Boys and men from generation Z are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good, according to research that shows a “real risk of fractious division among this coming generation”.
One in four UK males aged 16 to 29 believe it is harder to be a man than a woman and a fifth of those who have heard of him 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. He has talked about hitting and choking women and has said he is “absolutely a misogynist”.
…
On feminism, 16% of gen Z males felt it had done more harm than good. Among over-60s the figure was 13%.
The figures emerged from Ipsos polling for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. 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.
“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.”
Well the propaganda is working. Surprise, surprise, distribute unfiltered hate speech and people will start believing in this hate speech.
Propoganda, hate speech - interesting as these labels are equally applied by both sides to describe the other.
Interesting you say? :D Those are not “labels applied to sides”. They are words with specific meaning describing actions. Your wording immediately is trying to turn this into an identitarian issue. And it cause isn’t even people, it’s systems. Like algorithms or business practices that have figured out that creating controversy increases profit. Or propagandists who realized that it’s useful to distract from actual policy and real issues, so they get funding.
Eh? I see propaganda accusations all the time, with widely varying degrees of veracity or baselessness, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen the left accused specifically of hate speech. I will admit that I don’t tend to frequent right-leaning opinion outlets, and so may be simply ignorant, but can you provide an example?
Hate speech per UN definition - any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.
Through the above - there is a lot of pejorative and discriminatory language levelled by both left and right wing posters on social media. Lemmy is rife with it to the point that I don’t feel comfortable in some groups. The social media company formerly known as Twitter is similarly awkward but from another angle. However, it takes multiple viewpoints to form ones own.
More broadly and as a very specific example, I think it might help if you do a careful examination of the way that many on the left describe what is occurring in the gaza strip, specifically attributing qualities to the entirety of Israel and Judaism.
ETA Fwiw I consider myself left of centre and I live in a country whose baseline is more left wing than the US.
It could be a difference in our countries, in the US we learn a LOT about the holocaust and Nazism, WW2, etc, so most people I know politically aware will go out of their way to assure you that they are not speaking about Judaism in general. Who are these ‘many on the left’ being antisemitic? I simply haven’t seen that, not any more than it might have occurred before this current war, which was rare. It doesn’t seem difficult for most to separate the actions of a violent organization like the IDF and right-wing Israeli officials from Jewish people in general.
i guess this is where the differences in “common” knowledge comes in…
There are multiple countries where left wing politics is associated with anti semitism. It might seem weird but it’s true. Start with the UK - there is a Wikipedia page on it. I’m not going to share a heap of further context as I’d invite you to read and review yourself and come to your own conclusions, much as I have.
I would also encourage spending as much time reading accounts of world war I, and the conditions before and after the war, as you have on wwii. It helps to understand what left and right wing have meant over long periods of time, and the clumping / allegiances that comes with these alignments, which persist into the modern world without really being visible under the glossy label.
The wording here is really important. We don’t know how masculinity and feminism are being defined here.
Stuff that began with “woman’s suffrage” are honored by people in this age group. They think it’s normal women vote, have jobs, leave the house etc. Some of this stuff probably isn’t even “feminism” to them but just “normal.”
Remember that these guys are on social media a lot more than us and see those words misued frequently for click bait, etc.
Watching from country, where even 70 years ago everyone voted(although single-candidate elections are shit), everyone worked, state provided daycare for all children and my grandma worked as loader in shop because she had to work somewhere like everyone else had to, it is bizzare what shitshow happens 4 km to the east of my country.
I’m really happy you commented this. “normal” reflects norms.
Part of any generational attitude divide is the base conditions aka norms. When a change / progress is made, it sets those norms.
It’s normal for my generation that people wear seat belts and don’t smoke in pubs, that women have extensive varied careers and dads don’t beat their kids. It wasn’t for the generation before me.
It’s not normal for men of my generation to talk openly and confidently about their sexuality and mental health. Yet that seems to be normal for some of the younger generations, and I envy that.
I find that the easiest way to tap into the generational norms is to listen to comedy. It often represents the edge of what is considered acceptable, because comedy does play with that edge.
It’s amusing to see the pitchforks come out for comedians where they’re judged for edgy content from 25 years ago and society has moved on a bit. Amusing because most of this judgement seems to happen online, and thus is a permanent record, so in 25 years time we’ll have a bunch of embarrassed mid 40s people trying to explain their cruelty to an unsympathetic younger generation. “you weren’t there, man! You don’t understand!”
But that misuse of the word is harming the overall cause. It’s not like the need for feminism has evaporated, although it has surely evolved, and if young men think it’s harmful… Even if what they think is harmful is not an accurate representation of what feminism is, they aren’t going to be supporters of what it actually is if it has the name attached.
Maybe it is time for a new movement with a new name.
Ah yes, confused men want to uphold the tradition of mysoginy, misandry, the very patriarchy that subverts men to be stupid soldiers and labourers, sacrificing emotional intelligence and their individuality to become stereotypical puppets of the powers that be.
MGTOW energy Indeed. Just the kind of weakness a grifter like Tate loves to exploit.
Dumbasses.
Most of Gen Z is children.
95 to 2010, so yeah - mostly.
Chalk it up to exploitation of boys to become exploitable males.
I was born in 95, I’m 28 not a child by any stretch of the imagination… although if I am considered a child can I quit this whole 40 hours of work every week to barely get by shit?
97 to 2012 actually.
Feminism has 100% turned into a push for superiority, not equality.
Modern feminists believe it’s “their turn” to be the abusers.
100%. What’s your proof? Jokes. Ok buddy
I think generalising across the whole group like that is what got us into this mess.
🤡
What makes you believe that women are now the abusers and superior to men?
I can’t believe I actually had a full on moment of, “thankfully that’s not me” before realising I’m not a boy or a man anyway.
This is sad and concerning though
“1/5th of one quarter of the small group of men who participated in one survey that was only take in a single country know who Andrew Tate is and approve of him, thus all GenZ men hate feminism”
This article is a fucking joke
Is this just a cyclical thing that will swing back and forth like a pendulum? Feminism surges for a few years, following a big sort of zeitgeist-defining event (#metoo being the recent one), but then it sort of just gets taken for granted, attention lags, and a quasi counter-feminist movement emerges that pushes back against that. Have we had this happen before in the past few decades? I feel like recently at least I’ve seen a lot more men online bemoan the fact that nobody is paying attention to their inner-world. It’s not even men bringing up or attacking feminism as a problem, I feel like more of the arguments are careful not to go there, more that society in general just doesn’t care that much about men’s emotional world. I would assume that along with that, you’d have some men pushing back against feminism or as seeing it as having over-extended itself.
I feel like more of the arguments are careful not to go there, more that society in general just doesn’t care that much about men’s emotional world.
As a man I feel like the main people to blame for this are men both now and historically. So many of us were raised with this macho bullshit hold-it-all-in thing and our parents’ generation were even worse about it and theirs even worse still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash:_The_Undeclared_War_Against_American_Women
This is something feminists already wrote about since the 90’s
Although I understand the importance of feminism, I never had the impression that feminists are good at PR. Somehow, most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.
That has nothing to do with feminists as a whole, it’s just how the media works. You don’t get clicks without controversy. The vast majority of feminists I’ve known irl are chill people.
Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say. The more recent version of Feminism is “Women are awesome and can do anything, men suck and constantly keep us down. Fuck the patriarchy!” instead of “women are just as good as men at doing things”.
Not everyone claiming to be a feminist is actually one. There’s a lot of misandrists that use the feminist label to spread their bullshit. But feminism in of itself is meant to be an egalitarian movement, it’s about equality. It was never meant to bash men or make them unequal to women.
I do agree however that many feminists often look away when these type of people spew their garbage out into the public. I think especially women need to make sure to tell these people where to stuff it and that their shit isn’t welcomed.
A good chunk of the “feminist” who are guilty of it are also TERFs. To them, trans women are just creepy men, and trans men are women trying to cheat into getting male privilege. They started from a place of hating men, and that’s where they went.
Feminism as a whole has also been trying very hard to kick them out of the club. That’s difficult when there’s no central authority figure who dictates what is and is not feminism, but TERFs don’t last long at most of the meetups.
That’s selection bias. Reasonable feminists usually don’t crow about being feminists, probably because they don’t want to be judged based on stereotypes about feminists.
Feminism is something with many internal factions. But yeah, the loudest ones aren’t usually interested in genuine discourse. Some of those factions can act every bit as unhinged as ‘persecuted’ Christians about total non-issues, like Oscars nominations despite womankind as a whole having some very real issues to worry about.
People who say reasonable things most people can agree with rarely get their own platform.
Also, lots of people who say reasonable things have lies spread about them by misogynists and get made to look unreasonable
That too, that too. There are a lot of times something sounds absolutely nuts without context (and reasonable with it) and that is frequently used against certain folks as well.
… just curious, but are you perusing a lot of feminist literature?
I know I’m not.
But what I do see are the articles that the right wing has decided are rage inducing and fair game and that they plaster everywhere to try to influence people.
So … maybe worth some thought.
No. And I don’t think I’ve encountered these articles on right-wing webpages when I vistas there out of curiosity. I instead think some were rants on Reddit written by feminists (while I can’t recall how I encountered others). So maybe a selection bias on my side, or the loudest feminists get more upvotes even outside rightwing subreddits.
this is the correct analysis. true feminists are fine at PR, but unfortunately grifters who profit off of right wing ideas being spread have a vested interest in making feminists appear evil in order to maintain the status quo.
Somehow, most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.
Does anyone have a link to any of these? I keep hearing recently that somehow this has been a thing for ages, but last I checked “wanting gender equality” was the driving idea of feminism, and that a large portion of women and men agreed with this.
I’m in my early 40’s and I definitely haven’t seen some deluge of articles by women, who while proclaiming feminism, “stereotype and bash men.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
Especially the history section will be relevant to you.
When people complain about feminism they generally complain about forth wave or maybe third wave feminism. When people point out all the good feminism they usually mean first and second wave feminism.
Edit: chances are you’ll have to watch with subtitles (it’s in German), but here’s a documentary (with commentary, because the documentary fucked up hard in some parts) about feminism: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I-OFCy-NrU4
And here is an interview with one of the subjects of the documentary who felt wrongly presented (rightfully so): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tvPExRR_GRg
Well, the problem is that nobody collects history of feminism articles they have read. I’m not gonna spend time on collecting them. Even if I did, you don’t know how fair my collection strategy would be. I have no idea what Google query would reproduce the samples the average person encounters these things online. So, to do this fairly requires a dedication akin to writing a scientific article on this topic… Nobody has the time.
And if I presented such a survey, you’d do your own research to verify the results anyway. So, I hate to say this, but why not check the web yourself?
If you don’t, I think the most feasible you could try is to summarize people’s replies.
Well, the problem is that nobody collects history of feminism articles they have read.
Apparently you don’t have to, because ‘Somehow, most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.’ So go find some of these articles.
It’s not my job to verify your insulting, reductive, broad-sweeping claims. Feminists have fought for equality for both men and women, this is a fact. The missive is “… a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes.[a][2][3][4][5] Feminism holds the position that societies prioritize the male point of view and that women are treated unjustly in these societies.[6] Efforts to change this include fighting against gender stereotypes and improving educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women.”
How we go from that to ‘most articles just stereotype and bash men’? You don’t get to make a claim like ’ most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men’ and then literally provide zero examples. This is just Hasty Generalization and it’s depressing to watch another man do this in a thread about the sudden decline in men agreeing that gender equality-seeking is somehow ‘stereotyping and bashing men.’
I agree with you on what it is, though. The problem, if the problem exists as I wrote, is the PR.
PR is different from what feminism is.
I guess what I wrote is too nuanced to understand in the first sight. I advice you to temporarily assume I’m correct, so that you can calm down and see what I really mean here.
The problem, if the problem exists as I wrote, is the PR. … I guess what I wrote is too nuanced to understand in the first sight
Not really, you said:
I never had the impression that feminists are good at PR. Somehow, most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.
And, to this point, still haven’t posted a single one.
To quote a philosopher from my youth:
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
I agree with you on what it is, though.
Can you explain to me how you interpret this one, then? I’m pretty sure it’s just misunderstanding.
I don’t agree with you, because you said the ‘issue with feminisms PR’ is posts on twitter, reddit, and ‘most articles I read’. You didn’t respond with any of the articles, and people say all sorts of things on twitter and reddit. They don’t encompass the entirety of a group like people who want gender equality.
Here’s an example of how feminism helps boys and girls, and the positive impacts of it.
That’s two articles I’ve posted here, feel free to post your myriad misandrist feminist articles.
Go take a look at the UN’s Twitter account on National Men’s day. Or I remember articles about how 1 in 4 homeless are women and it’s a tragedy for women. Honestly if you have seen articles like these before you’re either not reading many of them or you aren’t noticing what they are saying.
Go take a look at the UN’s Twitter account on National Men’s day. Or I remember articles about how 1 in 4 homeless are women and it’s a tragedy for women. Honestly if you have seen articles like these before you’re either not reading many of them or you aren’t noticing what they are saying.
So an article, and some twitter comments. That’s not exactly “…most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.”
How dishonest can you be? You specifically asked for a link to ANY of these. You got a response that gave you some examples, and you respond:
So an article, and some twitter comments. That’s not exactly "…most articles written by feministsI
You didn’t ask for most of the articles and it isn’t reasonable to expect someone to provide you 50-100 links.
If you have a genuine disagreement with what they provided you should present that, but as it stands you’re being terribly dishonest and disingenuous.
You got a response that gave you some examples, and you respond:
What examples? The guy said look on twitter on National Men’s Day, and a reference to an article (without linking to it) for a hand sweeping ‘Most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.’
(EDIT: To be specific, here’s EXACTLY what I said:
Does anyone have a link to any of these? )
No-one here has linked to any deluge of ‘feminist’ articles that ‘love to stereotype and bash men’.
What is the actual, legitimate complaint against this:
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes.
What examples?
The ones you were given.
The guy said look on twitter on National Men’s Day,
No, they didn’t. They told you to look at a specific account on a specific day.
and a reference to an article (without linking to it) for a hand sweeping ‘Most articles written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.’
Yes, which you could have easily googled if you wanted to read it.
Regardless you asked for examples, and then upon receiving them stated “that’s most?”. No amount of examples was going to be sufficient, your response would have been the same regardless. Your original question was dishonest in that you weren’t interested in the answer.
Edit: As for your definition, I don’t think anyone opposed that definition. Feminism is a large banner under which a lot of groups identify. So your extremely generic definition doesn’t encapsulate all persons or groups.
No, they didn’t. They told you to look at a specific account on a specific day.
Not the OP, and still not any links. ‘Go take a look at the UN’s Twitter account on National Men’s day.’ isn’t an article written by a feminist. ‘Or I remember articles about how 1 in 4 homeless are women and it’s a tragedy for women.’ that’s both not a link, and doesn’t ‘stereotype and bash men.’
Still waiting for a link of an ‘article written by feministsI’ve read love to stereotype and bash men.’ Feel free to post one.
I’d wager that people who think that couldn’t give you a coherent definition of what feminism actually is.
God fucking forbid women receive equal treatment or autonomy over their bodies!
Is there a coherent definition of feminism that feminists agree on?
(I think that people’s opinion about feminism is commonly their opinion about self-identified feminists. It’s fair to say “I believe feminism is harmful because the opinions I have heard self-identified feminists express have often seemed ridiculous, offensive, or counterproductive” without needing a definition of feminism that goes beyond self-identification.)
The definition I found that popped up on google pretty well sums up what I have always heard women say.
The advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes
It’s really that simple. It’s not a women over men movement. It’s a movement to receive the same respect, rights, and inclusion that men have enjoyed basically forever. They want the right to make decisions about their body. They’d like to maybe not be victims of sexual assault and rape and staggering percentages (about 1 in 6 American women will be raped in their lifetime). They’d like to have a better chance at corporate leadership (10% of fortune 500 CEOs are women). They’d like to have more of a footprint in government (roughly 28% of the US congress is female and this is a record high).
They just want equity and respect and they deserve it.
There’s an essay that I agree with about that sort of definition.
Here’s a relevant excerpt:
I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way.
The closest analogy I can think of is those religious people who say “God is just another word for the order and beauty in the Universe” – and then later pray to God to smite their enemies. And if you criticize them for doing the latter, they say “But God just means there is order and beauty in the universe, surely you’re not objecting to that?”
The result is that people can accuse people of “privilege” or “mansplaining” no matter what they do, and then when people criticize the concept of “privilege” they retreat back to “but ‘privilege’ just means you’re interrupting women in a women-only safe space. Surely no one can object to criticizing people who do that?”
Let’s say that, for example, I affirmed my belief that people should be hired based on their ability rather than on their sex, but then I said that there are more men than women in software development mainly due to biological differences. That doesn’t go against your definition, but do you think most feminists would react well to it? They didn’t when James Damore said it, or when the president of Harvard said something similar…
(This is despite the fact that it’s commonly accepted that biological differences between the sexes are the main reason why there are more men than women who are violent criminals.)
As a man myself I’m just having a hard time sympathizing with other men who grief at a term like “mansplaining” and in that find the justifications for disregarding the crux of what feminism seeks to make right. Is the term thrown around too much? Sure, I bet it is. So are a lot of absolutely vile quips about women. I can empathize with why some women are as verbally antagonistic towards men as they are.
To your other point. Are women underrepresented in STEM fields because they lack the ability to tackle those problems or because women have been historically directed away from those sorts of professions for as long as we have history to look back on?
You can play some of this off to less women wanting X or Y job, but if you cannot acknowledge men holding 9 out of 10 CEO positions in fortune 500 companies as maybe being a symptom of major structural imbalances in favor of men, I do not know what to tell you. I’ve watched women be professionally undermined throughout the entirety of my working life.
Also I missed your edit on your previous comment:
(I think that people’s opinion about feminism is commonly their opinion about self-identified feminists. It’s fair to say “I believe feminism is harmful because the opinions I have heard self-identified feminists express have often seemed ridiculous, offensive, or counterproductive” without needing a definition of feminism that goes beyond self-identification.)
Would it be then fair to say that, men broadly speaking are harmful because a not insignificant group of men rape about 16% of the female population? I think judging any group wholesale by the actions of it’s most extreme cohort is problematic. And in this case we’re talking about words women said that made some guys feel bad.
I just don’t buy into the counter argument to feminism and I think this quote sums up how a lot of men are feeling about the topic right now.
When you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression.
To your other point. Are women underrepresented in STEM fields because they lack the ability to tackle those problems or because women have been historically directed away from those sorts of professions for as long as we have history to look back on?
To speak to that, back when software development was not a prestigious job, it was done mostly by women. The lead developer for the Apollo program’s guidance software is a woman, Margaret Hamilton.
How did they define femanism cos by trational dedinition of equal i heighly doubt it
Y’all know it’s incels, right?
From what I read of the polls, Im strongly inclined that its religion based not incels.
Well, that’s a new one. Not that surprising, though.
So it seems it’s largely ethnic minorities in this age bracket that support this view?
What’s the bet that correlates strongly with religiousness.
Well, in the old days US women couldn’t even vote. Feminism was thus more important than it is today. It’s not really surprising to me that opponents increase by 3% points as women win more equality.
You’re asking people to judge the effect of a movement, but only one group remembers what things were like before the movement. It could just be that more gen z men honestly don’t know the answer.
