I keep seeing posts mentioning this phenomenon more and more often.
For instance:
‘Andrew Tate phenomena’ surges in schools - with boys refusing to talk to female teacher
Like, why? Why now? Why even? I really wish I had a time machine where I could go to the future and ask them what the general reasons were for this social development. But I feel like I’m looking for the specific thorn on a cactus that popped my balloon.
Who else is talking to them?
Because they’re lonely, aimless and disenfranchised
Nah, they’re not victims.
I feel like there is also a pathologization of being single. I was a teenager in the late 90s/early 2000s, so before most of social media. I’m also from a village where most people knew each other.
There were a couple of nerdy, shy guys who never had a girlfriend by the time of graduation. I only had one boyfriend at 16 for 6 month before his friend told me he was only dating me as a dare. I was “ugly” and “not a real girl” because I didn’t wear makeup and mostly wore jeans and Tshirts. Stupid village kids.
Anyway, similar things happened to the nerdy guys. But no one started crying about all men/women being awful and no one became an incel. Several girls and boys in my class never dated by the time we graduated and that just wasn’t a big deal. Nowadays everybody’s being told there’s something wrong with them if they’ve never had a partner by age 17.
I always have to push back against this pathologization narrative. The very obvious alternatives are:
(1) that these guys you are talking about would have easily fallen into the trap of the right wing manosphere if it had been available, because being unable to find a parter when your hormones are urging you to and when everyone else around you seems able to find one is intensely painful. But you wouldn’t hear about it, since no one talks about it, because the least attractive thing you can do is talk about how you are frustrated by your lack of romantic success.
(2) the nerdy guys might just accept their lack of partners, but these days the demographic of unpartnered young men is significantly more diverse, and more likely to contain, let’s say… less discerning thinkers…
It’s kind of like saying “back in my day, no one really cared about getting kicked in the head by a horse. Yeah, it happened, and it sucked, but it just wasn’t a big deal. There wasn’t the social stigma that getting kicked in the head by a horse was bad, or that you shouldn’t get kicked in the head by a horse.”
while I agree, I think there are people who ended up choosing (1) because of pathologization, because they were ridiculed and the increased stress made them decide it’s easier to hate women
Lol…
Looks away
https://mediachomp.com/teenage-boys-being-indoctrinated-online/
Edit: I’d imagine the issue is exacerbated by the ease with which every flavor and speed of pornography over broadband internet is available to auto-objectify women, misdirect post-auto-orgasm oxytocin, and misrepresent intimacy.
Part of it is that women have achieved an educational level as a group that allows them to make better choices. They no longer have to choose which is the nicer wife beater in their town.
The incels seem to have a problem with this. The idea of having to compete based upon personality, likability and in general the ability to treat another person as a human being bothers them.
And if we let this follow the path it’s on, they’ll try to put us in burqas rather than working to become better people.
The incels
Weaponizing shaming like this is part of the issue. Young boys and men are bullied and called incels because they don’t conform to whatever BTS image girls and women fantasize about these days. They’re not given a chance to come out of their shells, and being shamed, won’t ever try to.
It’s a shame that body shaming boys is in vogue and perpetrated by those who support big models and HAES.
I think you have incel confused with something completely different.
I’ve heard young women call men “incels” as an insult, what are you talking about?
An incel is someone wbo claims ro be involuntarily incelibate, as in no one wants to fuck them. The incels claim it is based on looks, but it is because they have shitty, hate filled personalities where they blame women for their problems.
It doesn’t have anything to do with looks. It might have something to do with dressing like an Tate fanboy though.
Yes that is the definition.
However, it’s now being used as an insult as well. I’ve been called this even though I’ve been married 20 years with children, by a 40 year old spinster.
And you don’t think it may have had more to do with what you were saying / the way you were behaving than your looks? I don’t doubt that incel may be thrown around more as a basic insult these days - it’s just reaching that level of ubiquity in everyday speech - but I have more often heard it used towards men who are saying or doing things that are misogynistic. The same kind of misogyny that betrays a deeper insecurity has long been common in adolescent boys who are going through puberty and dealing with feelings they don’t know how to deal with yet, and the word incel has become a convenient way to call it out, but I do feel that when it comes to adolescents there should be some charitability and understanding. Andrew Tate and the rest of the Manosphere are giving these kids the opposite of what they need, though.
Oh it wasn’t used aptly which pissed me off even more.
Being called an incel to an awkward teenage boy has an equal but opposite effect to an innocent teenage girl being called a slut.
I’m advocating neither term should be used to either of them.
Calling someone a spinster in that context gives off incel vibes.
I’ve been incel for years and never hated or blamed women. I was aware of hateful incels but I avoided them.
I wish people would stop generalizing.
Incel has never been a label without the part about hating and blaming women, although it has expanded to hating men too over time. It has always been about not getting laid and expressing frustration and anger. There isn’t some neutral meaning to reclaim or anything like that.
If you don’t blame the gender(s) that isn’t having sex with, you are not an incel. That just means you haven’t successfully found someone which can be for a wide variety of reasons, most of which can be addressed by changing behavior and how one tries to connect with the desired group.
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Referring to men in general as “wife beaters” is exactly the kind of rhetoric that fuels Tate’s popularity.
It’s also pretty dishonest to lump his followers in with incels. Tate openly despises incels - he sees them as quitters. His whole message is about power, self-discipline, and taking control of your life. Incels, on the other hand, are rooted in despair and nihilism. They believe the game is rigged, that the problem is in their genes, and that there’s nothing they can do to change it. It’s a fundamentally different mindset.
Referring to men in general as “wife beaters” is exactly the kind of rhetoric that fuels Tate’s popularity.
They are referring to the fact that it was common in the past for society to force women to get married so strongly that at least some of them had to put up with the wife beaters just to exist. They didn’t mean men in general.
Also. When a legal system, religion, and political parties undermine women’s humanity, domestic violence in a population goes up.
I feel like there’s always been a culture of boys and young men who didn’t respect women, there’s just never been podcasters actively promoting it.
The internet allows idiots to broadcast their message worldwide and social media promotes the most controversial stuff in order to drive engagement and, more recently, to promote a culture war that keeps the populus divided.
there’s just never been podcasters actively promoting it.
Before podcasts, we had a bunch of AM radio, grindhouse movies, pulp fiction, skin mags, and incel blogs. Joe Rogan is an archtype that echoes through the ages.
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I think the answer is obvious: Tate tells them “you’re awesome”. No one else is doing that. People seek validation.
To me his message is closer to “you’re a useless piece of shit, but i will help you become the strong man that women love. If you listen to me and work hard you will have a family and be happy. Fuck the world and society they lie about what you need to do to keep you docile and weak.”
He also has a lot of stuff about embracing all the masculine traits that society hates like aggression and psychopathy. Then just general unhinged statements that contradict his core message and no one notices because cult
I feel like the contradictions are the point. The most desirable trait of people like Tate or Trump is their impunity. They keep getting away with heinous shit, it’s the one thing that makes them demonstrably powerful, despite being disgusting, unimpressive scumbags.
This is the short of it. Tate explains in no uncertain terms that society is to blame for the insecurities they feel, and provides an easy answer on how to fix it that kind of works, because it emulates self-confidence.
I mean it’s right wing politics in a nutshell
Dupe fools with simple, comforting lies over complicated, uncomfortable truth. If people don’t understand reality they can’t change it.
And organized religion, as well.
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That was a conversation I just had with someone today. They did not appreciate my saying so.
I think it’s another message. Tate says “The world is fucked up” and then proceeds to say “I have the secret, if you want to make it in this fucked up world you have to be tough, uncompromising, domineering, cheat, and act like me” and “you’re a sucker and a cuck if you don’t do what I say”. First message sets up the world, 2nd sets up a “”“”“solution”“”“” to success that only a “few” people know, and the final thing is him attempting to make anyone who believes otherwise look weak which gives any of his followers the ability to a) feel a sense of superiority and b) make fun of others for being “weak” or “cucks” or “betas” or whatever.
Part of it is that propaganda works. A lot of people are trying to make fascism happen and this type of content fits right in.
But also, there’s a growing issue of men not knowing how to act around women, and there isn’t much non-misogynist competition for Tate. It seems like for a lot of people (both men and women) it’s harder to make personal connections these days than it used to be, and apps like Tinder exarcerbate the issue.
Hasn’t this always been the case? Men flocking to an idolized image of masculinity with a sense of superiority over women?
Lack of father figures mixed with a regressive world that is admittedly going to shit, whereas millennials and genx were raised thinking they’d be something, with teen angst and rebellion also in the mix. Don’t forget a heaping-helping of Hollywood and mainstream media taking a focus entirely away from men in the last 20 years and replacing it with nothing. Fill in the voids with some toxic masculinity influencers and shake vigorously…
And there you have it, a misogynist that blames everyone else for their problems, with a good chunk of those problems actually being valid.
One teacher said she’d had 10-year-old boys “refuse to speak to [her]…because [she is] a woman”
Does this come from Tate? This could also be a child from a family with partiarchal values. Tate is not the only source of influence. But one incident shouldn’t be part of an article because it is an exception.
What is the general reason for social development? The elite is creating the cirucumstances for change. Why? Divide and conquer.
On an individual level, masculinity makes sense because going to the gym and being confident makes life much more simple than trying to feel compassion with everybody. For boys, masculinity is the common denominator among all cultures. So in a multicultural society, that’s what is going to be established as the fused culture of the next generation.
Girls have the same problems, but their answer, being pretty and doing makeup, doesn’t cause trouble and is thus ignored.
To change this, new forms of education must be developed because math and geography don’t teach the necessary skills to deal with this complex world.
I can’t help but feel that the amount of people following the likes of Tate did not change much, they just got an opportunity to get more vocal, being less afraid of a pushback.
They are a now vocal minority, similar to how there was a rise in Neo-Nazi speech, for example.
This video by Jimmy The Giant explains it better than I can in words.
Lots of stuff. One has to do with modern feminism that has attempted to redefine the female gender role to become more independent and to adopt some traits that were traditionally masculine. This leaves some men clueless in their own identity, as traditional gender roles are a crutch for both women and men to kinda know their place in society. Now women refuse to fit their traditional role, so men have to redefine themselves too instead of relying on how it’s been done in previous generations.
This cluelessness is frustrating and we’ve seen it pop up in different ways in the last decades. However with a more modern image of a woman manifesting, teens who have to figure out anyway who they are in society are affected more, especially young boys who are welcomed to society with no clear “default instructions” because the old gender role is demonized by a society that has largely accepted the new gender role for women, but is still clueless what men are.
Men may be the provider, but women now must be able to work too. Men could be more emotional and may take caregiver jobs, but women are considered better at them anyway and men are not trusted with kids or not taken seriously as caregivers. This is also not easy on women who now have children and need to care about a career. No wonder we have fewer children. And this also gets confusing for young men who go on dates, when they still need to pay for the bill at dates, their income still plays a role, even though women may make a lot of money (or even more than them) too now.
I hope this doesn’t read as a rant, because I see feminism as a positive development even though I acknowledge the new challenges it provides.
Based on this background young, impressionable boys are sucked in by social media algorithms and confronted with the frustration and backlash of these men like Tate, that promote a return to the old gender roles. Many things he says could be something they said to your great granddad. Social media also leads to content and community bubbles, which are harder to penetrate for alternative ideas, so once you are “red pilled” you won’t get off your track.
Additionally social media is not just content, it also publicizes and quantifies your social status and connections with followers and likes. Social status is hugely important for teens who are looking for their place in society. Even when you move, you don’t have a chance to try again with a new group of mates: you still have your account and your status follows you everywhere. This increases the stakes and leads to more extreme behaviors.
I think that’s all the reasons I can think off. Sorry it’s so long.
Do we have a best of lemmy community yet?
I love this deconstruction, it captures quite a few of my own thoughts. Thank you!
I still don’t think the argument has ripened fully in my head yet. I’m glad I read “The Game” in my 20s and not earlier and that nobody asked about my Insta in highschool. I had the chance to move and leave some social dynamics in the past with several fresh starts.
Because it’s all too easy to abdicate responsibility, let other people look after you and be a shit. If we empower any sort of crappy behaviour, that behaviour grows.
