Mothers of Sons and the fears of feral masculinity to a lost generation of boys
Over at the Winterless TVNZ ‘Life’ section, Michelle Duff is concerned…
How do you raise boys in an era of ‘alphas’ and toxic hyper-masculinity?
Online misogyny targets teen boys as potential recruits and the influence appears to be trickling down to primary-school-age kids. So when your nine-year-old comes home from school chanting lyrics about “alphas” – a term popularised by a self-professed misogynst Andrew Tate – and your five-year-old is hacking at his hair for fear of looking like a girl – how do you respond? By Michelle Duff
…it’s not the first time she’s been concerned…
How Dame Jacinda Ardern’s profile went from saint to witch
Opinion: When journalist Michelle Duff wrote a biography of Jacinda Ardern in 2019, the term ‘Jacindamania’ had been coined but Covid 19 was unheard of. Over the next two years the world – and New Zealand – would change drastically and the young prime minister would be deified, then demonised. Duff, who last week released an updated version of her book, writes on how she believes imported culture wars helped to distort our political landscape – at the expense of women.
…Michelle’s inability to understand how we got to where we are would be funny if it weren’t such an example of the woke Left being woefully blind to their own alienating agenda.
For the last 6 years I have screamed at the middle class woke in New Zealand that their activism was creating culture war political ammunition for the Right.
When I started warning this, ACT were on .7%
ACT are now 8.6% and thanks to the race baiting political stunt of the Treaty Principles Referendum, they are headed towards double digit support.
The manner in which middle class woke cancel culture activism has driven male voters into the arms of the Right is an enormous issue the Left are going to have to confront at some stage.
Imagine if MeToo hadn’t mutated into a Salem witch trial where the new evidential threshold becomes ‘whatever a person says on Twitter’.
Imagine if BLM acknowledged that far more white people were shot by Police than black people and instead of rioting had progressed their argument with solidarity?
Imagine if the Trans community had not been so radioactively militant?
I have many self declaring feminist women who privately tell me they have real misgivings with some of the Trans woke dogma but are terrified of saying anything because the Fourth Wave Feminists, non-binary activists and trans ally vegan mommy bloggers rip them to pieces on social media. Part of the problem is that the Trans activists themselves have helped make this debate so radioactively toxic with their cancel culture dynamics.
Imagine if the woke hadn’t started cancel culture deplatforming?
Imagine if the entire Identity Politics movement had sought to build class solidarity rather than alienating bullshit?
Since 2016s #MeToo moment, a coalition of 5th wave feminists, non gender binary activists, Critical Race Theorists and Critical Gender Theorists have manufactured a faith based woke dogma, the holy trinity of which is:
1 – All white people are irredeemable cross burning racists.
2 – B-E-L-I-E-V-E ALL WOMEN that men are rapists.
3 – Everyone defending free speech is a uniform wearing Nazi who hates the Trans Community.
Woven into this woke Identity Politics Holy Trinity, is the ‘BELIEVE ALL WOMEN’ mantra, because intersectionism decrees all men are part of a power dynamic which means they can never be victims and because women are morally superior to toxic masculinity males, they would NEVER lie about that abuse.
The real danger of identity politics is the moment when men start seeing themselves in the same cultural terminology of victimhood, the result of that is how Trump just won a landslide.
The modern Woke Left are great at organising ‘Free-The-Nipple’ protests for vegan cycling mommy bloggers, not so good at deconstructing the Neoliberal Economic Hegemonic structure.
No poor family is sitting around the kitchen table cancelling one another for mis-using pronouns.
This entire issue of Identity over Class has caused immense damage on the Left and rather than debating the material well being of citizens, we are lost in middle class identity politics virtue signalling that censors rather than answers and in that cultural space, anger grifters from Posie Parker to Andrew Tate to flourish.
We told men they were the problem and they left the mainstream and founded the manosphere.
This is a problem that is demanding some reflection on MotherJones…
Of Misogyny, Musk, and Men – Women are not okay. We’re furious.
The Trump campaign knew that men were his ticket back to power, and it targeted them—pointedly young men, and men of color—with a sophisticated campaign of grievance and disinformation. And in that, they were massively aided by the manosphere and its billionaire mascot: Elon Musk.
…the manner in which micro targeted hate algorithms helped turn this election has not been fully comprehended yet, by playing into culture war revenge fantasies, Trump manipulated male resentment like nobody else has before…
There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women. For decades, men have been losing ground relative to women, be it in education or job opportunities. Women are increasingly likely to be a household’s primary breadwinner or raise families by themselves. The MeToo movement was a massively needed corrective for sexual harassment and abuse, but the ferocity of it (and some occasional overreach) did destabilize many men.
…when even MotherJones can quietly acknowledged the social media purges probably helped alienate all those young men, we might be moving towards progress.
We have brought up a generation of girls telling them ‘boys will rape them’ and brought up a generation of boys telling them ‘you will be accused of rape’
Mothers these days are more concerned their son will be accused of something than their daughters of actually being absurd.
Being a man isn’t an evil thing, and it isn’t inherently evil. We are a culture of angry solo mothers raising fatherless children and we have pushed boys away into the arms of toxic masculinity grifters.
Trump’s United States of Wounded Masculinity has won because boys are lost…
The ex-president is courting a demographic drifting away from the Democrats. What’s driving the widening gender gap among young people?
…young Men are suffering more mental health issues, education problems and self harm driven by a system that alienates them and then lectures them on privilege creating a deep resentment because identity is the only thing that matters now..
Richard Reeves – whose 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, has become a foundational text on what has gone wrong for young men in the country – is damning of framing that puts young men’s rightward turn in terms of UFC fights and incels, when he believes it’s about deep-seated inequalities of outcome in education, mental health and employment.
“I want to talk about why only 60% of Black boys graduate high school on time in Michigan, or the fact that the share of male teachers has gone from 33% to 23%. Or that we’ve lost more than half the men who work in social work and psychology,” he says. “I’d want to talk about that rather than, for example, whether the Barbie movie was unfair on Ken.”
He says people are misinterpreting the polling. “It’s not enthusiasm for the reactionary right, it’s a sense of being taken for granted by the left. There are more young men shrugging their shoulders than raising their fists.”
It’s true that there is now a growing gender gap in education; for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men. In many US cities, young women are earning more than young men and moving out of parents’ homes earlier than them.
Reeves is careful to say that improving conditions for men and boys should not mean slowing down similar efforts for women and girls. But he says that government institutions do have a tendency to purposefully avoid naming the problems young men face. Suicide is one of the clearest areas in which there is a huge gender divide – there’s a fourfold gender gap in rates for young people – and yet, says Reeves, “the CDC website breaks down suicide rates by every demographic except gender. Why? Why don’t the Democrats have a taskforce on male suicide when there are 40,000 deaths a year?”
He gives other compelling examples of how Democrats have failed to signpost their achievements to young men. Biden’s infrastructure bill – his key piece of legislative success – was a huge jobs creator for working-class men, “but the administration tied itself in knots not to say so”. Instead, it focused on the million women in construction initiative to ensure women got some of the funding. “That’s amazing. Now, er, where’s the million men into teaching initiative? … There are so many initiatives for women in Stem; why not one for men in teaching? Who is going to attack that?”
On the Democrats’ own website is a page titled “who we serve” that lists 14 different groups. Men are not among them.
…if the Left wants to win, it needs to win back male voters.
The true demarcation of power in a Capitalist Democracy is the 1% richest plus their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us.
Once you understand power in that framework, we can never lose an election!
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
My suspicion is that the economic inequality between men and women was inevitable once more mothers had to work to support their families as a father’s wage was no longer enough for the family to live on. There are many excellent men and women in NZ however there’s a perception that men are more likely to have ego issues and women are more compliant so you can see why employers would favor them. There has always been smart females, I remember from school that males and females both got high results so it is more that employment opportunities have opened for females allowing them to progress that has allowed them to succeed.
Obviously the ego and compliance attitudes are more equal across the sexes now and almost anyone in power has ego issues (you can use more earthly descriptions if you want) so people need a reason to understand the incredible value they all have if they are to escape the social media rush to the bottom.
If you fail to explore the effects of pornography on gender relations and/or the failure of some migrant groups to integrate into host countries, you will never fully understand social and economic conflict in western liberal democracies.
My grandsons and their mates reckon their life today is a problem cause boomer men aquiesced to feminists in the seventies and eighties. These are all kids with feminist working mums. In the free world election they all supported Trump. Was their anything about Harris that could appeal to them?
As if – the woke agenda pales into meaningless insignificance to the hypocrisy of society at large. Basically we are telling our kids over and over again what it means to be successful. Be a gangster. Get money – get fame – get what you want – and when it all turns to shit it’s someone elses fault. We’re raising a generation of narcissicists.
They are all STILL being fed imaginary nonsense about being a “man” and it’s fucking depressing – then we get this CoC government and they’re wondering why shit is getting worse. Man up – lol – what did you think would happen under conservatives
Wheel – Take your blinkers off! You don’t even seem to understand that nobody here is commenting on the current coalition government – except to say perhaps that it is surprising their winning margin was not much larger.
Martyn…I knew there was a good reason I kept looking at this blog. I deeply regret your (apparent) commitment to Marxism- which is a road to nowhere, but heck, it wasn’t that long ago I would have considered myself leftist.
On the issue of the ‘woke’/’progressive liberals’/’authoritarian white male haters’, I agree with you entirely. They have cost the Ao-NZ,the USA, and a few European governments their last election, and will be the reason conservative governments will presently replace the present governments of Oz, Uk and Canada. Most of their followers are still unwilling to accept your message too.