this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Boys and men from generation Z are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good, according to research that shows a “real risk of fractious division among this coming generation”.

On feminism, 16% of gen Z males felt it had done more harm than good. Among over-60s the figure was 13%.

The figures emerged from Ipsos polling for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. The research also found that 37% of men aged 16 to 29 consider “toxic masculinity” an unhelpful phrase, roughly double the number of young women who don’t like it.

“This is a new and unusual generational pattern,” said Prof Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute. “Normally, it tends to be the case that younger generations are consistently more comfortable with emerging social norms, as they grew up with these as a natural part of their lives.”

Link to study: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/masculinity-and-womens-equality-study-finds-emerging-gender-divide-in-young-peoples-attitudes

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[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (22 children)

I can't say I'm surprised that people like Andrew Tate, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro have gained quite the social media following. Society has failed a lot of young men, and the oligarchy that controls our world has a lot to answer for.

Men are disproportionately affected by a lot of the socioeconomic issues currently plaguing the Western world because despite decades of progress towards creating an egalitarian society, men are the ones who are negatively impacted if they cannot provide. Look at the US and how judicial decisions on child custody and alimony are heavily favoured towards women as a very good example of this.

And before you dispute me on this notion, can you offer any other explanation for why the biggest role model for a lot of teenage boys is some bloomy rind dick cheese who looks like a spitting image of the Stonks meme guy?

[–] MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Because their content is controversial, thus driving engagement, thus being favored by the algorithms of many social media platforms. I still get recommended some of their garbage on YouTube, despite never having watched anything remotely similar to it.

Younger people tend to be easier to influence, and they often lack the experience to smell bullshit. And the more people hear something, the more likely they are to believe it.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

I can’t say I’m surprised that people like Andrew Tate, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro have gained quite the social media following.

I can. Their content sucks. It's whiny and boring and utterly tasteless. Tate's an absolute skeez. Crowder has zero swag. Peterson is an incoherent puddle. And Ben Shapiro... well... just come on, wtf is this?

And before you dispute me on this notion, can you offer any other explanation for why the biggest role model for a lot of teenage boys is some bloomy rind dick cheese who looks like a spitting image of the Stonks meme guy?

Because that's half of what YouTube / Twitch / Netflix / et al serves up anymore. These people are the dregs of modern media, but they and their promoters are everywhere. Its the same way that AM radio is the endless cesspool of senile racists whining about scary foreigners and Daytime TV is washed up fashion models pretending to have the secret to fame, fortune, and eternal youth. The lowest common denominator of mass media is overflowing with gross, juvenile bullshit.

And when you simply cannot escape the morass of filth, that's going to affect you one way or another.

[–] ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Childless men don't have a stake in child custody, visitation, child support or spousal support so that can't be it.

I used to be sympathetic to these types of arguments until I actually gained relevant experience with the formula that gets used to calculate family support.

I have to assume you're talking about Andrew Tate. Pretty much everyone who ever pushed cryptocurrency as part of their social media sponsorships I assume is or was on the Russian take. We experienced the same exact type of messaging in 2014-2015 about how unfair life is for men when women are by default responsible for raising and providing for kids if Dad skips town or otherwise leaves the picture.

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[–] dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I wonder how this reconciles against the other recent report of Gen Z more likely to be LGBTQ than Republican. On one hand, Republicans are the most vocal enemy of feminism and the LGBTQ+ community, but on the other hand, my anecdotal experience dealing with Gen Z dudes are that they're fucking idiot reactionaries who think "feminism" is "blue haired land whale blaming all her problems on men". I'm not here to paint any group of people with a broad brush, but again, speaking anecdotally, it seems that Gen X parents are neglectful as shit and their Gen Z sons are desperately looking for father figures elsewhere.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

One thing that may deform statistics is the interpretation of feminism.

Personally i prefer equality and I recognize that the majority of people mean equality when talking about feminism.

In almost all ideological groups theres a section of extremist that listen to the same name. Extremist often yell the loudest and say stupid, hatefull memeable stuff. The post of extremist make ripe content for opposers of the general movement to show how stupid/bad an entire group is.

You can be an otherwise very rational person if the only example of feminism you know is jk rowling then it influenced the decision.

On why its different between generation. In general i observe gen-x and boomers care alot about official definition and proper terminology which leads to narrower thinking but also less Confusion on how to perceive in unity.

Millenials and gen z tend to play More creative with language which can allow much more nuanced communication and fresh perspectives but causes different word meanings within different social groups. Misunderstanding outside of it.

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[–] Mahonia@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think these things are very related.

I'm queer and trans, and I'm not so picky about the demographic that I hang out with. I've met a lot of dudes who wanted to act their best in good faith, but received such vitriol for even showing up in conversations that they stopped bothering. Even as a transgender person, I don't tend to engage much with community because there's so little room for meaningful dialogue that isn't totally prescribed. There seem to be a lot of rules on how you should and shouldn't be. I understand that propping up the voices of those who have historically been ignored is an important thing, but there is something to be said about the fact that men and boys are often actively shunned from specific groups. If you're frequently told that you have no place in community, you're probably going to model a different community around that rejection.

Now what I actually think is happening is that tools of mass manipulation like the more centralized social media platforms are weaponizing the language of social justice to create division and escalation. All media platforms are quite effective at serving the ruling class, but social media is particularly insidious in that it pretends to be real life and the exposure is virtually constant.

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[–] tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Older people have had more history with the term, seeing people burn their bras in the 70s for example. My uncle, around 60, said he loved feminism because it was great when women starting not wearing bras and dressing in more revealing things haha.

I can't imagine being born after Youtube and Facebook were created. Propaganda through media is incessant and young people have been subjected to the most potent forms for their entire lives.

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I think the venn diagram between gen z members who are republicans and those who believe feminism is harmful is just one circle inside of another.

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[–] mightyfoolish@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The wording here is really important. We don't know how masculinity and feminism are being defined here.

Stuff that began with "woman's suffrage" are honored by people in this age group. They think it's normal women vote, have jobs, leave the house etc. Some of this stuff probably isn't even "feminism" to them but just "normal."

Remember that these guys are on social media a lot more than us and see those words misued frequently for click bait, etc.

[–] BluesF@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But that misuse of the word is harming the overall cause. It's not like the need for feminism has evaporated, although it has surely evolved, and if young men think it's harmful... Even if what they think is harmful is not an accurate representation of what feminism is, they aren't going to be supporters of what it actually is if it has the name attached.

Maybe it is time for a new movement with a new name.

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[–] macrocarpa@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I'm really happy you commented this. "normal" reflects norms.

Part of any generational attitude divide is the base conditions aka norms. When a change / progress is made, it sets those norms.

It's normal for my generation that people wear seat belts and don't smoke in pubs, that women have extensive varied careers and dads don't beat their kids. It wasn't for the generation before me.

It's not normal for men of my generation to talk openly and confidently about their sexuality and mental health. Yet that seems to be normal for some of the younger generations, and I envy that.

I find that the easiest way to tap into the generational norms is to listen to comedy. It often represents the edge of what is considered acceptable, because comedy does play with that edge.

It's amusing to see the pitchforks come out for comedians where they're judged for edgy content from 25 years ago and society has moved on a bit. Amusing because most of this judgement seems to happen online, and thus is a permanent record, so in 25 years time we'll have a bunch of embarrassed mid 40s people trying to explain their cruelty to an unsympathetic younger generation. "you weren't there, man! You don't understand!"

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[–] Zink@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Young men/boys thinking we don’t need feminism reminds me of healthy people thinking we don’t need vaccines. Just because we’ve improved the world and made a problem less of a thing doesn’t mean we can now forget about it and move on.

There is a lot more to it than that, as evidenced by all the replies already.

[–] EatATaco@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It never ceases to amaze me that in almost every comment section there is a highly upvoted comment by someone who clearly didn't read the article. Or maybe they read the article and are I explicably talking about something else completely.

Even reading just the headline, I don't get how one would talk about not needing feminism anymore. It's about them thinking it has done more harm than good and/or it's now harder to be a man.

[–] Zink@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I am talking about the similarities in how these two good things became something bad to be rejected because they are actually harmful. Became that way to a certain wacky group, at least.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Seriously doubt this (and most polling these days). Gen Z is particularly unlikely to respond to polls or answer unknown callers in general. Until those issues in polling are solved, I take them with a grain of salt.

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[–] LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Well the propaganda is working. Surprise, surprise, distribute unfiltered hate speech and people will start believing in this hate speech.

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[–] djsoren19@yiffit.net 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'd like to warn all the Americans against generalizing based upon their personal experiences or beliefs here. This is a UK study that sampled a UK population. These results can't necessarily be generalized to any other country, this is focused on the UK culture.

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[–] AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I think a big part of the problem is that, among younger Americans especially, both men and women that refer to themselves as feminists conflate it with benevolent sexism, and not the same sets of social rules for both genders.

Benevolent sexism is a tough concept to swallow for men. It means respecting and practicing the old mores men practiced with women, with none of the toxic expectations. Things like expectations of men being the breadwinners, running to get the door, etc aren't compatible with a desire for equality, especially when correctly rejecting the trade-offs those perks used to be tied to.

The first waves of feminism cleared the way, but in having done so, the newest generation of women are asking "but why don't I get these cool perks I heard about" and men are answering "because we no longer get the social power that facilitated that cool stuff."

Everything is trade offs.

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[–] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

I find the internet is super good at locking people into echo chambers. For some reason, I feel especially keen on this when I was super into reddit over the last decade. I could FEEL just how a community would shift into just saying the same 10 things on repeat and any deviation would result in downvotes and messages in my inbox.

But it's not just reddit. Modern video feed algorithms and other social media just need to feed you the same stuff you've engaged with previously.

So what ends up happening is young boys only see the videos of angry purple haired stereotype liberal feminist first year college student get SLAMMED/DESTROYED by Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or a woman who is clearly saying something sarcastic with sad sigma male music in the background and all the comments are calling for her to be put in prison or death.

And that's not to say people don't experience these types IRL and it morphs their opinions, my sister is this stereotype and is pretty fucking stupid and she will get into heated debates on Facebook about stuff she has no idea about. She'll read a headline and form a whole mindset of bullshit around it and never verify if it was just a click bait article posted to Facebook to get ad revenue with no concept of journalist integrity. It's really difficult talking to her about anything political because even though I'm pretty liberal/progressive myself, she'll just say things that are factually wrong and when I try to talk to her about it she takes it as me disagreeing and won't listen to reason or logic outside of her preconceived image of reality. Very difficult person

I often have to look at her and remind myself that people like her are a very small portion of the population and aren't really indicative of the masses.

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

The internet can definitely get very echo chamber/brigade/gatekeepy when it feels like it. Sadly, lots of people have no identity of their own and attempt to latch on to one created for them. Once this happens, then they fiercely and angrily defend what the adopted, as if it were them being attacked personally.

[–] BaskinRobbins@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

I swear rage baiting in the social media era has to be the most lucrative grift of all time. Even being super aware of it I still fall for it from time to time.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

The problem is the so called Third Wave Feminism, which is far too often just middle and high-middle class women trying to obtain special benefits for themselves by claimimg the whole group they were born into "is a victim" (even though they themselves were born into and are amongst the most priviledged 1% of people in the World) and hence "must be compensated" in some way which is discriminatory against all those not in the group and which is invariably in a form that is mainly usefull for middle class and high-middle class well educated women in well-of western nations. Hence things like Quotas or the practice of Benevolent Mascism in power situations such as in Court (for example the whole gender-discriminatory idea that the Mother should be prefered as the custodian of children when a couple separates).

This is generally neither fair, nor equal (you know, the whole judge and treat people based on what they do, not based on the genetics they were born with) and even has zero positive effects for the vast majority of women out there who aren't the well-of scions of well-of families in well-of countries: you get loud noises about the "glass ceiling" that stops well-of women from maximizing their income from being in the upper classes, not about the 3000% difference in incomes between those above said glass chieling such as corporate CEOs and the average worker, which includes most women.

This shit isn't Leftwing, it's just a "make believe leftie" facet of "Greed is good" Neoliberal Capitalism: personal upside maximization hidden behind "the group" so that it doesn't just look like naked greed, hence why you see this mostly supported by Liberals in Anglo-Saxon nations, not traditional Lefties.

Previous generations of Feminism (and those who still now fight for Equality and Fairness) are the ones who are deserving of tremendous respect and support, not these pampered, priviledged, greedy people who happen to have been born with 2 X cromossomes and who want to maintain the discriminatory and prejudiced treatment of people base on the genetics they were born with, as long as theirs is the group getting benefited by that discrimination.

It's thus not surprising that amongst those who are not in the groups that benefits form the discrimination these people defend and are exposed to this highly moralistic variance of greed is good, grow negative about it. The thing is made even worse in the US because Politics ther is entirelly in the Moral space (people have no genuine choice on how the Economics is managed in that country since both sides of the Power Duopoly do the same in that field) so you end up with equally pro-descrimination groups on the other side, who just differ in who gets favoured by said discriminationand face off against these, muddling the whole "equality" domain.

It's pretty hard to find a space if you're genuinelly pro-Equality and pro-Fairness and not be confuse by either side of selfish fucker as being in the other side of selfish fuckers.

This became especially obvious in my country when we were passing the gender self-determination law. Really helped me differentiate between feminists who actually wanted equality, regardless of background or biology, and narcissists who saw a discriminated group trying to get acceptance as a threat to their own position in the hierarchy, who would later got angry and offended when we called them TERFs for repeating far right talking points. Thankfully the later are overrepresented online and aren't so prevalent in society as a whole.

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[–] bedrooms@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (28 children)

Although I understand the importance of feminism, I never had the impression that feminists are good at PR. Somehow, most articles written by feministsI've read love to stereotype and bash men.

[–] 520@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Feminism is something with many internal factions. But yeah, the loudest ones aren't usually interested in genuine discourse. Some of those factions can act every bit as unhinged as 'persecuted' Christians about total non-issues, like Oscars nominations despite womankind as a whole having some very real issues to worry about.

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[–] taanegl@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah yes, confused men want to uphold the tradition of mysoginy, misandry, the very patriarchy that subverts men to be stupid soldiers and labourers, sacrificing emotional intelligence and their individuality to become stereotypical puppets of the powers that be.

MGTOW energy Indeed. Just the kind of weakness a grifter like Tate loves to exploit.

Dumbasses.

[–] friendlysoviet@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Most of Gen Z is children.

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[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago (21 children)

Feminism has a branding problem. The name itself makes it sound like it's about putting women above men. People who don't know better—the kind of people who are disproportionately young—will judge feminism based on the name.

Calling it feminism made sense when everyone "knew" women were generally inferior to men, but since gender equality has become the mainstream view, the name had lost the context that made it work. Combined with the scope creep of feminism that causes it to encompass issues like disability rights and economic inequality, I think feminism is becoming indistinguishable from leftism.

[–] lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Feminism is leftism and leftism is feminism. It's always been that way because it's all about the same issue, equality. Women's rights, civil rights, trans rights, they're all fighting for the same thing. One of my favorite quotes comes from Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights and women's rights activist, "Nobody's free until everybody's free"

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