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.
Were you not young before/after the start of the internet?
I could have been MAGA, no question. Here’s my anecdote: (edit: too lazy to correct so please don’t pay close attention to the tense of my words here, I was partially speaking from the perspective of being a kid again but I didn’t stay consistent)
- been a loner irl. Not that many friends
- most of my friends are online
- most of my friends say offensive stuff and while I don’t really mean things (at first) I want to fit in
- this can spiral pretty easily with a bunch of kids. And it did. I’ve said my fair share of atrocious things online that I wish I could take back
- as a youngster, 20+ years ago, as a loner/nerd if I’m not playing games, I’m (probably) watching YouTube or anime. Rarely hangin with friends
- now as someone who’s book smart, but especially at this point has absolutely 0 like street smarts & real people skills? Hooked into conspiracies.
I grew up in a diverse area, so I’ve really never believed in racist stuff. Those kind of conspiracies I used to just handwave the racism stuff away cause it wasn’t the important stuff to me that I did kind of believe in. I literally even used to watch some of Alex Jones conspiracy videos.
Really easy to get lost in this crap as a teenager alone at 4am.
Like I said I grew up in a diverse area, and in one of my first real relationships, I got a lot of pushback about certain things (I was kinda blue lives matter for a bit for example) and when that ended, one of the big things I took from it was I wanted to be a more accepting person, and I’ve been an increasingly-raging leftist ever since.
With the rising loneliness epidemic (which actually extends to both genders - EVERYONE is increasingly isolated) I can only imagine this sort of story is increasingly common. And not everyone comes to the same conclusions about wanting to be more accepting, etc.
I was very lucky to go through those experiences and learn what I did from it. There’s probably another universe where I instead got increasingly angry & further into all those things - from the cruel & crass words to the conspiracies - and am wearing a red hat
🤮🤮 at the thought of that
My guess is that the internet connects them to like minded misogynists, then it’s just a big women hating circle jerk that perpetuates the reason they got into it in the first place: women dislike them, because they are misogynists.
It’s not complicated. They’re horny and frustrated that they can’t get a woman to be interested in them. Tate tells them it’s not their fault and that the blame lies with women and society, allowing them to not feel shitty about themselves or make any effort to improve.
It’s a combination of them being young and dumb, but also being brought up mind-fucked by social media from the beginning of their lives.
The algorithm pushes them that direction.
On YouTube I’m constantly one video away from “owning the woke libs” content because I turned my view history off.
Yo the second I turned off personalized ads I got so many ads for erectile dysfunction medication. It felt like they were trying to embarrass me into turning personalized ads back on.
That’s both funny and very insulting.
I think its because, to an extent, masculinity has been villainized, and people who are masculine (in appearance, identity or desire to be traditionally masculine) naturally look for people that pretend to value them.
This combined with reduction or even removal of shop classes, reduced PE, recess and physical activities in school, female teachers now far outnumbering male teachers, and strict attitude towards typical male behavior can easily build a huge amount of resentment in young men. Most public schools now are heavily tailored towards female students.
Doing normal boy stuff, like roughing each other up and messing with your friends got me and other boys detention, and it felt extremely unfair.
Most public schools now are heavily tailored towards female students
Schooling has become overly feminized to the detriment of boys. Graduation rates are the very clear proof
What you consider masculine or feminine behavior is mostly socially constructed.
There are these myths that only men where hunters while women where only gatherers, which turn out to be false. Women and men both hunted and gathered. Link
IMO, the real issue is that current society places to much attention to gender roles, and for men it is done it in a way that makes it difficult and contradictory for young men to find their place: “You are a ‘man’, and you have to behave this specific way, however if you do that you are bad and will have trouble finding a partner. However if you do not behave like a ‘man’, you are weird.”
The conservative gender roles don’t only hurt women, they hurt men as well. And dating and finding a good partner sucks for everyone.
The algorithms in social media, media platforms, and search engines are all designed to keep users engaged so that ad revenue can be generated and user data can be harvested.
Adding to that, a lot of these misogynistic creators leverage predatory practices that manipulate marginalized people into sycophantcy.
When this and other factors come together, we wind up with mindless drones which are easily manipulated, constantly angry, and always searching for a way to “get back” at those that who marginalized them.
This explains MAGA
Social medias thrive on engagement, and controversial content is king of engagement.
So social medias companies push content like Andrew Tate and co because it makes them money and they don’t care about anything else.
Young people are impressionable, and they get pushed that crap over and over.
If everyday of your life you get told that women are just baby factories, you will eventually start to believe it, some sooner than others.
Social media algorithms create filter bubbles that limit your perception of the full world. The algorithm changes the “high” it creates to keep you interacting with it as long as possible. If social media algorithms were real life drugs they would be considered the most dangerous of all because of their psychological toll.
From around 2022 until just recently YouTube Shorts was heavily pushing Tate on me (an almost 50 year old man).
No matter how many times I disliked and/or blocked the poster, the YouTube algorithm just kept throwing more Tate at me. I don’t know what I did to make YouTube think I’d be interested in that clown.
On the plus side, it made me a lot more aware of what’s going on, hence my efforts to get Google out of my life. I can spot someone trying to manipulate me, but I have young sons who might not.
Thanks for protecting your sons from that shit
That’s what happen when identity politics mark a group as less important and the enemy.
It happens when right wing do identity politics an the marginalized minorities group together against it.
Left wing for some reason decided to use exactly the same strategy as the right wing and took identity politics as a way to do politics and they are having exactly the same result. The “marginalized” identity turned against them.
Surprised Pikachu face.
Yep…
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.
I think I had this exact thought yesterday. In the past, there’s been hints that appear within just a few months if you’re looking.
Most of the explanations posted aren’t very convincing. If it’s just a daddy figure or toxic masculinity or just personal affirmation that’s not new and should have applied all along. The YouTube algorithm could be part of it, but then you just get a question about why the YouTube algorithm was pushing that.
A random theory, just based on something I read recently: looksmaxxing is becoming a big thing, which is itself a sign of equality in that the burden for being attractive is now going both ways. Paradoxically, the new cohort of men with body image issues is very vulnerable to radicalisation by the manosphere.
It’d be kind of surprising if that was the whole thing, though…
Because positive masculinity doesn’t get clicks like toxic masculinity does, sadly. No shortage of examples of the latter, but there just aren’t enough examples of healthy manhood out there to learn from, or at least not enough ones in the algorithms.
What’s worse, in so many cases it’s assumed that positive masculinity just means being receptive, sensitive, collaborative and being connected with others. These are qualities that are typically associated with women, and a lot of guys shun anything that might make them “look like a woman”. Then it’s assumed, more or less, that you’ll need to be more like a woman in order to not be toxic.
Obviously not true, but this leaves young men in a vacuum. So they fail to live up to their potential, plus they lose out on relationships, are isolated from their peers who could steer them in a better direction, and are without a secure sense of self.
So, in come the Andrew Tates of the world to give them a seemingly easier and better way to cope. Sure, they’re told they’re special, but then they’re fed the notions like “might is right”, that there are only winners and losers in this world, and to “get the prom queen”. Not wanting to miss out on this is incredibly enticing for these young men, so the manosphere sucks them right in.
It’s gotta so, so much deeper than just changing the messaging. Positive male role models and helping young men understand who they are, creating healthy examples of masculinity that are both manly and positive, can make a difference. Without that, the far-right black hole that is the manosphere is going to keep getting more young men trapped in it.
I think at the root of it all is a far broader phenomenon than that which is far from gender specific.
In simple terms: quiet confidence doesn’t stand-out in “loud” environments were people’s attention is being sought by countless other people, especially for people who aren’t sophisticated and lived enough to recognize and value it, and the vast majority young people are such people as are (or so it seems to me at times) a large minority or even a majority of supposedly adults.
Putting it in another way, both quiet confident people are nowhere as invested into shaping the opinions of others as to spend most of their time “shouting” (and by “shouting” I mean all the ways people try and project and impression onto others, not just speaking loudly, so for example how some people always dress to impress rather than dress for themselves) and unsophisticated people are drawn to “loudness” rather than more subtle elements of how others talk, dress, make choices and act.
This stuff is behind phenomenons like Influencers, Celebrity Culture, Populist Politicians and so on, which has been pushed very hard in Western Culture for decades now.
So loud toxic masculinity posers with lots of exposure in the News Media (with the well known “Halo Effect” that people who are talked about a lot are perceived by others as important even when most of the talking about them is saying negative things) will get the attention of and influence emotional, social and/or intellectual simpletons.
I blame the algorithms. This shit is oushed in front of impressionable young men’s faces by most social media algorithms because it drives (toxic) engagement. Others have already described why it’s appealing.
This shit has always existed but it’s given a soap box because corporate wants number to go up, and sadly parents these days leave parenting up to social media so they don’t teach them that these views are abhorrent.
Young men have problems in their lives, like everyone else does, maybe less, maybe more than other groups in society but that does not matter because for them it’s the most vivid problems. He talks to specifically them and their problems.
I don’t know how the media in your country sounds*, but here every time there is an issue discussed it tends to be: women, minorites, whatever have a problem, men are the problem.
If the mainstream does not talk about young men’s issues, you will hand over the attention of young men to someone who does.
*In a news article, or a political speech try switching the word man/woman black/white immigrant etc for their opposite. Some of them sound absolutely absurd when you do.
every time there is an issue discussed it tends to be: women, minorites, whatever have a problem, men are the problem.
This can’t be overstated. There are a lot of loud misandrists posing as feminists, broadly painting men as The Problem just for being men. Speaking up is automatically condemned as condescension, sitting comfortably is encroaching on women’s space, striking up conversation is harassment, glancing at someone in the gym is sexual assault, a drunk hookup is rape.
Of course, there are problematic men who are guilty of these accusations, but the majority are normal people being baselessly lumped in with actual offenders for no other reason than being male. Women get unwavering support for just being women, men get trashed for just being men. That by itself is demoralizing.
Then you combine that with the fact that a large percentage of women want an assertive “manly” man. The boys who err on the side of respectfulness watch the aggressive dudebros succeed sexually and romantically where they fail.
If respect loses to toxic masculinity so often, then it’s only reasonable to think that maybe the guys pushing toxic masculinity know what they’re talking about. And if they’re going to be demonized for being men anyway, they might as well live up to the condemnation and at least get something out of it.
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 2 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
