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.”
How is it that I can keep saying “it’s also not your fault, just because other men did this” and then you read this as “men are responsible”?
At what point do you realize that I’m saying you shouldn’t hold individuals responsible for structural problems or blame sexism on the actions of individual people? I keep saying this over and over, but the root of the problem is class society and is not just bad people having bad ideas. The world historical defeat of women was the consequence of the invention of private property and the modern family, but men aren’t responsible for that and neither are women. Men who invented Stranger Danger were products of their material conditions. These are just the material forces at work. You’re doing this liberal thing where you individualize the problem and think you can fight sexism by stopping sexist people, but the only way we can actually stop it is by breaking the material conditions that reproduce sexist ideology.
Blaming women or men is unproductive. The problem, as I keep saying, is class society. As long as the reproduction of labor is relegated to women then both men and women are going to suffer, and that’s not something that can be fixed by a individual simply not being sexist.