I think progressives never thought about this because we banked on immigration and demographic change allowing us to win culturally and electorally but the issue is immigrants tend to be overwhelmingly male, that is how Trump won actually he won over a lot of Hispanic,Black,Asian and indigenous men who feel humiliated by a new culture, economy and world.
So what can we do rhetorically and policy wise to win more young men over ?
Idk how do you “sell” being a decent fucking person?
A little out of the blue but I watched an episode of a German cooking show today where strangers are coupled in groups of five for a week and every day one of them has to cook for the rest of them. They then vote who was the best host.
This week was ALL 30-38 year-old straight Dads. Nobody talked about football.
Nobody chestbumped anyone. Nobody was mansplaning anything. Instead, they were all swooning over each others’ cooking skills, making each other cry over how much they love their kids and hugging each other for feeling insecure about their cooking. In other words it was the most realistic and “manly” portrayal of the male reality that I have seen in the media ever.
It’s easy to blame the media and the “culture war” for male alienation but I strongly believe that our perception of ourselves is largely influenced by our peer group’s portrayal in society. In other words: if I feel antagonized, I tend to overreact. If I am being told by Hollywood or social media to “stop being a mansplaning patriarch” I will be imprinted with the very idea to identify as such.
So long story short: non-toxic masculinity needs more representation AND it needs to come from a place of positivity, not judgement or condescension.
Simple. What do young men care about? Getting laid and getting paid. Promise them that, and you’ll get their votes.
You’ll need to use coded language, of course. But using coded language is politicians’ whole job.
You need to make it fun and engaging for them. That is what the far right is doining. You and I might find it reprehensible, but they het som much traction bu having fun and giving young men a purpose and the feeling that they are doing something to netter themselves and their commuity.
How you go about that I dont know. In my local area we are focusing on having fun partiets and going out together as a group instead of just being political nerds in our own little grottos. Som far it seems to be working.
Tl;dr: Have fun visibly and invite them to join you. It takes forever, but at least you have fun while doing it.
I KNOW! Let’s make June Men’s Mental Health month instead of… wait was it again?
Promote and get behind actual progressive candidates, not corporatist shills like Hillary or Kamala. I like Kshama Sawant because she calls shit like she sees it.
Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.
If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.
Help them to break down. Encourage them to be soft and show them that that softness is strength. So many of these young men are like this because they feel alone. We need to bring them together in positive ways.
I don’t follow the media and the debate where you live, but over here left leaning politicians and media tends to frame it as: women, minorites etc have a problem. Men are the problem.
You’re basically pushing any undecided man over to the right.
liberal politicians and liberal MSM frame it that way, because they have nothing else to offer but toxic culture wars.
Liberal politicians do it because it’s been pushed by the left. It’s how they keep leftists voting more centrally. They take left wing ideas, then water them down enough to appeal for centrist voters. Centrists find common sense ideas appealing, while those on the left get a dog whistle.
I lean quite to the left and have rarely, if ever, heard many boogie-man talking points in this comment thread that people are obsessed over. And in terms of “centrists” equating patriarchy with men, for me it’s an intelligence/education issue, combined with refusal to have real life human contact with women, and, of course, choosing to blame literally the oppressed for all the harm that patriarchy causes them or their fellow men
This is all from the perspective of a non-american from a country where thankfully we are still liberal at heart and only entertain some progressive ideas, instead of buying it wholesale, meaning the right has yet to completely cannibalise the government over the mistakes of the left.
- Move away from equity and return to equality of opportunity as the main goal. Equity demands lack of competition, and men love competition.
You can want everyone to receive equal opportunity and dignity, but people are not equal and will not end in the same place once the race is over. You can’t demand equality of outcome and onboard the most competitive demographic, there is a reason if the stereotype of leftist men is passive wimps. This is completely compatible with prgressive ideas, but it’s incompatible with progressive brains, apparently.
- Actually understand what intersectionality looks like, stop treating it like a hierarchy of oppression.
The core idea of intersectionality is that each demographic has its own issues and they manifest differently if more demographics overlap in the same individual (e.g. sexism against white women vs sexism against black women exhibit different tropes and connotations).
This does not mean whoever has the least minoritary traits is the most acceptable target, that is some marxist “oppressor vs oppressed” horseshit and, while it was probably the intended idea, it is massively counterproductive and doesn’t have to be the actual application of the issue.
Men have issues that women don’t have, women have issues that men don’t have. As soon as your movement decides to prioritise one they have lost the other.
The reason this does not happen with race is that no movement in the US can realistically exist politically without white people simply by virtue of how huge the white slice of the demo pie is, and because this whole thing was started by highly educated, economically mobile, overwhelingly white, college grads who live in very specific coastal bubbles, hence the endemic hatred of farmers and factory workers, the actual working class of the US, as hicks and racists, and the lionisation of serving staff like baristas and waiters (the only working class most large city dwellers ever interact with).
- Move away from “patriarchy”.
It’s just a fucking L on its face isn’t it? “Yes come join the party that thinks men being in power is the problem” fat fucking chance lol.
And when they do join, the parodies write themselves.
I don’t care if you think it’s “just a name” (especially in light of what progs consistently do over “just a name” and “just a statue” and so on) it’s a massive optics L that shows all of the horseshit about microaggressions and non-confrontational language and whatnot are entirely performative.
You have the most obvious othering language in the core ideas of the movement and then complain about microaggressions? And you wonder why people don’t take you seriously?
And while we’re on that:
- Politeness is baseline, respect is earned. Confrontation is necessary and men are more likely to thrive in confrontational spaces.
You can’t have a political movement that does not tolerate dissent and confrontation, or only tolerates it in one direction. See the implosion of the “Unfuck america tour” as a good example of this.
The whole point of politics is to create a critical mass of people who align on some goal to push for it, you don’t have to agree with them on every point, if you had enough people who agree with you, you would be already in the majority and would not need to participate in politics.
Easy example from the last decade: TERFs.
Now, I don’t like TERFs, on account of them being radfems and thus automatically hostile to me due to the circumstances of my birth (i.e. penis), but you know what? I reckon they probably want women to have better salaries and fewer barriers to entry into professional fields.
Let them force themselves into political irrelevance if they refuse to play ball, don’t make a big fucking show of kicking them out of the movement, because then you end up on the back foot of having to explain “trans women are women” to the mass population and the TERFs simply need to say “look at these brainwashed biology deniers, they think males and females have no differences” and you end up eating your own ass in public, when the point is that trans women ought to be treated as women for their own good and a more welcoming society.
(side note: if you are in that brainless chunk of progs who do believe there is no difference between the sexes, I highly encourage you to look at the world records in any discipline with easily measured metrics such as 100m dash and freestyle swimming. Not a single male record is under the women’s record, in some cases every historical male record eclipses the current female one. Males and females are different, this should be acknowledged, and it should not be a barrier to equal dignity in treatment.)
A movement that can’t include anyone but the most in-line and pure of the ideological adepts is doomed to be irrelevant, and on that the progressives have an almost complete lock.
Harsh to hear but I believe this perspective to be both true and very important to accept/understand (with the exception of the terf topic)
Keep in mind I’m not saying to accept TERFs, I’m saying to be smart about letting them cut themselves off instead of forcing them out.
Fair. IMO it depends on how much you value being morally correct vs overall effectiveness of the movement. It could be worth it to compromise the integrity slightly if it will be much more effective. Not everyone would make that trade but I’m not here to argue against people who would.
IMO it depends on how much you value being morally correct vs overall effectiveness of the movement.
And this entire thought process is why the left gets weaker every round of elections.
See for instance: Abandon Harris, a movement thought by absolute winners at the brain lottery, who thought that undermining the candidate who didn’t ban middle easterners from entering the US was the smart choice because Biden was “too lenient against Israel.”
Politics is about seizing and wielding power, morality has nothing to do with it.
For one, any grifter can pretend to be more morally correct than you or I and once they get in power they will do whatever they want anyway. I would much rather side with someone who disagrees with me on some things but does so in earnest than someone who is suspiciously always somehow more moral and more correct than me or them.
For two, morality is literally incompatible with politics, because it is downstream from the body politic.
For instance: It is considered immoral to own slaves, today. It used to be allowed and to the mores of the time, uncontroversial.
Then enough people who disagreed with that stance pushed to gain power and made it illegal, once that became the status quo for long enough it is now controversial to hold a position that was the default and viceversa.
Something becomes a matter of morality once it is no longer a matter of politics.
In practice, you don’t actually need support for all your ideas, you need enough good ideas to get you enough support that you can then push through your less popular pet issues. Even better if the pet issues themselves are popular, that’s when you get explosive successes like Trump getting re-elected by hammering the inflation button (despite anyone who knows anything about econ knowing he would be literally unable to do anything about it).
As long as people are not actively against your pet issues they’ll re-elect you just fine, that’s how croneyism skates by unnoticed.
Yes, but there is a point at whoch your movement is compromised so much that winning doesn’t matter because the common goals of the movement are no longer desirable. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that-- we’re pretty firmly in “come on guys stop bikeshedding and work together” territory-- but it is important to know that it can swing too far the other way. That’s how we got people saying “violence is bad, you have to hear the nazi out”.
there is a point at whoch your movement is compromised so much that winning doesn’t matter because the common goals of the movement are no longer desirable.
That’s why movements should be built around goals and not allegiance/morality.
“This is the movement to achieve X.”
“X has been achieved.”
“Aight, job well done, time to move on.”
This is what the right does (or tries to, anyway), and they’re eating the left alive, maybe it’s worth taking this very non-partisan strategy from their playbook?
violence is bad, you have to hear the nazi out
AKA the same provision that protects everyone with an unpopular opinion, yourself included, yes. That’s what liberal democracies do.
The state has a monopoly on violence, you don’t get to decide who doesn’t get rights, nor do the nazis.
The US is a bit of an exception obviously, you guys love your political violence (one could say you are built on it) and who am I to stop you, but Europe does not work that way and thank fuck for that, lol.
So yeah you have to let the nazi speak, that doesn’t mean you can’t talk over them, mock them, goad them into striking first so the cops will crack down on them, etc.
I’m Italian so I guarantee you I know that it’s a complex landscape to navigate, with actual fascists (the roman salute kind, not the “we’re cops and we will do our job” ““fascists””) in a lot of police strike teams, and in the current government (Thankfully I live abroad, shit’s bad at home right now), I know it’s no picnic to actually maintain a liberal society, but other countries consistently succeed, like France and the Netherlands, or the nordics.
It takes effort and a lot of education from early on, and that the population appreciates the importance of that education and the values it is supposed to impart.
Conversely it was “me ne frego” and the widespread apathy towards it that condemned italy to Mussolini’s rule, not civil debate.
Moreover, allowing and embracing political violence doesn’t work when one side is already chomping at the bit and better at it than your side, but that’s a practical consideration rather than an ethical/moral one.
Mind you this does not mean “don’t defend yourself” it means “don’t strike first”
Embrace the Roman doctrine: we will never pick up arms first, but if forced to we will only lay them second.
wow. most of what you write creates culture that completely excludes and alienates women. See: hostility of current male dominated fields towards women. Blows my mind that you consider going backwards, rather than male culture evolving to be better human beings, to be a solution.
A competitive spirit is not morally wrong and calling men worse human beings for having one is so fundamentally wrong that I can only ask you to reread and reconsider the above post.
competitive spirit is very healthy, however we have decades of very well documented evidence of how keeping it unchecked and alienating anyone with emotional intelligence plays out in real life. I also never called men as worse human beings - case in point that anyone pointing out the toxicity in **male only **culture is labeled as hating men
It’s amazing how well he articulated the problem and pointed out potential solutions just for you to give a perfect example of the type of rhetoric he is talking about that drives people away from the left. Like his link, the parody writes itself…
my existence and me wanting to not be oppressed is not “the left”. Men throwing tantrums at not having unchecked control over women in the workplace or not having maids at home is not an “articulated” problem or a solution. I’ve done nothing but give support and love to good men around me who are partners or friends because I hurt for how much harm patriarchy inflicts on them too, and having heard from them how toxic, unjust, and completely devoid of empathy the oppressive environment created by their fellow men is, I have zero tolerance for people advocating to keep subjecting humans to that culture.
I have a bit of a preconceived notion as to why you are saying this, however I would rather ask you to be more specific before jumping to conclusions. Can you give concrete examples as to how my suggestions would alienate women?
Easy
Every time there is a conversation regarding men issues, dismiss them as talking about something that clearly DOESN’T EXISTS, demean them, if they are emotionally intelligent enough to defend themselves from the TOTALLY NOT aggressive rhetoric, compare them to something else, preferably, something weaker and less smart than them, bonus points if you attack their sexuality in the same phrase, that always gets them riled up to support you!
Even more so if you treat them like complete imbeciles with a memory span of seconds and assume they forgot about all the years you have been doing this exact same thing!
And whatever you do, don’t forget to bring up how women have and keep having BIGGER issues
That’ll work wonders
You can’t really do anything. Men had privileged position in the society for millennia. Now you’re basically asking them to resign this privilege. They will not do it voluntarily. It doesn’t make sense for them on any level. They will push back and the harder you attack their special rights the harder they will push back. It’s only natural.
I think the only thing you can do is to educate them about democratic values so that while they are regaining power they still respect the rights of other people and don’t create authoritarian state. This is what clearly failed in the US.
Men had privileged position in the society for millennia.
Other people had this privileged position in society for millennia. The people turning away from progressive politics aren’t wearing top hats, their hands are oil-covered. When you tell them they are privileged, that everything is just handed to them by society, they look around and wonder what you are talking about.
Not this kind of privilege. The privilege of exerting power over women. Deciding what they can and can’t do, ordering them around, abusing them without any consequences. White men could also exert power over men of other races. Oil-covered men enjoyed this privilege, not just the top hat wearing ones.
The fact that you’re the only person who pointed out what men can do and are being downvoted is insane. Everyone else is completely blind to even entertaining the idea that progress might not be the main problem.
Given the fact that there is a massive backswing towards the right in most of the west, very much riding a wave against progressive politics, with the largest gender divide in viting demographics on record in the US, and a republican winning the popular vote for the first time since Bush’s second term?
US Progressives need to worry about this, not everyone else. Everyone else is telling progressives to shove off.
“Progress” does not exist, only marxists think history is a linear path from bad to good, reality is a bit more complex. (a good answer to pretty much any of Marx’s arguments, incidentally)
If you want your worldview to win, and your worldview is both against the ruling class, its supporters, and doing anything to onboard them? You’re just not going to win. You’re not going to win even if you were to execute a revolution because you just don’t have any measurable support.
So, unless you just want to circlejerk about how right you are and accomplish nothing, you should look into how to get the people on your side, very much including the demographic that makes up most of the politicians.
Look at what men are missing and how the right is selling it to them.
Men aren’t doing so hot right now, emotionally and mentally. They feel like they are not manly, and criticized for trying to be manly or liking manly things. There’s a lack of transitions into manhood, and the bar that is seen as a successful man with a good career is pretty much impossible.
If you have a poor paying job, you’re not manly. If you have a well paying job but it’s blue collar you’re not manly because you’re a dumb working stiff. If you have a white collar job you’re not manly because you’re not doing anything tough with your body. Maybe if you’re a CEO who owns the company but also does rock climbing and bear fighting are you seen as manly enough, maybe.
Then you have these guys, your Andrew Tates and so on, who act very manly and tell you it’s ok to be a man and then spout off some of the most toxic, asinine shit saying that’s how you be a man. And young guys fall for it because they aren’t shown any alternative.
Then on the left you have people who speak ill of men as a whole, and manliness as a whole. Sometimes the criticisms are correct, but a lot of times it’s presented as men overall. If you try to say that it’s not every man out there who’s a monster, you get blasted with criticism for saying “not all men”. They also don’t provide anything positive or solutions for feeling manly, with the best they can be offered is to be more like women.
So young men, especially young cishet men, are actively pushed away from leftist spaces, leaving them feeling demonized by those spaces, and actively pandered to by the right which are offering mind poison dressed up as solutions.
So what do we do? There’s a few things to fix.
-
leftist media has to stop demonizing men and start demonizing actions. Instead of saying “men are rapists” start saying “rapists are bad”. When people start to say things like “cis people are shit” other people need to call them out of it, because if you’re supposed to be the side that accepts people’s gender identity, it should be for all gender identities. It can feel cathartic to rail against the majority demographic, especially when people of that demographic have hurt you, but if you feel that it’s unfair to rail against a group because of the actions of a few members of it, that should apply to all groups. Things like “what’s wrong with the straights” doesn’t help build bonds with allies, and it turns young men away from leftist spaces.
-
there needs to be validation and recognition from the left for problems men have, like suicide, workplace death and heavier prison sentencing. The left needs to show that they are trying to fix these problems, too, instead of telling young men to suck it up and be a man about it because they are the oppressor demographic.
-
there needs to be people who counter toxic masculinity, not with telling men to be more like women, but with positive masculinity. If a man is having emotional or mental problems, toxic masculinity says to push that down. Femininity says it’s ok to be soft and vulnerable. Positive masculinity would say that a real man is true to himself and his feelings and expresses then freely, even if others might ridicule him for it. There’s a subtle difference, and the end result of femininity’s and positive masculinity’s tactic might be the same, i.e. the man expresses those feelings, but the way that they get there is very different. The former makes the man feel less validated in his identity, while the latter uplifts it. The memes where they say stuff like “I always tell my homies I love them before they go to bed” actually work.
-
leftist influencers need to make fighting for the rights of minorities seem manly. Badass. Like a hero. Worthy of praise and celebration.
-
while they won’t get the financial and political backing that the toxic male influencers get, there needs to be positive male influencers who talk about masculinity in a positive way, while promoting the ideas above. There needs to be an alternative, who acts manly but in the fun, positive way, that validates young men’s feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and isolation, while promoting an egalitarian perspective.
-
there needs to be a cultural shift in what makes a man. A shift away from dying in battle or becoming a tycoon, and a resurgence of the working class hero. Mass media itself needs to change and promote positive male figures. It can work and be popular, like in Avatar the Last Airbender. We need to show men that they are still men, and still worthy of love, respect and adoration, even if they aren’t a super soldier or a wealthy elite. A lot of this is counter to capitalistic goals, so it may have to be subversive, but eventually it needs to be made the norm.
-
other men need to continue to step up and speak out about injustice towards minorities and against toxic masculinity behaviors in the day to day, and start decrying those behaviors as unmanly. People need to call Andrew Tate and the like unmanly.
-
ideally, the men’s rights movement should be absorbed by the left and the toxic incels kicked out. It should be done in the name of gender equality. Fixing only woman’s problems won’t solve the patriarchy (which could be changed to a different term so everyone feels like it’s less of an us vs them) and feminists should try to help solve men’s problems directly rather than indirectly. Young men would see feminism as more appealing if feminists actually focused on men’s problems as well, rather than ignoring or worse, demonizing them. Feminism could be rebranded as an egalitarian movement for all sexes and genders, maybe get a name change. If the patriarchy affects everyone, then the focus should be on everyone. Maybe it would have to be a whole new movement entirely.
So it’s a larger problem than just getting more leftist male influencers, and some of those problems are systematic. Some can get worked on today. Talking about masculinity in a positive way, promotive equity, stop both their side and your side from bigotry, and, probably the thing that would get young men on board the most:
Actually trying to solve the problems young men are going through.
You hit the nail on the head AND provided clear action items. Excellent post.
I do think that it would be difficult to rebrand “feminism” and “patriarchy” because the terms are inherently gendered and are sometimes still being used for gendered purposes. We should definitely find new terms and be more accurate about the egalitarian movement being a new movement, or a rebrand of the more general parts of feminism, rather than trying to reuse the old movement’s terms when it doesn’t make sense.
W-Wait, what is this? A well-thought out, constructive, sympathetic comment? Here? I don’t believe it!
Real talk, though: This is an incredibly solid post and I really appreciate you taking the time to actually write all of these points out. It’s rare (or, subjectively, it feels rare) to see an admission that a major shift in how this topic is approached is needed, and I feel just a bit more hopeful seeing someone else put in the time to go this deep on it.
I would only make two add-on comments to your points:
-
With regard to point #6, I agree with the concept - but we have to be careful of how we phrase this. Unless it comes with a major effort to utterly restructure our economy in such a way that either a man’s value is no longer measured in his ability to be successful in a paid position, and/or we restructure our economy to make success more viable, I fear that efforts to support “working class heros” are doomed to become awkward failures as automation continues to steamroll the viability of those positions.
-
One point I don’t see brought up here, though it is touched at in (1) and (8), is that we’ve got to modulate how we discuss so-called “toxic” behavior. When so many seemingly minor behaviors are met with the same levels of disdain, villainization, and even punishment as things like actual sexual assault, it ends up feeling deeply isolating, undermines the point that is trying to be made, and pushes men towards the worst actors.
For #6, I don’t think we necessarily have to move away from the idea that being a man means being a provider and a protector. At least to me those are some of the core tenants of being a man.
The person above you mentioned the men in Avatar the last Airbender. But I also want to add in the men in LOTR, Gomez Adams, Ted Lasso, Kratos in the newer god of war games, and Steve Rodgers.
These are men who are caring, loving, emotional and they are (mostly) able to show those emotions, capable of growth, and able to admit when they are wrong. But they are still men. Men who struggle with anger, men go to war and protect their families, men who are incredibly strong in the face of struggle, men who sometimes make “inappropriate” (to the left) jokes, and men who strive for nothing else but bettering the lives of those in their care.
I sometimes hate that what counts as “positive masculinity” is really just feminity but dressed up in a blue bow. Men are not women and telling them that they can’t be super competitive, can’t be angry, and can’t fail is just setting them up to fall into toxic masculinity. This might just be me talking about the culture I was raised in but those things aren’t necessarily a bad thing, and erasing what a “man” has been for generations isn’t going to win you any extra fans.
Thanks, I’m glad you liked it!
I kinda agree on your points. I feel that working class heros could make a comeback if done well, though.
Hell ideally I’d like to see more historical stuff based on labor history, Blair Mountain was crazy and could totally be an action movie.
-
-
Do what you say you’re going to do when you get elected. Quit finding just enough no votes and making excuses. You promise, we vote, you don’t deliver. Then you ask “why does no one want to vote for us? We promised to be marginally less terrible than our opponents!”
Maybe stop hating their guts…
deleted by creator
