Dear Readers
So it's been a while since I fired up this blog, and for that I apologise. Times have been tough for me mentally in the last few months and ultimately it's easy to lose sight of the usual activities and leave them forgotten (I've lost count of how often I've done this when trying to stick to an exercise regime).
So ultimately unless you've been, in the words of Cecil Terwilliger from the Simpsons; 'in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears', then you'll have heard about the recent scandal surrounding Andrew Tate. Now, this guy has been vaguely in my zone of awareness and I knew of him as a motivational and inspirational figurehead as far as many young men are concerned. I've generally disliked him, especially with some rather unsavory and concerning implications against him (e.g. trafficking) and his derogatory comments about men who don't stand up to his "standards".
Now, while I won't say where for confidentiality reasons or disclose any incriminating details, I'm a youth worker in the UK, and mentoring young people such as children and adolescents of all races, genders, sexualities etc, and sticking up for the issues that affect them, is my job. Part of that involves 'masculinity' workshops that I haven't yet had a chance to get involved in, but we go around to schools to hold these and give the young men involved food for thought, and a guiding light to help them into a positive, productive and happy adulthood.
This week, my colleagues and I met up for our monthly get-together and update on the services we supply. Unfortunately two of the women on our team disclosed an incident in which they were mobbed by a group of 15 year olds who questioned them aggressively and set a tone and scenario that left them encircled and surrounded. They also talked openly about 'winning against the gays', and took a very aggressive and threatening approach to both women - a scenario that's while thankfully rare, still thoroughly unpleasant.
For many women - of course, for anyone but you can see what in particular a woman has to be concerned about in such a situation - this can be an intimidating scenario to be in, as Woodstock 99 horribly demonstrated. A couple of points were brought up such as that under peer pressure there's little to no chance of being able to break out of behaviour you'd never dream of committing on your own. This isn't to excuse any of this behaviour, rather to understand where it comes from, because ultimately we're still apes from the African plains. If you struck out from your troop or your tribe in the earliest days of mankind, you would die. I was never part of such a group until my late teens and I remember being a very easy target for bullies and much worse until I finally snapped and used violence to defend myself.
What surprised me was how they brought up that these lads were being given no leeway to express themselves, being controlled by the adults in society, not allowed to speak their minds, screamed at by teachers and generally treated like animals. So ultimately, if you're treated like an animal, you're more likely to act like an animal. Furthermore, what he pointed out was that these guys aren't given the chance to act like teenagers. They get excluded for what is arguably often normal teenage behavior. They're told to sit down, be silent and listen in classes, which while this works brilliantly for girls, isn't quite as productive for boys. A lack of male primary teachers in the UK means that many of them are lacking in role models, and while discipline and a firm and assertive approach is desirable, my colleagues have witnessed teachers screaming in these boys' faces and treating them with contempt as a problem to be fixed.
That being the case, are we entirely surprised that these young lads flock to a figure like Tate? What attracts many young men to Tate in their minds, is how he speaks out his mind, and in the circumstances of 'cancel culture' or to more accurately describe it, cyberbullying, this has become increasingly difficult in the past few years. The 'punching-up' and 'punching down' rules by left-wing post-modernists leave them subject to treatment from abusive 'girlboss' types that they'd get in serious trouble, possibly face jail time, if they were the ones doing it (such as sexual harassment, and verbal and domestic abuse broadcast on TikTok - for further details, see Chloe Roma from 'Roma Army' who has done sterling work documenting this toxicity), and it's not like there are any towering male figures who stand up for them on this matter, or not at least without being inappropriately smeared as a "misogynist" for the mildest of objections.
Ultimately we're not offering these men and boys any alternatives. In modern life we've come up with a twisted radfem empowerment approach to lift up women and girls, based on revenge against men and boys, emasculating them in media for decades and trying to get them to unlearn masculinity (a damaging and toxic exercise in futility). What cultural figures do they have to look up to? Male so-called "feminists" who tell them they're inferior to their female counterparts? If we treat them as naturally negative and inferior, what motivation is there for them to behave any other way? Let me also remind us all that these are the same abuse apologist men and women who supported (and still support) abuser Amber Heard and lamented her being held accountable by her male victim.
Of course, the same radfems in their infinite wisdom have claimed that the 'overcorrection' was a response to 'centuries of misogyny and patriarchy' (the latter being a useless and simplistic term if ever there was one), implying that collateral damage to those men in the poorer stratas of society wouldn't matter, and that the pendulum would 'swing back' (presumably over their dead bodies in a millenia). But are they right?
No.
This phenomenon has been grinding on, like I said, for decades, as post-modernist "thinkers" have tried to create a perfect world of equality. And yet we've still seen obstacles for women to overcome here and there, and if anything, under third and fourth wave so-called "feminists" we've seen women's rights go backwards. These useless postmodernists were already pushing their toxic agenda forward during the 2013-2015 period. Then in 2016 there was a vote in the UK, and a vote in the US, for an exit of the UK from the European Union and for Donald Trump to become Republican President of the United States, snatching the title from Democrat Hilary Clinton.
Of course, while the EU subject is a complicated subject that I won't dive into (trust me, we had four years of bickering and arguing over it and all got sick to the back teeth of it), Trump is not someone that I have a great liking for. He's arrogant, uncouth, unpleasant, oafish, cynical, race-baiting, a wannabe authoritarian, immature, and that's just the short list, hence I was massively relieved to see him go. At the same time, I saw him less of the driving force of the problem, but the symptom of a multitude of different issues - economical, social, financial, cultural etc. Seeing him go may leave many people thinking that it was the end of the issue but it isn't. This is a widespread issue of boys and men in wider society among the poorer and more destitute being left in the dust in a flawed progressiveness, and turning to extremism in response.
And I'm not the only one thinking this either. This isn't rhetoric, but much deeper rooted than that. As Richard V Reeves 2021 book 'Of Men and Boys' states on page 119-120:
'Across the world, men have been more likely than women to support right wing or protest parties. In Sweden for example, one in four men supported the far right Sweden Democrats in a 2015 poll, twice the level of support among women. In Germany, especially in the east, men have swung sharply to the political right. In 2017, a third of Saxon men voted for the far-right [AfD] party....In South Korea, young men are also swinging hard right, fuelled by anti-feminist sentiment...India's Prime Minister, Nerandra Modi, boasts of his 56-inch chest. There was alpha male Imran Khan in Pakistan, anti-feminist Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and straight-out misogynist Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.'
And what was the result of Trump being voted into the Oval Office? He started a pull-out from Afghanistan that, while no doubt a relief for the western world to not be stuck in a 20 year quagmire anymore, resulted in the Taliban very quickly taking back the country and reinstalling themselves as rulers of the country. And the successes of progression for women in the country installed during that time (all other issues with the war notwithstanding)? Disappeared overnight. Gone. In a puff of smoke. Meanwhile in the U.S. we had Trump installing anti-abortion judges, resulting in Roe vs Wade being revoked, meaning that all states that wished to do so almost immediately cancelling the legal right to abortion for women.
As an aside, despite the rhetoric of "no pussy no opinion", the reality is that U.S. men and women hold very similar views on abortion according to this poll from 2018:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-views.aspx
Personally, while I see some flaws with abortion, I'd suggest scientific means to solve the problems (but that's another story), but not the outright elimination of abortion, which would result in increased teenage pregnancies, poverty, as well as bodily autonomy lost for women in low-income families in those states (if faced with a pregnancy that may cost them their lives, this is disastrous).
So how is this relevant? Because the pretend "progressives" have lied that leaving men essentially to rot is going to work out just fine, that they're fine because of their representation in the top 1% of society (the so-called "patriarchy") will mean they'll suffer no less than a bruised ego, that they'll be improved by being made more like the idealised "feminine", and yet the failing of the short-sighted education and political systems leave the poorer and less financially well off in the dirt. At the same time, they still have a vote, and you can cancel someone a million times over, but they don't have to tell you who they elect, and at that point there's nothing you can do to stop them. If their mind is made up to vote for someone who'll roll back progress for women, and if you can't persuade them otherwise and offer them a better alternative, then you're in trouble. If you think Trump's decisions were bad, he's just the beginning.
Now we have Tate, who my colleagues have reliably informed me not only comes up frequently as a figure of admiration for these young men, but now he's been imprisoned (for very serious allegations I might add), they see him as a martyr. It's on us as a wider society to offer them a better alternative than Tate as a role model, a figure of strength with masculine qualities that they can admire and look up to, but without the negative traits. Channel their energies into being a force for good, harnessing their strengths and desires to them living better lives rather than trying to merely thrash them into correct "feminine" behaviour (or worse, treating them the way you teach them not to treat women such as abuse, and filming it on TikTok). Show them by example a better way to interact with women and girls and how to express their masculinity and direct those desires into something brilliant such as leadership, inspire them to greater things, show them how a strong man interacts with women as opposed to this worrying mobbing behavior by these 15 year olds. If you don't, then these Tate-like behaviours and extremisms will continue, as has happened across history with countless other forms of extremism.
It's easy to say, as one twitter acquaintance of mine suggested to me, that these young men are merely incels who 'isolate themselves' but as a worldwide phenomenon, that's clearly not what's happening here. This isn't a problem that can be brushed away as jealousy of women's equality. This is a serious issue for two reasons.
1) These aren't inferior creatures to be crushed but fellow citizens who have a stake in society and the way it runs.
2) If the marginalized men and boys are sidelined they'll come back and haunt you, as they already are doing so politically, resulting in rise of far right politics and even strengthens dictatorships.
I may be dismissed as an "incel" (I seriously don't see how that makes sense anyway) or a "misogynist" or whatever, trust me, I've heard them all before, but you can't suppress anyone in society without it coming back to bite you in the arse. For those saying "but we're not obliged to cater to straight white cis men", tough. We all owe it to each other if we want a better functioning society. If equality isn't a zero sum game, then the onus is on you to make damned sure that you put your money where your mouth is. If all of this I've described is anything to go by, then we've got a lot of learning to do, and we'd better do it fast or be prepared to reap the whirlwinds.
To wrap up, I leave you with a famous African proverb to bear in mind for the future.
'A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.'
Mark. My. Words.
Sincerely,
The Invisible Man
