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- cross-posted to:
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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
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.
Normal masculinity is simply existing and not giving a fuck how other people expect you to live. There’s almost no point in discussing it more as the left is already very comfortable with discussing the idea that you are who you are and you can be proud of that. That message is literally everywhere.
Toxic masculinity has to be discussed because people are being made to confuse being toxic with being “strong” which is something the right is creating. Their image of a “real man” is toxic.
It’s like the whole “racist right winger” or “neonazi” labels given to a politician, but then some random right winger gets all bent out of shape as if they were called a Nazi… They weren’t even part of the conversation, they decided to take on that guilt. It’s the same with toxic masculinity. If you’re not expressing the things that are discussed within that subject then they aren’t talking about you, you’re more than likely “performing” normal masculinity. It’s not the fault of the people having the conversation that someone else chose to feel offended by it when it wasn’t about them at all.
Interesting to assume people like Tate didn’t exist before. They just changed their rhetoric and added “anti-feminist” to their agenda since that’s trendy in certain circles now. These people existed already in much greater numbers in the past.
Masculinity is not the centre of the discussion of the left or even feminism, though. It’s just what certain people want to make out of it, which is exactly what the quote above is referring to.
Advancing rights for women in general spans a broad spectrum of intersectionality with masculinity just being one fraction of it. You can look up how many feminists are actually talking about masculinity unprompted and you’d be surprised how infrequent it is. It is a certain group of people with an often anti-feminist agenda who try to make it seem as if masculinity was somehow the main hook of feminist discussion.
Most leftists and feminists want emancipation for men as well, with that they mean the emancipation from gender roles for everyone.
I grew up in a Calvinistic worldview where every week you were reminded you were utterly disgusting in the eyes of God and simply by being born you deserved to be tortured more brutally than the English language can adequately express because you had by virtue of being human inherited original sin, and the only way you could get rid of it is if you had been predestined to be saved by Jesus (who did not come to save everyone, only a select few). Anyone can imagine the horrible effect this polar opposite of therapy has on rates of mental illness in that community. This kind of worldview was popular with the English Dissenters (those famous ‘persecuted pilgrims’ belong to this category) who later crossed the Atlantic in large numbers and I think I can see its unpleasant legacy in American political thought both left and right.
If there is one idea I could delete out of existence it’s this notion of original sin in both its religious and secular forms. I would make it unlawful to tell a child that they were born guilty of anything simply for existing or that guilt can be inherited from anyone because of how psychologically harmful this is. While it’s usually not the intention there exists a trend that de facto results in telling boys they’re guilty of various things simply for existing, and then in the same breath we act surprised when scumbags like Tate are hoovering up their attention instead of everyone telling them what a piece of crap they are for being born. Manly qualities in my mind are qualities like physical and mental strength in the face of adversity, having the moral courage to make difficult decisions for the good of a group, a deep sense of good sportsmanship, being willing and able to take risks when required, that sort of thing. The left should be all over that as its history is littered with such examples!
What is “normal masculinity”?
You know, protecting your wife and kids if it comes to that, not being an domestic abuser, etc.
Oh, my bad - these are obviously toxic examples! Or, idk, women can do both also? /s
I’d then challenge you to come up with some examples of normal feminity that men can’t also do, since that’s obviously an exclusionary factor.
Defending others has nothing to do with being “masculine”.
like, there isn’t a non-partisan stance towards masculinity