Note that this poll only targetted around 3000 UK adults aged 16+. Nonetheless I personally think the trend this poll highlights is worrying and worthy of discussion.
Also note I changed the original title to not use the terms “Gen Z” and “baby boomers” since I think putting in the ages is clearer.
Some choice quotes:
On feminism, 16% of [16 to 29-year-old] males felt it had done more harm than good. Among over-60s the figure was 13%.
One in four UK males aged 16 to 29 believe it is harder to be a man than a woman.
37% of men aged 16 to 29 consider “toxic masculinity” an unhelpful phrase, roughly double the number of young women who don’t like it.
The figures emerged from Ipsos polling for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership.
“This is a new and unusual generational pattern,” said Prof Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute. “Normally, it tends to be the case that younger generations are consistently more comfortable with emerging social norms, as they grew up with these as a natural part of their lives.”
But Duffy said: “There is a consistent minority of between one-fifth and one-third who hold the opposite view. This points to a real risk of fractious division among this coming generation.”
Prof Rosie Campbell, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s, said: “The fact that this group is the first to derive most of their information from social media is likely to be at least part of the explanation.
In the meantime, social media algorithms are filling the vacuum, she said. “This could be something that changes when young men enter the workforce but we can’t take that for granted given how important social media is in the way we understand ourselves.”
As far as I understand it men are part of fourth wave feminism, so seeing this feels conflicting to me. If you believe men are having a hard time, then feminism is right up your alley, isn’t it?
So I just wonder if this survey even makes sense because how can you answer a question you don’t understand?
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As a transwoman this strikes close to home. I’ve always felt that if I am able to be free, that means that everyone is free. Specifically by giving up privilege. When you see me I hope that’s what you feel, including men. It’s added value.
But well, for others it somehow attacks their identity.
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God made me a saboteur hehe
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Sadly, a lot of young men who are living on their own for the first time are perfectly happy to have an ideology that tells them that no, they shouldn’t have to do all these chores themselves, that’s what their moms and girlfriends and wives are for.
These man-babies are just the newest in a long historical trend of privileged dorks who would gladly enslave people to maintain their privileged lifestyles… the metaphorical Bezos to the warehouse worker women of their lives.
Can’t help but agree. Down with the dorkiarchy!
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If you believe men are having a hard time, then feminism is right up your alley, isn’t it?
Ultimately, I believe this is a direct result of the capitalist capture of feminist aesthetics into the sort of shallow “pop-feminism” that rose to prominence over the past couple of decades. For young men who’ve only ever seen this hyper-sanitized business driven take on feminism (one that notably does not make room for them), it’s easy for them to see it as an extension of the broader trends that leave them disenfranchised. A lot of young men simply do not have any experience with the broader feminist tradition.
There is a Chinese term ‘Baizuo’ which kind of hits this (If I’m wrong please correct me ). It’s described as " being hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”. [Just a wiki source]. So I think it’s fair to say this likely isn’t just marketable feminism, although it probably doesn’t, help. Just the way it’s approached, probably hyper inflated by the disconnect of lockdown and social media.
I’m not saying that “marketable feminism” is directly to blame, but rather that this hyper cynical feminism™ championed by brands and celebrities explicitly does not make room for men while the larger feminist tradition has a lot to say about men’s place in the movement. Given how insular gendered friendships are, I don’t think we should be surprised that men think what they see on TV constitutes the sum total of feminist ideas. Especially since feminism™ has kind of sucked all the air out of the room for roughly 2 decades (the majority of the life of a man younger than 30).
Sounds like their term for virtue signaling, maybe?
白左, pinyin báizuǒ, lit. “White left”
naive, self-righteous Western liberals (neologism c. 2015)
Modern feminism has a problem with the name: it literally says “female ideology”.
That works fine when females are oppressed out of speaking their mind, and the meaning is obvious to everyone: more rights for the obviously oppressed. Many places, that is still an issue, so the name fits right in.
However, in societies where both men and women already have the same basic rights to life, speech, work, ownership, etc., for those who don’t have a full picture, its meaning turns into a “female superiority movement”. So now there appears a group of poorly informed men who, going just by the name, feel opressed by the “female superiority movement”… which fuels a desire for a counter-movement of “male superiority”… and related grifters like that Tate thing.
One possible way to solve it, would be for feminism to use a different label in these societies, one that would inherently and unmistakeably express the goal of “parity, equality of opportunities”. For example: equalitarianism.
Meanwhile, people who just heard the word “feminism” for the first time, in societies where they can see females walking freely on the streets, then the first explanation they get is from the likes of Tate… well, this happens.
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being clear that these issues stem from the devaluing of femininity
Men […] not demand everyone get off and get on a different train
I don’t disagree, but I also don’t know what word could be used to both point at that, and at the same time not allow being misinterpreted as “female superiority ideology”.
For example, in Spain we have a “Ministry of Equality”, which is basically in charge of implementing the “4th wave of feminism”, without directly referring to feminism by name, while its name leaves no room for misinterpretation:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Equality_(Spain)
Are other societies ready for that? Dunno, even here there is opposition from the right, but I think something like that would be the proper next step.
“All Lives Matter” doesn’t work
It doesn’t work because it’s the argument US cops use to do what they do: “All Lives Matter (…starting with the cop’s)”.
It would only start to work, once gun ownership got severely reduced, cops had to pass a rigorous training, including in de-escalation, and had a mandate to protect civilians above their own asses.
Like, I’ve recently watched a video of body cams where cops decided to turn on FBI agents. Most of the involved were white, on both sides, with some black, also on both sides. All the cops, including their supervisors, acted as a bunch of entitled assholes, and only some got dinged for it. “All Lives Matter… but cop lives matter most”.
“Black Lives Matter” will keep working better in the US, for as long as there is racial profiling, and a lack of consequences going on. Hopefully, at some point in the future, it could be changed to “Civilian Lives Matter”… and ultimately to “All Lives Matter”… but the US seems to be far away from that point yet.
If the name was “Black Lives Do Matter” it’d be harder to misinterpret, wilfully or otherwise.
Dunno. They both sound basically the same to me, maybe because I’m not a native speaker. What would be the difference?
They’re meant to, it’s a more specific version of BLM with the same intended meaning, meant to make wilful misinterpretations by talking heads /right wing dingdongs as "Only Black Lives Matter" harder to sell.
Hm, so… “Only Black Lives Do Matter” would not be grammatically correct? or sound too long? or is there a connotation difference that I’m missing?
When you relate this idea to what raccoona replied to me, do you think ‘patriarchy’ is a fitting term or not?
As in if you accept that it only benefits a section of all men.
I think there are many fitting terms, like “heteropatriarchy”, “toxic masculinity”, “fourth wave feminism”, etc.
What I’m wondering is whether “feminism” is an easily understandable term to describe all these fights, or if once a society gets past some level of advances towards the goal, it rather leads to confusion in new generations and becomes counterproductive.
(BTW, since I had never before, I just watched a piece of an interview with the Tate thing… the cringe is strong with that one, as well as the con artist level, redefining the meaning of words to fit his narrative, or the amount of dog whistles. Then all the sycophants in comments and related videos… 🤮)
My mother wasn’t allowed to study because she was a woman, so it really wasn’t that long ago. Perhaps it just needs time.
I’m sorry to hear that. It definitely depends on the region/country.
Despite all the things that commies did wrong post-WW2, they did offer my mom three different career choices on merits alone. Interestingly, when I went to inquire about career choices at the same place in the post-commie era, they asked for a bribe just to start talking.
There has been measurable wage stagnation in the USA for the past 50 years. If you combine this with more equal pay between men and women plus an increase in education in the workforce, you are likely going to have a group of lesser educated men who have seen a backslide in their economic power. This gets combined with a general lack of social power as women can be more independent, both economically and socially.
Some men may see this as needing reforms in the economy to raise all working class economic conditions, but others may look back at feminism of all forms as being a major reason they don’t get what men a generation or two ago had.
I think that in the past it was also simpler for men to express their sexuality, at the detriment of women. Perhaps some men feel left behind as they don’t know how to move forward with society. Kind of like those people in Japan who never leave the house because the social rules go over their heads.
The hikikomori are more of an extreme case of “staying in the closet”: they are people who, when they fail to meet some expectation (like finishing their studies, or getting a job), decide to retreat to a safe space (their room) in order to not bring shame to their families, while at the same time the families cover up the fact to avoid bringing shame to themselves and the recluded person.
I think modern toxic masculinity is more of an action-reaction thing: women get some rights, at the expense of men’s rights to abuse them, so some men push back against the loss of what used to be their right… without stopping to consider whether that right was fair or not in the first place.
Makes sense. It’s interesting how many hypothesis we have in our discussion here. I wonder if there’s any studies into this.
Many young men have no political/financial power to begin with, and take generalized criticism personally. Some feminists are openly hostile and live up to the stereotypes. Those are the encounters people remember. I can see how gullible, spineless young men can fall into the trap of thinking that feminism is “harmful”.
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Probably related to this:
https://feddit.uk/post/7126064
It’s really frustrating to see (young) cis men continuously fall into the trap of patriarchy, making their own life worse but especially making it for everyone else hell…
When I hear things like this it just highlights the dangers of right-wing oversimplification. Compared to Gloria Steinem or even Bell Hooks, Andrew Tate is going to be much easier to understand and be relatable to a 10-year old boy. It’s not a coincidence that the human trafficker mostly appeals to children since most people with any life experience are going to immediately recognize how childish and absurd the deliberately inflammatory things he says are. It’s as engaging to a little kid as fart jokes.
The inverse can’t be true. Understanding the systemic nature of oppression is asking a lot of many adults let alone little kids. There’s no way simplify the truth without it being overly-simplistic, and overly-simplistic is what the right runs on. Easy intuitive answers you just have to claim and not really think about are very appealing to children and the intellectually cowardly. Children naturally trust adults (unless they’ve directly suffered for trusting adults) so it’s much easier to absorb the simplistic even if it’s wrong.
An older teenager has a brain developed enough to understand at an adult level, but at this point they would have to do a lot of work to critisize the simplistic shit they were exposed to while highly impressionable while at the same time trying to comprehend the true scope of wider reality. Many will just forgo this exercise and stick to the simplistic answers. Many will not be satisfied with childish explanations which turn out not to be consistent with reality most of the time.
By the time anyone is 60 they are going to have been exposed to a lot, and it is clear to any mature adult that pretty much everything is much more complex than what is immediately or intuitively apparent. While Boomers famously hold onto many simplistic beliefs, this is more of a matter of desire to hold those beliefs and refusal to admit that they could be wrong about such important things. They are aware of all the exceptions to their beliefs they experienced and will often even act on what they’ve learned rather than the party-line BS they say is true.
I grew up with a kind of Andrew Tate as well and had quite a bit to learn myself when I was a teen. Hopefully gen z has an easier time growing past this stupid crap than previous generations.
There are many forces at play fostering this kind of polarization. Social medias cultivate it to generate reactions. State controlled troll farms are being used as a tool of social disruption against enemy countries. Various unscrupulous attention seekers surf on that wave. Many people get caught and amplify it further. I feel this goes a long way into explaining these poll results.
I feel like there is feminism, but also toxic feminism. I once got told off for being a toxic sexist person for giving safety advice in a hiking channel. And I would have given the same advice to anyone posting and always do
The thing is, the question she was asking could have only mattered if she either had no idea what she was talking about, or was planning to do something unsafe.
Obviously though, there is also non toxic too that I’ve seen (I’ve got so many female friends who get screwed around by their bfs here in Australia).
But, similar to toxic masculinity, unfortunately the toxic ones always make more noise
I’m not saying this is what you did in your example, but offering advice when it’s not asked for IS DEFINITELY a form of toxic masculinity. That’s probably what they were referring to, however I don’t know the context and I can’t pass judgement.
I will say the tendency to immediately be offended if someone accuses you of something is perfectly natural, and it’s an abrasive form of communication and “setting boundaries”. However, a mature response is to understand they have this feeling regardless of what you’ve done, why not figure out why?
Sorry morning rant 💖
but offering advice when it’s not asked for IS DEFINITELY a form of toxic masculinity.
Highly dependent on context. There’s “mansplaining” like you’re talking about (though that word sounds infantile for this kind of discussion), and there’s the neutral, adding your own two cents into a forum conversion. Especially when op thought they might be putting themselves in danger by doing something they shouldn’t be.
It’d be like if he called you a toxic sexist for your response to him. That’s stupid, we’re all in a forum just having a conversation, and people jumping in mid-thread is to be expected
If not “mansplaining”, I don’t think there’s another word that describes that very particular, yet common, experience. It doesn’t read as infantile to me.
Regardless, re. feminism, I wonder if the word’s meaning may be growing more muddled nowadays. The word is used by regressive TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists)/“gender critical feminists”, who these days are very much loud and visible in the media on their trans hate campaign trails, even as the same word is used by 3rd/4th Wave feminists who advocate/fight for intersectionality and gender and sexual inclusivity. Both groups call themselves feminist and often assert that members of the other group are not actually feminist, so if a study asks “is feminism harmful?” without specifying a definition, the answer might depend on what definition the respondent thinks is being used (from the context around the survey, or from whichever contexts the respondent most often hear the word feminism used in).
‘Mansplaining’ is basically just sexist patronizing, but the word reeks of unprofessional slang to me. I fully admit it may be my own biases coloring that perception, but I’ve also only really heard it used by people who hold over-the-top opinions like men spread their legs to try and marginalize women. Like if a woman acted like a father couldn’t possibly know how to raise a child and needed to explain simple shit to him, I wouldn’t say she was womansplaining I’d just say she was being sexist and patronizing. Same goes for men and mansplaining.
the question she was asking could have only mattered if she either had no idea what she was talking about, or was planning to do something unsafe.
offering advice when it’s not asked for IS DEFINITELY a form of toxic masculinity
I personally would like to be told if what I’m planning to do is going to get me killed.
Well. For starters, my best friend who is female saw the exchange online and called it ridiculous. And the “victim” called it mansplaining during the exchange
In this case, relying on tanks puts others in danger and it was clear this had nothing to do with her being a female. .
If you don’t want a discussion, don’t post to a public Facebook discussion group lol. It basically means women can offer advice to women, but guys can’t? That’s actually a double standard that only seems to exist within the boundaries of toxic feminism. If op had gone on their hike and the tanks are empty, others would have had to give up their water, because they wanted to hike more comfortably than others
In this case, the response had more to do with the fact I was male
The hilarious thing is that most of the people I hike with are females and I have taken the backseat plenty of times for female guides. And I’m definitely not the macho -big car kind of guy either.
Again, not saying it’s prolific, but rather just saying theres a few bad apples out there who drown out the normal people (toxic masculinity is obviously a much bigger issue here in Australia)
Omg bro you are def oblivious hahaha
When you have more than one female messaging you (including your best friend who is female) saying it was a weird conversation and they agree with you, No… I’m not oblivious lol. Same comment is made to anyone posting similarly dangerous and dumb questions that put others at risk. I really don’t care if they’re female or male.
Perhaps you experienced some toxic spill over from the US? The far right has been on a war with feminism for over a decade trying to convince people that equality for women is actually taking rights away from men and reverse sexism.
I have no idea. I just found the whole exchange a bit ridiculous. But yeah, honestly, here in Australia we do have a problem with insecure guys Thinking everything is an attack on them lol (I’m a guy btw)…
And yeah, it’s one reason I really hope Trump doesn’t return to power because his nonsense spills over here
This is the result of a long-term, political strategy.
Anyone remember GamerGate? There has been an extreme backlash against feminism since the mid-2010s which GamerGate was a part of. (GamerGate in itself was part of a wider strategy that the far-right began to use on 4chan in the late 00s.)Steve Bannon (then EIC at Breitbart) pushed GamerGate’s anti-feminism into the mainstream right-wing politics because he saw it as an opportunity to recruit young men. Unfortunately he was right and his strategy has paid off, forming an anti-feminist alliance that has become a core belief of right-wing parties all around the world. It has creeped into the mainstream with figures like Andrew Tate who fulfill the role of recruiting young men for even more extreme anti-feminist, far-right content.
This was the background noise that these young men grew up in. Many of the influencers they followed would tell them endlessly how feminism is to be blamed for bad games (during GamerGate) and - in general - how feminism is to be blamed for most ills of modern society. That young men were effed over by capitalism and patriarchy was - of course - deliberately omitted.
This takes place in the UK right? I know TERFs are a big group there. Are most of these people’s interactions with people who call themselves feminist TERFs?
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One in four UK males aged 16 to 29 believe it is harder to be a man than a woman and a fifth now look favourably on the social media influencer Andrew Tate, the polling of over 3,600 people found.
Tate, the British-American former kickboxer who has 8.7 million followers on the social media platform X, is facing charges in Romania, which he denies, of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.
The research also found that 37% of men aged 16 to 29 consider “toxic masculinity” an unhelpful phrase, roughly double the number of young women who don’t like it.
Prof Rosie Campbell, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s, said: “The fact that this group is the first to derive most of their information from social media is likely to be at least part of the explanation.
Tate preaches that young men should take control of their own lives, shouting at them in one recent video over footage of him vaping, firing a gun and driving a sports car: “You’re not supposed to be happy.
Colin Brent, a youth worker in Ealing, said some of Tate’s appeal to black and minority ethnic young people appeared to be that he offered a more direct route to change in their lives.
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Shitbags like Tate have done a lot of harm. The good news is that great parenting can shield kids from this kind of nonsense. Oh wait…
