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.”
the algorithms just rewards “shocking” content; it generates conversation.
I forget who I heard it from, but some bigger YouTuber mentioned that when talking to someone at YouTube about “the algorithm” and the person who worked at YouTube suggested rather than always thinking about it being the algorithm that drives what’s popular, that it’s the users who engage with that content. In the “line goes up” capitalist mindset, the algorithms at these companies are really just designed around engagement, and keeping people hooked. The “algorithm” is just what it thinks the audience wants.
And while I think a lot of us would like to think better of ourselves, I think we all have a strong tendency to engage with ragebait, and “shocking” content. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad trait in a pre-internet world. But in the world where the shareholders always need the line to go up infinitely, all of our media gets filled with the garbage that makes the line go up the most.
In the short term, we can all try more to engage less with the kind of content, showing the algorithms that we don’t actually want that content.
In the long term, we should probably de-couple our media from the infinite-growth investor-first capitalism that has formerly-respected publications writing articles about what 5 random people said on Twitter that they can ragebait people into engaging with.
Yes people like stuff that’s not good for them, violence focused “journalistic” shows were all the rage during the early millenium since they did get a big viewership, but nowadays they are mostly over with only a few left, we should demand change from those that have the power to do it.