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Andrew Tate discourse has descended upon Bluesky, where I spend most of my social media time these days, in the wake of a Wall Street Journal article by a high school student named Eli Thompson discussing the appeal of the repugnant manosphere grifter to many of his classmates during what the WSJ editors call a “confusing time for young men.” Many of the Bluesky criticisms are spot on about Tate and the discourse surrounding him. Or at least kind of funny.
But I think the piece, while flawed, is a bit more subtle than some Blueskyers give it credit for. Though you wouldn’t necessarily know this from a lot of the Bluesky posts, the article is hardly an endorsement of Tate; far from it. Thompson, who attends an all-boys Catholic school in Chicago, is well aware that Tate is a pernicious misogynistic ass, and he makes his distaste for the manosphere idol quite clear.
But his criticism of Tate is often frustratingly indirect. He doesn’t always fully own his critiques, instead putting them in the mouths of anonymous classmates. “Plenty of guys here dismiss Andrew Tate as a ‘blowhard,’” he writes at one point. “Some guys here say these bros don’t empower men so much as tear down women,” he adds later. “Others note that guys shadowed by legal troubles aren’t exactly role models worth following.” You obviously agree with these things, dude, so why not simply say this?
The real problem with the piece, though, is that Thompson’s framing of the issues surrounding teen boys today largely replicates the rhetoric of those who promote the notion of a “boy crisis” as a way to blame feminism for woes that are in reality caused by patriarchy–and by the decade-long backlash against feminism, which has led many teen boys and young men to reject the idea of gender equality.
Thompson complains that
Being a teenage man today feels like standing in a hallway with a dozen doors, each leading somewhere different, and no one telling you which to pick.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s felt for a lot of teenagers–boys and girls and others–for a long time now. It certainly felt that way when I was in high school. The teenage years have traditionally been a time of “storm and stress” in Western culture.
But having choices, as confusing as it is, is certainly preferable to the coercive certainties of life in, say, the 1950s, when everyone (in the middle class at least) was expected to rush into early marriage and a premature “maturity.” Teen boys were pushed to become providers at an early age; teen girls were expected to become mothers immediately after high school or college, and either live out the rest of their lives isolated in the home or at work at a job where they were underpaid and subordinate to men. Lesbians and gay men were forced into the closet and conformity with compulsory heterosexuality; the closest the culture came to recognizing trans people came when Milton Berle dressed as a woman on TV. This–minus the drag performances–is the “trad life” that many conservatives, and to some degree Tate himself, fetishize.
Thompson continues:
At my school, we’re hit with a barrage of mixed messages every day. In history class, we’re taught about equality and the importance of respecting women as peers, often through lessons on past struggles for civil rights and suffrage. In English class, we dive into texts that unpack our privilege as white men; we are urged to feel some guilt for the inequities of the world, even if we didn’t create them ourselves.
Well, no, teen boys didn’t create “the inequities of the world.” But they benefit from them in many ways–especially the sorts of boys who attend private schools. And even at that age, unless they are preternaturally egalitarian, the chances are pretty good that these boys have helped to reproduce these inequalities, often without even realizing it. Framing the issue the way Thompson and many other commenters frame it leaves the impression that bringing up the inequities is sort of, kind of, as bad as the inequities themselves.
But in the locker room, it’s all about being tough and “manly” and never backing down.
Certainly there’s pressure to conform. But you don’t have to buy into that macho culture. Plenty of boys and men don’t.
Am I supposed to lead or step back? Does “manly” mean just one thing, and should I still chase it? It’s hard to figure out what it means to be strong without being “toxic,” confident but not arrogant, assertive but not overbearing. Are we meant to shrink so others can rise? Is it always zero-sum? It’s confusing.
I don’t think it’s all that confusing. You can be confident without being an asshole. You don’t have to “shrink so others can rise.” It’s not a zero-sum game.
We also know that more women than men are graduating high school and going to college, which can feel a little like we’ve lost ground before we’ve even started.
This is a major “boy crisis” talking point. But this is a misleading way to frame the issues, as the college attendance and graduation rates for boys vary enormously depending on race and class (and in just the ways you’d suspect). As sociologist Michael Kimmel notes, white middle class boys are only slightly less likely to go to college than white middle class girls, with only a 2% college enrollment gap (51% female vs. 49% male). Black male students, meanwhile, comprise just 37% of Black college attendees. Yet the discourse around the “boy crisis” often seems to revolve around the problems faced by white, middle class boys.
Talk of a “boy crisis” also obscures the often enormous difficulties teen girls deal with on a daily basis. Sexual violence against teen girls has increased dramatically in recent years: with 18% reporting sexual violence in the past year in 2021, up 20% since 2017, according to the CDC.
Eating disorders are much more prevalent among teen girls than teen boys. And the problem is getting worse: in the US, doctor visits for eating disorders among teenagers overall more than doubled from 2018 to 2022. Teen girls are much more likely than teen boys to feel shitty about their bodies, and a flood of artfully posed and filtered pictures of improbably attractive women on Instagram are making this worse.
It’s true that girls are much less likely to commit suicide than boys, and this is often cited as a key piece of evidence in the “boy crisis” hypothesis, but they’re twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts; one 2021 CDC study found that 57% of US teen girls reported chronic feelings of sadness and hopelessness; that’s twice as much as teen boys reported
I could go on, but the point is that teen girls are dealing with some shit too. As are LGBTQ teens. Particularly trans teens, who have to put up with more shit than pretty much everyone, but who have somehow avoided flocking to absolutely toxic influencers.
The other problem with the article is that it seems to suggest that becoming a Tate fan is a foregone conclusion for many boys. And it isn’t. The subhead for the article–which I should note was written by the WSJ editors, not Thompson–is especially troublesome.
In this confusing time for young men, we take our role models where we can find them.
Yes, the world is a confusing place at the moment for all of us, but there are plenty of role models for boys out there who aren’t screamingly misogynistic con men who have been accused, quite credibly, of multiple rapes and human trafficking. I mean, there’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a giant manly dude who has talked openly about his mental health struggles and helped to encourage boys and men who are similarly struggling. There’s Terry Crews, another exceedingly buff dude, adored by women, who testified before Congress about his sexual assault experience, breaking a longstanding taboo about acknowledging male victims of rape; he also works with the National Organization for Women to combat toxic masculinity.
On YouTube, there’s Drew Gooden, a popular comedic commenter with 4.5 million followers who embodies a gentler version of masculinity. He often features his wife in his videos, and seems to truly adore her.
Hell, you can even model yourself on a fictional character, like Jean-Luc Picard or Fox Mulder or even Gomez Addams of the Addams Family.
No, there’s no feminist or leftist Andrew Tate, and I’m not even sure such a thing is possible or even desirable. But if you don’t see any decent male role models out there, you’re not really looking. Being more decent than Tate is not an impossibly high bar for potential male role models.
Wrapping up his article, Thompson writes that many teen boys “simply want a version of manhood that is strong and morally grounded—but they will settle for strong and shameless if that is what’s on offer.”
But that’s not all that’s on offer, and Thompson knows this–because he himself has rejected Tate as a role model and evidently argues fairly regularly against his classmates who idolize that piece of shit. He’s obviously found other men to model himself after, though he doesn’t mention who they are.
But all this talk about missing male role models may have kept many from noticing another thing missing in the lives of teen boys, and that is regular everyday contact and friendship with teen girls, a problem exacerbated by all-boys schools. If boys were more aware of what girls go through, and what they’re about, they would know that what Tate says about them is not only toxic but just plain wrong.
Obviously, girls aren’t obliged in any way to “fix” boys that have gone down the Tate rabbit hole–or any other boys, for that matter. But Tate fans weren’t always Tate fans, and some (though clearly not all) of the boys in his cult now were decent enough kids before they imbibed his poisonous ideology and became utter shits; some of them might even have been appealing to girls as friends or boyfriends. I suspect that boys with genuine friendships or relationships with girls are a good deal less likely to embrace misogynistic ideology because they are more likely to see girls as human. Especially if they actually make an effort to listen to these girls and learn from their perspectives.
That’s not to say that contact with girls or women automatically fixes misogyny; there are obviously innumerable boys and men who are surrounded by girls and women, or in relationships with them, who are still hateful fucks. But boys’ isolation from girls–either in all-boys schools or in schools where boys and girls generally only socialize with those of their own gender–certainly doesn’t help. Nor does a society that teaches young boys, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that girls are in various ways inferior and undeserving of respect. Once again, it’s patriarchy, not feminism, that’s the problem.
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Chris Kluwe is a former NFL player who has advocated for gender equality and trans rights for many years. He was recently arrested for protesting against the installation of a MAGA plaque at his local library. He is a great masculine role model.
One more issue that will be affecting young people of all genders: the lack, for many of them, of any sign of a desirable future. Most can only look forward to a life of being mercilessly micromanaged at a McJob while renting, barely making ends meet, and spending a stint now and then living out of their car, until they die never having had the option of retirement, all the while watching the planet burn.
So, it’s the combination of patriarchy and capitalism.
Some extra stuff about Andrew “says f-slur/gay more than thank you” Tate: He has a web chat…thing called “The Fake World” (not actual name BTW). It’s messages got leaked. The staff channel (high-ranking taters) is here: search(.)ddosecrets(.)com/data/revolt/categories (ctrl f = staff)
Maybe having Gomez Adams as a role model is something that helped me out as a kid.
I’m gonna put paid to this young male crisis BS right now.
We are not seeing young Black men flock to Andrew Tate, and other men like him, in the kinds of numbers that middle class white boys are. I have absolutely no doubt that life is extremely difficult for young Black men, and they have many role models to choose from, some fictional, some toxic, and some in real life, and yet, a surprising number of them manage to grow up to be fairly well adjusted adults, or at the very least don’t become gangbangers, school-shooters, and human traffickers.
Why is it that something only becomes a “crisis” when it affects white men and boys? Don’t Black and Latino men get lonely too? Don’t they find navigating life difficult too?
Presenting these guys: one of the great creative and personal soulmate pairings of all time, in a moment of unabashed emotion that wasn’t about war, sports, or pussy.
http://web.archive.org/web/20241130155233if_
(Image description: a concert stage where Bruce Springsteen, a White man in a black leather vest, red muscle shirt, and blue jeans and carrying a guitar, slides as if into home plate into the embrace of Clarence Clemons, a Black man in unrelieved white: suit, frilly shirt, and headband, holding a saxophone. The two then kiss as if they were posing for the cover of a trashy romance novel.)
(I don’t personally believe that their relationship was sexual, but they clearly didn’t give a flying fickle fuck whether people thought so.)
Dwayne Johnson a role model for boys? Have you seen his films? The characters he plays send an emphatic message that a great man is a violent man, and the more capable of violence he is the greater a man he is. I don’t call that a good role model.