this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Yes. Unironically, yes. Young men have swung right in a way that the youth usually doesn't and it is in a meaningful way because Dems and progressives offer them little, blame them for much and the right welcomes them in with open arms.
Continuing Feminism instead of switching to Egalitarianism was a mistake
Feminism has always been egalitarianism. There will always be people co-opting terms and movements for negative reasons. If men see feminism as something different that's on them to educate themselves. Women never achieved equity and now (in the US) we are backsliding as a country.
And.... that's part of the problem,
Women haven't achieved equity, this is true, and we ARE backsliding as a country.
But at the same time it's saying "Could people be co-opting Feminism for Misandrist and Transphobic purposes? No, it's the men who are to blame!" that pushed young men to the Right to begin with. It's time to take some responsibility, and say "Not my circus, not my monkeys"
Oh, progressives offer them plenty, just not on social issues (and that's the only type of change on the table)
To put it another way, anxiety is preparing for a fight. It destroys you spending all your life looking for an enemy you can't see. But we all feel it
The right offers them an enemy, and a way to fight for something better. It's a bald faced lie, but the need for something to change is overwhelming for a lot of people
Very, very true. And I mean honestly, the fact we no longer have third spaces and our communities have moved online have given an insane boost to the most extreme voices. Groups based on location and hobbies might lean to one side, but there's going to be moderating voices
But in a right wing echo chamber, you just have to listen to people attacking others. The left is plenty welcoming, but there's these people who are just sitting there to attack any perceived bigotry or ideology - like once I got called out for using the wrong pronouns in a new voice chat because I had the wrong name... And it was just this one drunk girl and we just moved on and someone else privately apologized for her, but that injustice just feels terrible
It's not that left spaces aren't welcoming, it's just that it takes one person to make you feel constantly on edge and sour you on anything like it
And it's not like the right doesn't do the same - they ban people left and right for perceived purity tests and label you a far left instigator, but pound for pound they need less people because they're more organized than we are
They have leaders at every level and every checkpoint from general dissatisfaction to rabid Fascism to feed you the next level of hate you need to repeat
We have liberals who hate the left more than they hate fascism and constant infighting between what few communities we do have
We really need to set a set of next step goal posts, like universal healthcare, worker protections, and forcing corporations in line
We need to be able to talk to tankies and just avoid geopolitics, we need vegans to be able to talk about reducing meat consumption instead of all or nothing, we even need to be able to talk to bigots and focus on why they actually agree with our next step goalposts once they understand them
We need to provide a ramp to leftism, even if we have to hold our noses at some of it. We can still have our safe spaces and leftist spaces, but we need to do outreach and give people stepping stones and middle grounds so people can slowly learn, where we're lazer focused on key subjects and let the rest slide
We also need places where we can organize around issues we all agree on so we can organize and make actual progress, where we don't talk about end goals, ideals, and values - just on the next step
The truth is, most everyone wants a lot of the same things, and they'd support it if they understood it - we need to be able to teach them issue by issue what we want to do, no matter what baggage they haven't yet overcome.
Bingo.
I once got somebody to think differently about green energy by harassing the power of patriotism. His initial argument basically boiled down to "new is scary and I don't see why we need to change anyways", and I hit him with a "what are you talking about, innovation is what made america great", and I could see the loading icon spin in his brain.
I've also gotten conservative family in on medicare-for-all by pointing out that the military maybe doesn't have enough healthy citizens to pull from if a crisis happened, and if we're gonna be serious about national defense, we absolutely need national healthcare.
What is it you'd call someone who said exactly this but was talking about crime statistics broken down by race rather than sex, again?
Let's try it. I'm thinking of a group of people. This group of people is disproportionately subjected to police violence, including police shootings. This group is more likely to be prosecuted when accused of a crime, is more likely to be convicted when prosecuted, and gets harsher sentences when convicted. What group am I describing? Hint: The answer is that all that applies to both black folks and men, and usually to similar degrees (close enough that some measures have a wider sex gap and others have a wider race gap). And that's not even a complete list of similarities.
By the vast majority of measures the way men are treated by the criminal justice system compared to women and the way black folks are treated by the criminal justice system compared to white folks line up (other non-white racial groupings tend to end up somewhere between). Race and sex also both apply, meaning that black men get treated the worst and white women get treated with kid gloves. Depending on the specific measure, sometimes the gender gap is actually wider than the racial gap but that again depends on the specific measure (for example black folks are more disproportionately killed by police than men are but mostly because that would require more than 100% of police shootings to be men instead of merely 95%, while men get disproportionately harsher sentencing for many crimes than women to a larger degree than black folks do compared to white folks).
I personally know a white woman from here who got busted for drugs in another state, was released on her own recognizance pending her hearing, fled back here, was eventually picked up, spent a few days in jail while the other state decided it wanted to extradite her and made arrangements to transfer her, went before a different judge and was released on her own recognizance pending her new hearing date a second time, despite demonstrably proving she was a flight risk. That's doesn't happen unless you are a white woman, preferably a young, pretty one because those traits both carry further privileged treatment by criminal justice.
I'd argue you are operating from a bad model. The core problem is that a lot of social justice models are ultimately built upon a bedrock of Marxist class conflict, with people being assigned into roles of bourgeois-analog "oppressor" and proletariat-analog "oppressed". The problem is that the degree to which Marxist class conflict actually works as the basis for a model is basically the degree that whatever feature you are basing it on functions as a proxy for economic class. For race, it does well enough in the aggregate that it works, albeit imperfectly. For sex, however it's a poor fit.
The trick is that to justify fitting sex into a model based on class conflict you lie to yourselves by looking at the sex distribution at the very top and pretending that that tells you anything useful about men as a whole (this is a fallacy of composition). Or to put it another way, Nancy Pelosi and ~~turtle lich~~ Mitch McConnell have more in common with each other than either of them does with men or women as a general class.
A consequence of this is a whole series of apologetics and the like to try to justify why the model still holds even when evidence seems to run counter to it. Like using epicycles and deferents to try to make a geocentric model of the solar system fit reality. Except it;s all things about how "the patriarchy hurts men too" in exactly the way you wouldn't say "capitalism hurts billionaires too" and that kind of thing. Like why in a system allegedly built on male supremacy would men be treated worse by criminal justice than women, in all the same ways that this same system that is also allegedly built on white supremacy treats black folks worse than white folks? The short answer is that it's unfalsifiable, the model can be stretched to fit any measurement of reality.
A better though still imperfect approach is the concept of malagency which seems to do a better job of actually predicting how western culture actually treats people with respect to sex. The core notion of malagency is that society treats men as hyperagentic (that is men are perceived to have greater agency/responsibility than they actually might) and women as hypoagentic (that is women are perceived to have less agency/responsibility than they actually might). Applied to criminal justice, this directly explains things like men being given higher bail and longer sentences for the same crimes - men are seen as more responsible for their crimes, and so "deserve" a longer sentence. Even when a man and woman do a crime together, the man is often subject to higher bail or a longer sentence, which makes no sense as "privilege" but makes all kinds of sense if men are treated as having greater agency. When having lots of agency/responsibility for your actions is beneficial, this leads to better treatment for men and conversely when having greater agency/responsibility for your actions is not beneficial, this leads to worse treatment for men.
So for example, imagine we both saw a news headline on Reddit or Lemmy about a young woman throwing her newborn baby out a window, leading to it dying in the ambulance. Presumably under a model of privilege and male supremacy, we'd expect lots of blame directed at her and her behavior because she's a woman and any comments questioning her guilt or supporting her to be downvoted. Under malagency, you'd expect people to immediately start looking for ways to diminish her responsibility for throwing her child out a window and maybe even poking at the possibility of the father being at least partly to blame in some fashion for the baby killing and downvoting anyone laying responsibility for the killing squarely on her, because the slant is minimizing her agency for what she did and if possible assigning agency to a man.
What do you think we'd actually see in those comments? Hint: this isn't a hypothetical, it's a recent news story that's popped up on Reddit and you should take a look. It...strongly resembles what you'd expect under malagency.
Again, maybe you should look at a racial breakdown on the same, and then ask yourself why you don't consider that trustworthy but are fine with using conviction numbers for men as proof of what reality looks like.
Again, the criminal justice system broadly speaking shits on black people and men (and as a consequence black men even moreso) in similar ways and by most measures to similar degrees. And by "shits on" I mean is more likely to charge, more likely to convict, gives longer sentences, is more likely to shoot, etc, etc.
I'll just go ahead and throw out as a starting point that the definitions used by NISVS specifically discount male rape victims and female rapists by essentially defining away anything that a woman is most likely to do when sexually assaulting a man into a subcategory of "other". This is a common wrinkle in a lot of the stats, and it goes back to some old and toxic ideas - to the point that I can find you a clip from a prominent sexual assault researcher (Mary Koss, many of the survey instruments used descend from her work, she's also the origin of the "1 in 4" stat that's oft quoted and coined the term "date rape", etc) describing a woman drugging a man into compliance in order to have intercourse with him as not "rape" or "sexual assault" but "unwanted contact."
There's a further issue with lifetime survey stats (which is what gets focused on in that link), which is pretty simple and obvious if you look at the data. There's this weird gap between what previous year numbers look like and what lifetime numbers look like that's very obviously off, specifically that once you account for weirdness in definitions the previous year numbers are much closer than the lifetime numbers - so either the rates used to be dramatically higher for women and have since equalized for some reason or for some reason men are less likely to report older incidents in the survey - either way previous year numbers being much more similar than lifetime numbers needs some explanation. If you've been told time and again that what happened to you doesn't count as assault, that you must have wanted it because men always do, etc, etc until you internalize the messaging, how do you think that impacts survey reporting long term?
I personally suffered from this one for a long time, and only literal decades later can wrap my head around not being "lucky" due to what happened to me. If I'd been asked to be a participant in NISVS ten years ago I would have answered very differently than I would now, despite the incident having happened long before that, because I'd mentally filed it away as not an assault because men always want it, at least from a woman so clearly what happened couldn't/didn't count, right? An even a casual look around would lead to realizing I'm not remotely unique in this. And yes, I'm implying that lifetime sexual victimization rates in men specifically are massively under-reported because social narratives surrounding the idea are heavily internalized by the men themselves. And I have no idea how you'd fix that because it fundamentally is a mental block on the part of the men themselves, an unwillingness to see themselves as victims or what happened to them as violation.