I will say it’s very easy to accept that victim attitude. I did. I don’t any longer, I’d consider myself a humanist with the belief we need to make society better for everyone.
I’m going to whine for a bit, I’m in my mid 30s now, and when I was in high school social media was new and Facebook was pretty much at its peak. I don’t know what growing up is like for kids these days, but I do know my 11 year old nephew is like the kids in the article and he knows all about “red-pill” alpha/beta/sigma shit (but not how incorrect it is).
As a teenager it felt like being a white straight male meant I was being pushed backwards to make room for helping push women forward (I saw felt like because sometimes how somethings feels outweighs reality).
As an example, to pay for university I went through lists of scholarships and almost all of them were focused on minorities and women, and so I was ineligible. I worked 30+ hours a week after school school and I worked really hard to get up to an A average so that I could get some scholarships to help afford tuition (and I still ended up with debt). It was a really tough time and I was filled with fear about the future. At the time I felt that that I had to put in more effort to get less than my peers did because I was a straight white boy. My girlfriend at the time ended up getting so many scholarships and bursaries that she could afford her tuition, and her residence, and fun money leftover, and she never had to take on any debt to pay for her even more expensive university. I only got one scholarship (not for lack of trying) based on my grade cutoff, and I ended up taking on debt which took years to pay off. It felt very unfair by comparison, and I know her experience did not reflect the average, but that’s what I saw as my comparison.
I also was a frequent 4chan user at the time, I joined for the memes, but there was a lot of commentary about how the education system had been changed to favour girls and that when it was more adversarial boys performed better. By then the statistics had already swung so that more girls were getting accepted into university, and they were more likely to graduate. I still have no idea how true the things I read on 4chan were vs reality, they definitely excluded the narrative of sexism against women in the old days, but they felt real, they matched with real statistics, and it was a cohesive narrative. I got sucked in, and I was bitter, and I saw all the ways in which I was the victim.
Obviously I never experienced any of the downsides of being a minority or being a woman. I never got the perspective of why things were harder for them and why they deserved help. I only saw there was help for them while I was struggling to keep afloat. I only saw the still present expectations on men to be providers, all the bad sides of patriarchy without knowing what patriarchy was (except meaning male and bad). Also at the time, there was stuff like anti-rape pledges that schools were making boys take, and it sorta felt like being treated like a criminal for crimes you knew you would never commit.
Anyways, I’ve meandered a lot. The discourse has evolved but I still don’t think men’s issues get the discussion they need, and I don’t think we’ve seriously focused much effort on the question of “how do we help boys too”.
Now that alarm bells are ringing and it feels like we’re still not adequately discussing men’s issues, and sadly it feels like the only people who actually are, are those alt-right red-pill influencers (who are massively warping the truth to fit a narrative) because they’re not afraid to get labelled over it.
And just to sign off, over 15 years after high school I now see a lot of the privilege I actually had, I’m more aware of the realities minorities and women face, and I know I was a whiny teenager with blinders on to all of the benefits and luck I actually had.
I remembered being the only Asian kid in school on Long Island. It was awful. The constant fights/bullying I was in were so frequent that my parents sent me to defense training.
My teachers would put me down and one of my teachers even physically abused me. The vice principal saw it and didn’t do anything either.
But I felt privileged because I wasn’t the only black kid in my school. He was my best friend. He had it way worse.
My point is that it is all about perspective. My life sucked because I knew what my friend was going through.
Obviously it’s not your fault. You’re the product of your environment. Racism is sorta built into everything in our society.
I’ll give you an example that relates to your post.
I work in a small startup and manage a marketing team. Our team is growing and I’m constantly hiring people.
Our founder plans to go public, but our diversity % is awful. We have 2000 employees, 8 blacks, 14 Asians and 80% men. The vast majority of them are white men. The head of HR is a friend of mine and asked me for help.
I told her one of the many reasons was the college graduate and masters preferred line we have on all our postings. It didn’t even matter that it’s a junior position. That was added because they wanted “educated” people. But we inadvertently homogenized all our candidates.
As a test, we changed all marketing positions to just say high school or GED. And with that simple trick, marketing is the most diverse department in the company.
The only thing we can all do as a society is to just try our best to bring diversity to our lives. I was a “don’t bother me and I won’t bother you” type of person when it came to LGBTQ people until I found myself living in West Hollywood and making friends with mostly gay people.
The scholarship thing, and lack of social support for men in general, is still a massive problem IMO. I’m all for lifting those up who need it, but many people, myself included, were too “rich” to get financial aid, too poor to afford anything other than community college (which is great, but it has challenges of its own), and too straight and white and male to quality for 95% of scholarships. I’m very aware I inherently have some level of privilege, and I’m sure there’s even more I’m unaware of, but the single greatest contribution to your chance of success in life is the zip code you were born in.
I’m extremely privileged and make more than enough money for a comfortable living, but the road here was very difficult, and it’s pretty damn easy to see why young boys are leaning right so hard. I’m left as fuck and id even be considered left wing in Europe, but the left in the US has alienated the fuck out of young men and provides almost 0 role models for them. The constant media messaging and sentiment of men are evil, they need to go die in wars, and #killallmen on social media being celebrated is super damaging. If I didn’t end up decently successful and couldn’t take a step back and get a top down view of everything I don’t know if I’d end up nearly as left as I am.
It’s only recently I’ve seen some sentiment change around this, but it’s going to take a long time as all social change does. We really ought to stop telling young boys what to not be and instead SHOW THEM what they should strive to be. This is why people like Andrew Tate get such a cult following. Despite being an absolute dog shit human being, he focuses on uplifting oneself and provides an ideal person who you should strive to be. By comparison that positive male role model who young boys should strive to be is completely absent on the left and leaves many boys, myself included at the time, lost as fuck and surrounded by what they should not be instead of what they should.
I really get this feeling. I remember at uni seeing adverts for scholarships and internships from huge and exciting companies that, in only a few more words, essentially said ‘if you’re anything other than a straight white male, sign up!’. I won’t speak to the value of effectiveness of these programs, but I can really understand how that could create a feeling of unwantedness that the alt right tries to give an answer for.
I enjoyed this article
I will say it’s very easy to accept that victim attitude. I did. I don’t any longer, I’d consider myself a humanist with the belief we need to make society better for everyone.
I’m going to whine for a bit, I’m in my mid 30s now, and when I was in high school social media was new and Facebook was pretty much at its peak. I don’t know what growing up is like for kids these days, but I do know my 11 year old nephew is like the kids in the article and he knows all about “red-pill” alpha/beta/sigma shit (but not how incorrect it is).
As a teenager it felt like being a white straight male meant I was being pushed backwards to make room for helping push women forward (I saw felt like because sometimes how somethings feels outweighs reality).
As an example, to pay for university I went through lists of scholarships and almost all of them were focused on minorities and women, and so I was ineligible. I worked 30+ hours a week after school school and I worked really hard to get up to an A average so that I could get some scholarships to help afford tuition (and I still ended up with debt). It was a really tough time and I was filled with fear about the future. At the time I felt that that I had to put in more effort to get less than my peers did because I was a straight white boy. My girlfriend at the time ended up getting so many scholarships and bursaries that she could afford her tuition, and her residence, and fun money leftover, and she never had to take on any debt to pay for her even more expensive university. I only got one scholarship (not for lack of trying) based on my grade cutoff, and I ended up taking on debt which took years to pay off. It felt very unfair by comparison, and I know her experience did not reflect the average, but that’s what I saw as my comparison.
I also was a frequent 4chan user at the time, I joined for the memes, but there was a lot of commentary about how the education system had been changed to favour girls and that when it was more adversarial boys performed better. By then the statistics had already swung so that more girls were getting accepted into university, and they were more likely to graduate. I still have no idea how true the things I read on 4chan were vs reality, they definitely excluded the narrative of sexism against women in the old days, but they felt real, they matched with real statistics, and it was a cohesive narrative. I got sucked in, and I was bitter, and I saw all the ways in which I was the victim.
Obviously I never experienced any of the downsides of being a minority or being a woman. I never got the perspective of why things were harder for them and why they deserved help. I only saw there was help for them while I was struggling to keep afloat. I only saw the still present expectations on men to be providers, all the bad sides of patriarchy without knowing what patriarchy was (except meaning male and bad). Also at the time, there was stuff like anti-rape pledges that schools were making boys take, and it sorta felt like being treated like a criminal for crimes you knew you would never commit.
Anyways, I’ve meandered a lot. The discourse has evolved but I still don’t think men’s issues get the discussion they need, and I don’t think we’ve seriously focused much effort on the question of “how do we help boys too”.
Now that alarm bells are ringing and it feels like we’re still not adequately discussing men’s issues, and sadly it feels like the only people who actually are, are those alt-right red-pill influencers (who are massively warping the truth to fit a narrative) because they’re not afraid to get labelled over it.
And just to sign off, over 15 years after high school I now see a lot of the privilege I actually had, I’m more aware of the realities minorities and women face, and I know I was a whiny teenager with blinders on to all of the benefits and luck I actually had.
I remembered being the only Asian kid in school on Long Island. It was awful. The constant fights/bullying I was in were so frequent that my parents sent me to defense training.
My teachers would put me down and one of my teachers even physically abused me. The vice principal saw it and didn’t do anything either.
But I felt privileged because I wasn’t the only black kid in my school. He was my best friend. He had it way worse.
My point is that it is all about perspective. My life sucked because I knew what my friend was going through.
I’m sorry you went through that.
That’s the kind of thing I didn’t think about growing up, which was in a primarily white area, and I only really made non-white friends in university.
I feel embarrassed at what I thought back then sometimes.
Obviously it’s not your fault. You’re the product of your environment. Racism is sorta built into everything in our society.
I’ll give you an example that relates to your post.
I work in a small startup and manage a marketing team. Our team is growing and I’m constantly hiring people.
Our founder plans to go public, but our diversity % is awful. We have 2000 employees, 8 blacks, 14 Asians and 80% men. The vast majority of them are white men. The head of HR is a friend of mine and asked me for help.
I told her one of the many reasons was the college graduate and masters preferred line we have on all our postings. It didn’t even matter that it’s a junior position. That was added because they wanted “educated” people. But we inadvertently homogenized all our candidates.
As a test, we changed all marketing positions to just say high school or GED. And with that simple trick, marketing is the most diverse department in the company.
The only thing we can all do as a society is to just try our best to bring diversity to our lives. I was a “don’t bother me and I won’t bother you” type of person when it came to LGBTQ people until I found myself living in West Hollywood and making friends with mostly gay people.
The scholarship thing, and lack of social support for men in general, is still a massive problem IMO. I’m all for lifting those up who need it, but many people, myself included, were too “rich” to get financial aid, too poor to afford anything other than community college (which is great, but it has challenges of its own), and too straight and white and male to quality for 95% of scholarships. I’m very aware I inherently have some level of privilege, and I’m sure there’s even more I’m unaware of, but the single greatest contribution to your chance of success in life is the zip code you were born in.
I’m extremely privileged and make more than enough money for a comfortable living, but the road here was very difficult, and it’s pretty damn easy to see why young boys are leaning right so hard. I’m left as fuck and id even be considered left wing in Europe, but the left in the US has alienated the fuck out of young men and provides almost 0 role models for them. The constant media messaging and sentiment of men are evil, they need to go die in wars, and #killallmen on social media being celebrated is super damaging. If I didn’t end up decently successful and couldn’t take a step back and get a top down view of everything I don’t know if I’d end up nearly as left as I am.
It’s only recently I’ve seen some sentiment change around this, but it’s going to take a long time as all social change does. We really ought to stop telling young boys what to not be and instead SHOW THEM what they should strive to be. This is why people like Andrew Tate get such a cult following. Despite being an absolute dog shit human being, he focuses on uplifting oneself and provides an ideal person who you should strive to be. By comparison that positive male role model who young boys should strive to be is completely absent on the left and leaves many boys, myself included at the time, lost as fuck and surrounded by what they should not be instead of what they should.
There is really easy solution - socially financed education and income based support.
But then how will we get young people to join the military for our unpopular unnecessary wars?
100%
It is a lot easier to see where you’ve struggled than where you are privileged.
But I would like to see more make role models. I didn’t really have many growing up.
I really get this feeling. I remember at uni seeing adverts for scholarships and internships from huge and exciting companies that, in only a few more words, essentially said ‘if you’re anything other than a straight white male, sign up!’. I won’t speak to the value of effectiveness of these programs, but I can really understand how that could create a feeling of unwantedness that the alt right tries to give an answer for.