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).
The world has a lot of cruel realities even in the coziest parts of the first world, the average teenage boy (correctly, IMO) is looking to older men for models of how to manage them, and if the only models on offer are right-wing freaks, that's a problem but it's not the kid's fault.
People who believe themselves to be driven by consistent ideology wrongly believe 1) that others are driven by consistent ideology and 2) that they themselves are driven by consistent ideology.
Ideology is for morons, having a malleable personal philosophy and universal empathy is the way to go. I eventually realized the reason I thrived while some of my peers failed is because I had very good (non-ideological) male role models. It makes me lucky, not better.
that's why I like to subtly put little ideas into my 12 yr old cousin's head when he comes to stay with me. his mom is pretty left wing generally so he's not totally screwed but he's still a little boy growing up in this society so I wanna make absolutely sure he's good lol
I think showing that it's possible to live in a variety of ways and be happy is often enough; also modelling the ways you solve your own problems rather than handing out worked answers. Eventually we'll all be dead and they'll have to solve problems without us, might as well give 'em a head start.
"Dudes rock" is how we defeat the manosphere. It's how we show men that they can be their authentic selves and the world won't beat them down for it. They don't have to be cynical manipulators to be loved.
Yes. Also, the right-wing freak take is that no man is truly loved, sexual access is locked behind power, money, and fear, and man, it's hard to think of a bleaker worldview than that.
Incredibly frustrating to listen to Peterson and his ilk [incorrectly] talk about Jung's more esoteric work when Jung The Actual Therapist was incredibly practical. He told people to join social clubs. If he were around today he'd send people to home brew classes and bowling leagues.
Right, this is where it becomes extremely obvious that this is just Tumblr media-consumption-as-praxis but from the right; you gotta Do Stuff Imperfectly, out in the world, not just Consume Input Correctly in such a way that you remain disconnected and thus desire more Input.
(Re: another point of yours elsewhere, pickup artists failed because their audience wanted a system that worked, while the market incentives are to create a system that fails; PUA shit that actually _worked_ would reduce the size of your captive market!)
Because it didn't matter what they were selling; whatever benefit accrued to the guys who bought into the whole PUA weltanschauung was largely confidence from having a 'system' - what that system was didn't matter, and as the market self-selected for ever more bitter and crazy dudes, it radicalized.
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
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.
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?
