By Eric Stratton, M.D., Spy Man Correspondent
Below our office today a line of dorks waits for hours in the cold March wind for a store to open. A few are women, but about 80% appear to be men. What are they doing on the mean streets on a weekday morning?
They’re not working. They’re not in class. They’re not studying. They’re not performing acts of tikkun olam.
They are waiting for the release of a new deck of Pokemon cards.
This got us to thinking about all the noise we hear about the plight of young men.
What’s wrong with men? Pretty much everything, apparently. A recent television series about a 13-year-old boy who stabs a young woman has led the worriers at the Guardian to bemoan the misogyny and cruelty of boys:
Dr Stephanie Wescott, like Schulz, has been researching misogyny in schools for some time. ... With the advent of [the television series] Adolescence, she says, “I feel now the conversation has caught up to the scope of the problem. I feel we do need to be a little bit alarmist here, because what is happening is alarming.”
Research released by Wescott last year, based on qualitative interviews with 30 female teachers, found that sexism – long identified in research on schools – endures still, “resurrected in part by the ubiquity and influence of one specific misogynist ‘manfluencer’, Andrew Tate”. An anonymous online survey of more than 130 South Australian teachers conducted by Schulz last year found teachers identifying a “heightened use of misogynistic language and behaviours by male students, some as young as five”.
As any teenager might say: “Ew. Gross.”
The same article notes that disgusting misogyny among boys is nothing new:
Prof Michael Salter...says, it is not young men, it’s older men. “The idea that young men today are more misogynistic than they were 20 or 30 years ago, I don’t see any evidence for this.” Salter recalls his own primary and high school years, where sexual harassment was rife and normalised. The average age of sexual harassment of girls is prepubescent, he says, and “that’s been the case for decades”.
Now every man was once a teenage boy and if they are being honest they will admit that saying and thinking revolting things about their female contemporaries is not new.
So what is new, other than the unfortunate fact that boys today can immortalize their awful views on social media?
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This is the specimen Donald Trump rescued from justice |
One answer lies in the quote itself. The ubiquity of hateful anti-woman creeps like Andrew Tate may lead boys to think that such vile conduct is what society expects from young men.
For those of you living in innocence, Andrew Tate is an avatar of sexual violence against women. As Moira Donegan explains:
There are so many allegations of sexual abuse and violence by the misogynist mega-influencer Andrew Tate that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. ...[In 2016, ] Tate was kicked off [a reality] show after producers became aware that he was under police investigation for sexual assault and rape following a 2015 arrest. (Tate denies wrongdoing.)
But after being kicked off of TV, Tate had another career to fall back on: that of a pimp. For some years, Tate has been running an online business in which he collects the earnings of women who perform webcam pornography. ...he has amassed a staggering number of followers – almost 11 million on Elon Musk’s X alone – including a large and growing proportion of young boys.
Who would have anything to do with a specimen like this? Hint: he is a tangerine-faced Russian-owned sex offender and traitor:
Andrew Tate is now a free man. The rightwing anti-woman influencer landed in Florida last week after being held detained for over two years in Romania on rape, sex trafficking and money laundering charges. The Romanian courts abruptly reversed their previous refusal to allow Tate to leave the country after several high-level Trump administration officials took an interest in his case – including Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr, who called Tate’s arrest in Romania “absolute insanity”. The Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, was reportedly approached by a Trump envoy about Tate’s case at a security conference in Munich in February; Tate arrived in the US within weeks. When asked if Trump had played a role in Tate and his brother’s release, the Tates’ lawyer Joseph McBride said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”
So if the question is where young men got the idea that scum like Tate are admirable and indeed role models, the answer seems tolerably clear: they got it from the President of the United States and his flacks and shills.
Indeed, when a 13-year-old boy sees a man who has admitted to sexual abuse, who has been found guilty in court of committing sexual assault, who has been accused by 25 women of sexual abuse or harassment, and who boasts of palling around with a trafficker of underage girls, and that man is elected President in spite of this appalling record, why shouldn’t that boy think that treating women with cruelty and contempt is now the American norm? And when a majority of white women vote for a sexual predator, what conclusion does a young man draw about whether such views are acceptable and normal?
I mean what young man isn't influenced by inept Trump mouthpiece Alina Habba:
Of course, the usual gang of Republican hacks and shills can’t admit that they and their fellow Republicans are to blame for the wretched behavior of young men. They blame, wait for it,... Both Sides.
For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized. The two are not morally equivalent, but to boys, the impact can often feel similar. In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel. For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.
You'll be shocked to learn that this horses*** appeared in the Opinion section of The New York Times.
Here on Planet Earth, have you ever heard of a progressive refusing to engage with men's feelings or telling them not to express their concerns? Well, maybe if their concerns involve the desirability of raping and pimping out women. But if their concerns involve a lack of good-paying jobs and health care, we'd submit that progressives have been responding for decades to such concerns.
(By the way, it is a standard trope of right wing disingenuousness to pass off entirely justified shock and outrage at expressions of bigotry and misogyny, however crude, as intolerance of conservative “ideas.”)
We're progressive. And we're going to respond honestly to the concerns of sad young men living in their mom's basements playing video games and whining about how they can't find a date.
Here's our response.
- Get out of your mom's basement.
- Go to school, whether college or vocational school.
- Get a real job.
- Stop listening to ass**** telling you that the party of plutocracy and racism has your best interests at heart.
- Try not to whack off more than four times a day.
- If you're having trouble meeting women, volunteer at an animal shelter.
We are reliably informed that there are very many women out there who may be interested in young men who work or study, are able to carry on a conversation without references to the pride of Newton South, Joe Rogan, and exhibit some morsel of kindness and caring for others, including cats and dogs.
Will it work?
Hell, nothing is sure in this vale of tears. But it sure beats waiting for three hours in the freezing cold outside a GameStop for a deck of Pokemon cards.