Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers

Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers

“As soon as I mention feminism, you can feel the shift in the room; they’re shuffling in their seats.” Mike Nicholson holds workshops with teenage boys about the challenges of impending manhood. Standing up for the sisterhood, it seems, is the last thing on their minds.

When Nicholson says he is a feminist himself, “I can see them look at me, like, ‘I used to like you.’”

Once Nicholson, whose programme is called Progressive Masculinity, unpacks the fact that feminism means equal rights and opportunities for women, many of the boys with whom he works are won over.

“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,” he says.

But he is battling against what he calls a “dominance-based model” of masculinity. “These old-fashioned, regressive ideas are having a renaissance, through your masculinity influencers – your grifters, like Andrew Tate.”

  • Schadrach
    5•5 months ago

    When divorce was first legalized courts gave the women custody of the children so men could be free to be men with out the burden of children.

    This…isn’t accurate. When divorce was first legalized, the courts tended to give custody to whoever held the most wealth (usually the father), as they would be best able to materially take care of children. What you might describe as early proto-feminists pushed to flip that around which led to the tender years doctrine (essentially that a child needs it’s mother) and the idea that it didn’t matter who could best materially take care of a child, we can simply transfer wealth from the other parent on pain of jail if needed. Decades later, that idea in turn became part of “patriarchy” when women having careers became more normal, leading to the current scenario in most places in the US where the policy is to go with whatever biases the judge in question has (which tends to lean closer to tender years than the opposite due to social inertia).

    There have been moves to make starting from a position of equal custody and moving from there if there’s a good reason to a thing, but this often gets protested, usually by feminists (see Kentucky).