It's fun to slag on teenage boys but IMO they're not so much ideologically right-wing as they are desperate for the approval and mentorship of older dudes a lot of the time, and we are letting them down on that score (either by trying to indoctrinate them or not interacting with them at all).
Have seen the take that young men are not getting enough attention before and it is blatantly the opposite. An entire media wing exists to tell them if they didn't get cheesy poofs immediately from their mom/girlfriend while playing games in the basement that society has failed them
I think that still lines up with what OP is saying. Young men aren’t getting sufficient healthy role models from *normal* media, which is exactly why it’s so easy for the weird Peterson/Tate media wing to capitalize on them
We still have Mr Rodgers, Anthony Bourdain, Obama/Bernie Sanders depending on your preference. It isn't no positive role models as much as that the much louder advertisement is that they have no good reason to be their best selves but should instead force others to tolerate their worst selves
Mr Rogers has been dead longer than teenage boys have been alive, and Anthony Boursin has been dead for more than half a decade. Sanders is 82, these may be people that boys can aspire to but they don’t speak to them and largely CANNOT.
It’s like telling someone your age that Audie Murphy should inspire you, they are irrelevant to you. Maybe we need to try to meet boys where they are, and to do that we need to appeal to them with messages that appeal to not just the most virtuous of them.
You are REALLY out of touch if you think a teenager is going to look up to any of those people. Two of them are dead, and one has some fear and loathing level drug use in his shows. I am waiting till my kid is 15 to show him Bordain. Mr. Rogers? Really?
Not so much 'healthy role models vs. not', as 'desperately trying to fill a real-life void _with_ media'. Life is not reducible to a media experience! There are no secrets, just an out-of-frame reality.
