Young men are more left leaning than any generation befire them.
I have had my share of struggles and hardship, definitely not the worst anyone’s had it, but enough to empathize I think. I lived in a camper for 5 years, was lucky to have that tbh. Shit jobs, shit pay, no respect. I live in the boonies so I work with all these guys. I’m a white straight guy too, so I pass, and I get to sit with them while they share their terrible opinions.
I guess what I mean to say is that somehow the exact experiences that are turning these man children into hateful far right weirdos have happened to me. Somehow I went hard to the left instead. I wasn’t a “radical” before I moved out here, it’s a response to the last 10 years mostly. Was it because I was raised differently? Probably, my mother is one of the most compassionate people I’ve known, and selfishness was ‘punished’ when I was young. Was it the psychedelics? Also probably. There are lots of other experiences that I know most of these guys haven’t had that helped me be a better person, travel, volunteer work I had to do, I’m sure I am forgetting a lot. But what helps me understand also makes it more difficult to excuse. A lot of these guys have had every opportunity I have, some a lot more. It’s difficult to listen to somebody that has had a chance at promotion complain about their pay, for an analogy that comes from reality. When I also know so many other groups of people are flat denied that opportunity. They don’t have solidarity because they are selfish. I think that’s what it boils down to.
Terminate Stoned Sunday ramble/
The comments here on this Lemmy post can serve as a perfect demonstration for the reason behind men turning right-wing. Any comment trying to point out some specific aspect of life where men are experiencing more hardships is immediately shut off and getting told these experiences and concerns are invalid.
There is a limit to how much “fuck you” one can hear before going “well, fuck you too”.
I mean I’m on the left and even I’m getting tired of hearing how all men are trash, which seems to be the only message about men I hear. Young men are only being courted by the right, and the left doesn’t seem to care or even seems proud about it.
The joke is on the right-wing men. Good luck finding female partners. Also, the best time to be a left leaning progressive guy.
Young boys are exposed to near constant right wing internet programming and are increasingly attacking girls in school, verbally and physically, starting as early as elementary school.
Combine that with largely apathetic and inattentive parents + very few male teachers and school is becoming an absolute nightmare for everybody
This essentially reflects the rise in incel school shooters except these young men just grow up to become bitter right wing misogynistic bigots instead. They have nowhere to go but right
the incel thing is such a self fulfilling prophecy - they embrace it then can’t imagine why women recoil from them. so they further radicalize.
nice job conservatives, you really fucked up an entire generation
its a negative feedback loop. J peterson, and joe roegan, shapiro achieve that by negative reinforcement.
I like how the maga women are leaving their maga husbands even in White House it’s like yeah…just wearing an maga hat doesnt make you as alpha as you thought bro. On that note I wish Steve miller gets swallowed by his top lip one day.
in r/teacher sub, the hs students are doing that, specificaly the male students have become more disrespectful towards female teachers.
As a man I would genuinely like to thank women for holding the torch of progressivism.
You boys better start getting real into fucking each other
No wonder they are trying to suppress women’s ability to vote again. I’m fairly certain women outnumber men just given by a statistical outcome of X vs Y chromosome at birth. I’m not certain but there’s probably a statistical study somewhere out there that a left leaving woman married to a right leaning man will vote right due to proximity. I’ve seen the former example in real life many times over sadly.
The feminist movement freed the women to have more choices but the men were displaced with fewer options than before. It’s not a loss of privilege but the closing off of options to be feminine or domestic stay at home partners.
This means that left-leaning men will raise happier families, while the incel-aligned will have their own bloodlines end in deserved extinction. 🎉
I think toxic podcasts have a big influence on young men, especially those who grew up without strong father figures. My own dad wasn’t perfect (I joke a bit about it on my profile), and many of us went through that risky “2015 phase” of consuming unhealthy online content.
What many politicians and advocates on the left often overlook is that toxic masculinity isn’t solved by telling men to be “less masculine.” You can actually counter unhealthy masculinity with healthy masculinity. Instead of shaming men, we should be teaching a better version of manhood one that includes therapy, emotional intelligence, and being able to talk honestly about what’s going on inside.
As corny as it sounds there’s a reason when there’s a bad take by a misinformed feminist calling all men evil on twitter ganders a response like “This is why men turn right” and sure while that stuff doesn’t work on me anymore, It’s not 2015-2016 there’s still some vulnerable people that unfortunately fall for it, does that mean though that the feminist is wrong in her views? Not really, but I’m not talking about myself I’m talking about a lot of men that do fall for it.
Most working-class men who grind through 9–5 jobs, going from shift to shift, are worried about affordability and stability. If someone comes along and says “I’m going to make your life easier,” that’s who they’ll vote for even if it’s Trump. You can call them naïve or say the leopards ate their face or whatever , but the reality is that many of these men are desperate for change. And they’ll keep voting for whoever promises that change. When society pushes these men aside or dismisses them, some end up looking for someone to blame. That’s when you get people saying, “Women are the reason my life is hard,” or “Jews control everything.”
Of course, some people are genuinely racist or sexist, and there will always be trolls who just want attention. But why do those trolls exist in the first place? Often it’s because they feel insignificant, and attaching themselves to extreme movements gives them a sense of identity and purpose they don’t have otherwise.
One of my favorite counter-arguments (so to speak) against Toxic Masculinity being the “true” masculinity is that it’s based so much on toughing out emotions, denying them, not showing physical or emotional weakness, etc. Yet, this misses the incredible display of deep confidence and self-image that come from being able to display humility, compassion, and sadness without feeling like that’s a risk to your “manliness”.
If what defines someone as a man is based so heavily on what others think of them or code them as, they are actually saying other people control whether or not they are considered masculine/manly, which is not very Alpha Male of them.
On Parks and Recreation, Ron Swanson wins an award and teases Leslie Knope about it. She ends up saying to him, “That’s not really the attitude I’d expect from an award winner.” He responds, “Everything I do is the attitude of an award winner, because I have won an award.” I feel like this can be adjusted for anyone self-identifying as “masculine”, “feminine”, or any other such thing - “Everything I do is inherently manly, because I am a man.” (adjust as appropriate)
That last part reminds me of a 4chan (?) meme of the Chad saying that he knows that trans women are women because he’s straight so everyone that he likes is a woman.
jordan peterson, and joe roegan under putin played a big part in shoring up gop support in the usa, and then the other right wing talking heads. tate brothers is just a side benefit, which are borne out of the toxic pickup artist games.
Could you name a few books by “advocates on the left” that criticise masculinity but argue for less masculinity rather than a redefinition of masculinity?
go look at all the OG rad fems and gender theorists of the 70s. butler, dworkin, etc.
To be honest with you I don’t know a lot, and yeah I guess that’s your point but I remember reading The will to change: men, masculinity, and love by beli hooks back in my 2015 phase and I don’t remember a lot from it, but I think it made some good points.
The good news, I guess, is that people can get better. I was one of those people who moved further right in young adulthood. I’m glad the social media and such didn’t exist then as I was not equipped to handle that by my upbringing and would have fallen right into that trap. We just had Limbaugh and Beck and the like. At some point, I pulled a 180 and, now in my mid-40s, find myself probably somewhere around center-left to left as most western European countries might define that.
Not really a coherent philosophical narrative for them to latch onto; ‘the world is fucked, they’re fucked’ is the main message they hear.
not to mention
‘nothing you do matters, so might as well just do whatever you want and fuck everyone else’
Huh, interesting that Limbaugh and Beck had that effect on you. I feel like they weren’t as readily accessible as modern right wing talking heads. What changed for you? What made you realize things and turned it around?
I had a lot of issues growing up. Neurodivergent kid in rural Ohio in the '80s, lots of conservative people around, abusive people in my family making stuff hard for much of my young childhood, and a number of other things. I wanted the same thing anyone joining a gang wants, really. Acceptance, feeling like I belong, and feeling like I was fighting something or for something better.
I came from a place where I, very much without knowing it, was very entitled and privileged. I was kept away from others a lot as a kid (lived with my grandparents for a bit and wasn’t allowed to play with the other neighbors (who were in my class) because they were not white. Other perspectives were few and far between when and where I grew up. There are some other reasons that there were huge gaps in my critical thinking and bullshit detection (partly due to not questioning people in power and getting heavily punished when I did). I got taken advantage of a lot when I first got out on my own and had to basically do a lot of lessons that most kids/teens learned as an adult with much more dire consequences.
I felt like I was working hard and that others’ failures were because they didn’t work hard enough (and that I didn’t work hard enough when I was failing). In reality, a lot of people attribute way too much of their success to their own skill not luck and circumstance. At the same time I was thinking other people were lazy, I was also helped by some of my family through some financial hard times more than once (though I was briefly homeless another time). I came to realize, as I met more and varied people, that some of the hardest workers I knew were getting fucked over. Two jobs, caring deeply about their families, and barely able to tread water to support themselves and those that relied on them.
Contradictions between people claiming to be christians and anything that christ would have done. People thinking they were holy and great for holding some coat drive and stuff, but any tax dollars for a safety net were just terrible and those people were just going to spend it on drugs. People who kept pulling up every bit of safety because “fuck you, I’ve got mine”, for lack of a better term was just more and more visible when I looked at what was going on. Also being out on my own and working when 9/11 happened and the crazy amounts of hate and racism that followed that. I slowly started actually seeing all of these things, losing that entitlement, not othering people, and realizing things for what they were. I traveled to other places, saw other ways of life. The early internet and chatting people from around the world via IRC and the like also played a role in that.
Living as a minority in another country (I moved to Japan in my early 30s), getting randomly stopped and searched, struggling to find housing, and other things also cemented many of the other things I had already been learning. I am a deeply empathetic person, but I had always assumed that everyone was acting in good faith in a lot of situations and that merit would see me treated “properly”. That’s not the reality. The reality is that people are messy and flawed, that people are mostly good but often wary. This can manifest as racism in the guise of “protecting our culture and way of life” where those others getting stopped and searched (often in front of their communities, peers, clients, etc. who have no idea what is going on and assume the worst) was just a mild inconvenience. That experience in particular showed me exactly what white, male privilege in the US was. I could never see it clearly since I always had it.
This is a very long and rambling response. I guess the TL;DR would be seeing my own entitlement and privilege, realizing that people in power and authority often don’t get there through merit and/or hard work alone (if at all), and generally getting more experience and seeing and experiencing inequity.
My husband has said your TL;DR verbatim when we were early in dating. He got there a different way, but he said what he went through was an eye opener for him, changing him profoundly, while giving him a lot of gratitude for what he does have, and is able to do.
A few incels snuck into this comment section
If “the left” called you “a bigot” or “sexist” or “isn’t letting you find a wife” you’re probably a sexist bigot no one would touch with a 10-foot pole.
Every damn time “men’s issues” come up there’s like 100 dudes saying one of the issues is “can’t find a wife”. We all know what that means. Go jerk off. Politics is above you.
My favorite are the incels on reddit et al that talk about how family courts are stacked against them and that the women leave them and “take everything”
I worked as a family lawyer before, men didn’t even show up in 9/10 cases.
I don’t think this is factual. I think there are many reasons why families have declined.
pssst don’t let the facts of reality get in the way of good liberal/leftwing narrative that narratives where men are evil and women are good. any any women and men who disagree with our politics are stupid and bad people.
because clearly nobody can have any legitimate reasons for being conservative… nor can we let a little thing like economic reality of young men being bleak get in the way of our moral grandstanding about ‘incels’. as if they some huge political force and and not a tiny minority
This post sounds superficially like it’s trying to justify conservatism, but that bleak economic reality is caused by conservatism.
Eisenhower was conservative and ushered in the 50s economic boom. pretty sure the world was much more conservative in the 50/60s, weird how that was such a prosperous time for the USA.
This is just so bizarre to me. Like what devilish teat are you suckling to get this narrative? Who’s saying this? I consume leftist media and this isn’t a message I’ve taken away at all, like seriously 0%.
This sounds an awful lot like “hey bro I heard what they were saying about you, totally fucked up and you should be so mad!” As in, they’re stirring the pot with cherry picked examples and rather than pulling your head out of their ass for a minute to get your bearing you’ve just inhaled smoke straight out of their buttholes and have fine to the conclusion the world smells like shit.
If it’s the economics that have you fucked up, and you’re not a 50+ year old furniture maker or coal miner; you’ve been fucked by the conservatives who’ve worked with moderate Dems to leave the middle class out to dry while crafting policy that only benefits corporations and the ultra wealthy.
no you got fucked by bill clinton, and NAFTA who wasn’t a conservative. he was a liberal.
but again, don’t let the facts get in teh way of your ideological purity where all conservativsm is bad and all liberalism is good.
it’s bizarre to you becuase you live in a social media bubble and only ever listen to ideas that re-inforce your existing viewpoints and demonize viewpoints or ideas that don’t fit into your ideology. and anyone outside your beliefs is seen as a heretic or idiot or liar. because you you know ‘the truth’.
You said that it’s liberal narrative, but somehow my liberal media is part of some bubble that reinforces the opposite?
NAFTA required better education to offset the jobs that would dissolve, the area I grew up in did invest in public schools and as a result I’m well educated and earn good money. I’ll let you figure out which areas decided education wasn’t an important investment.
You also missed me with the whole liberal thing, 100% independent. I’ve voted conservative, libertarian and liberal but in the past few election cycles a conservative vote equates to a reduction of freedom, rights, and general fucking sanity. Any vote for a conservative is a vote for team Trump at this point, and if you’re cool with that; fuck yourself traitor.
But women just don’t get me, if they just listen it would be easier.
Meanwhile gestures vaguely at what they have to listen to.
My teen observed …… guys are more likely to appreciate edgy, crude or offensive humor. Guys are more likely to be entertained by those assholes, even if they don’t agree with their message
Most queer folks have a darker, edgier, more offensive sense of humor than the average right-winger and they tend to skew left so I don’t think it’s the humor that’s winning them over.
I guess that’s true, but you’d also have to qualify that as being self-deprecating humor that’s clearly tongue-in-cheek, as opposed to straight-up hateful messages being passed off as humor. Like, “What up, f-slur”, “That was homophobic” for whenever something doesn’t go their way, and “Gays don’t deserve rights” for whatever silly thing they pretend to dislike. It’s all very self-aware and actually funny. The quality is on another level.
I think they mean dark humour as in “scream a racial slur as loud as possible and call it a joke.”
I’m reminded a lot of a discussion I read about people saying they don’t want tomvote for Dems because “Dems care too much about identity politics”, but “identity politics” just turns out to be code for “let me be transphobic”
Reminds me of a time I was at a party and this dude is like “hey I’ve got this super funny song, wanna hear it?” Then after folks agree to hear it he thinks for a second “also it kinda has some bad words, is that okay? You’re not gonna get offended?” Then plays a song that just has a bunch of racial slurs for shock value and nothing funny or redeeming about it. I don’t think a single person laughed and I hope it was as awkward for him as it seemed like it could’ve been
its all punching down, they just dont understand the nuances
I guess what I’m getting at is we shouldn’t let them get away with claiming that they like humor when they clearly just like bigotry. Humor takes nuance.
