be the case) what you said is NOT-infringing on anyone’s rights.
Recess. Unstructured outdoor play including monitored roughhousing.
Do you have kids? I do. My boy has more than enough unstructured outdoor play and comes home scraped up all the time. I’ve volunteered as a lunch / recess monitor. They’re doing just fine and doing young boy things.
Good anecdotal evidence, the numbers are against you
lol what are you smoking? Recess hasn’t gone anywhere lmao. In fact, I fucking wish I had as cool of a playground for recess as my nephew does when I was a kid. Shit’s fancy as fuck, all kinds of monkey bars, rock walls, a puke-a-tron that puts the merry-go-rounds of old to shame, etc… Mind you, he goes to school in a super liberal school district of an already very liberal state. The park district playgrounds have gotten way cooler too, one of the playgrounds at my local park has a fucking zipline now.
The fact that fucking recess is the best you could come up with, and it’s just blatantly not even fucking true, says it all.
Also, girls like outdoor recess too, MORE so than boys, actually, in my experience. What a weird thing to gender.
in my experience
We can trade anecdotes (and insults) all day long and none of it means a thing. You asked for a specific example and I gave you one. Just the first one off the top of my head. Schools in my area are canceling unstructured outdoor play time, which hurts boys more than girls.
Here’s one you’re probably more familiar with, since it’s nationwide: men being pushed out of careers in education.
I’m sure you’ll just move the goalposts on that one too though. “Ah but it’s not GOVERNMENT doing it so it doesn’t count!” or “I know a male teacher so it doesn’t count!”
The gender performance gap in primary and secondary education is, however, well documented, with girls outperforming boys to a statistically significant degree in ELA across the board, but with variability from school district to school district in math. Interestingly, boys tend to outperform girls in math mostly in higher income school districts, suggesting that two things can be true at once: patriarchal attitudes around boys and math performance can and do persist, mostly in white bread communities, AND, the educational system as a whole may be failing some boys, mostly in lower income communities.
Where the discussion gets gross, of course, is where MRA types use these statistics as a justification for misogyny, or on the flip side where those sensitive to that go out of their way to wave stats like this away, sometimes even making a ‘boys will be boys’ argument that is historically problematic for completely different reasons and in the end amounts to blaming the kids for the problem.
Again, two things can be true at once - society is still male dominated and victimizes women in many facets of life. At the same time, the little boys struggling at school … mostly in poor neighborhoods … aren’t the root of the problem, and certainly aren’t the ‘dominant class’ referred to above. The conversation should not be a zero sum game where recognizing the challenges of one group means you are trivializing the challenges of another.
(Though in fairness many do try to make it thus, so the caution is understandable).
It’s almost like he’d been told the opinion he was supposed to hold and then had to frantically explain why when someone finally asked him.
I was a card carrying Libertarian after high school, before my sense of empathy developed more fully.
Same. The world seemed so simple back then, until I matured. I suspect a lot of people are emotionally stuck
I can also relate, a classic libertarian utopia sounds great until you realise poor people exist. I think a lot of individuals are just afraid of personal growth because it often means admitting you were wrong.
Well, it’s not something you just institute overnight. Just like with communism, if you try that you’d end up with a pretty big mess, because people will manipulate the framework for their own personal gains. Instead it’s something you work towards slowly, through education and efforts to balance the system until it’s not really needed anymore.
The keys always have to be:
- People legitimately caring about their neighbors, and supporting each other through good times and bad
- People working towards progress for the sake of progress and their community, not for personal gain
Our actions weave into the fabric of society, and future generations are formed from that same fabric. It takes time to shift how our nature manifests into actual behavior.
In many ways I still consider myself libertarian, but moreso in anti authority leaning than Republican but with a cooler label. Many of my peers in highschool and university clicked with the pro guns, pro expression sentiment, but when it came actually letting queer people and religious minorities live their lives, or allowing women control over their own bodies and healthcare, they always seemed to side with the Authoritarians in power threatening the to restrict these people. Not to mention many of them had no problem with authority as long as it came from a corporate entity or oligarch.
I still identify with the term Libertarian, but have stopped using it because it truly doesn’t represent what it was supposed to mean anymore.
yeah it’s a shame that libertarian basically means closeted republican these days
is there a better term?
I’d consider myself pretty libertarian-minded in the whole ‘you live your life and I live mine’ style, but not in the ‘let corporations do whatever they want to workers and the environment’ style
I often go with Anti-Authoritarian when describing my beliefs. I’ve played around with the Anarchist label as well, though it seems to have the same affect on Communists who want an edgier label (which is ironic, considering both groups have clashed with each other throughout history)
I like many concepts of Anarchy, but until we have Star Trek levels of free unlimited power and food, I don’t think it would work.
There have been examples of anarchy working. Unfortunately, most of the ones I know of were around during World War 2 and got crushed between 2 larger opponents, or backstabbed by one of them.
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Anarchists - and other socialists in Catalonia - during the Spanish Civil War, were stuck between the fascists and the republicans (Soviets), sided with the Soviets and ended up being betrayed. Homage to Catalonia by Orwell is a good book about the civil war and the anarchists.
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Korean People’s Association in Manchuria were destroyed by Japan a few years before WW2 during a war between China and Japan IIRC, and apparently some of its leaders were also killed by “Korean communists” (the same ones that ended up forming North Korea).
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The Black Army of Ukraine fought the Red and White armies at separate times; one time they joined the Red Army against the White Army, and were betrayed.
You might have noticed a pattern there, which is also why a lot of anarchists are not found of Marxist-Leninists or Stalinists.
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The left needs to own healthy masculinity and properly address very legitimate issues that disproportionally hurt boys in our society.
Otherwise we will lose a whole generation to toxic male role models in the manosphere.
I read a great WaPo article on this recently. Basically on the left, no one can define healthy masculinity and it’s really opened up a spot for the right wing to swoop in and define it for us.
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This, want it or not, it is not hard for boys to feel incredibly alienated in the left hemisphere. We gone from “girls have issues too” to “only girls can have issues”. It’s ridiculous, and even more ridiculous when you remember that girls reach their growth spurt sooner than boys, effectively eliminating many of the purported advantages of boys over girl, making them feel even more alienated.
I’m pretty far left and in my entire life I’ve never experienced “only girls can have issues” as more than an extreme fringe statement.
What I tend to see regarding men is how they, too, are victims of toxic masculinity, taught to internalize their emotions until they have literal breakdowns. The Left gives a fuck about that, and it’s one of the cited reasons they have problems with toxic masculinity.
I wonder where you get the impression that “the left” is saying “only girls can have issues”? It feels to me like people have spun this reactionary tale in the backlash to feminism but no one is actually saying that.
It is like every time someone tries to talk about issues women face this is seen as an attack on men. Which I find frankly ridiculous. At the same time, in many cases when people bring up boy’s or men’s issues they will only do so while simultaneously attacking feminist talking points. This is especially prevalent on social media platforms like Reddit and YouTube.
It does seem like anti-feminists and sometimes straight up misogynistic people have monopolized the entire discussion surrounding men’s issues. When you look up information regarding issues men face it is really hard to not end up in a hateful corner of the internet. Some of these sources do not actually have the people looking for help at heart, they are simply anti-feminist and will even go so far as to provide inaccurate information or withhold information just so that they can keep up their narrative.
in many cases when people bring up boy’s or men’s issues they will only do so while simultaneously attacking feminist talking points.
This is very much a talking point by “only girls can have issues” people.
“Men don’t have issues, men’s rights groups only exist to spread misogyny!”
That is a key point of why the idea that men’s issues are not taken seriously is spreading, because simply talking about / focusing on men’s issues quickly gets people labled as misogynists.
This both gets people to stop caring about the idea of misogynism, because “apparently simply talking about men’s issues is misogyny”, and thereby also pushes people to develop more problematic views.
because simply talking about / focusing on men’s issues quickly gets people labled as misogynists.
This is simply not true.
I suspect it’s less due to the rhetoric of Donald Trump & more due to the influence of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson & Joe Rogan.
No, those personalities rose due to the mainstream (mainly left) not being able to discuss normal masculinity and overall only portraying masculinity as something toxic. When you go in one radical direction, you get radical response (Tate, etc).
We need normal, non-partisan discussion and stance towards masculinity.
What is “normal masculinity”?
