So this is clearly personal to many people in this thread but I’m just going to point out objectively and non judgementally that Vaush and other participants misrepresent the argumemt made by the original poster.
The original poster specifically refers to men. Vaush’s response either intentionally or unintentionally responds to to an argument not made by the original poster by referring to 12 year old boys.
This is actually fairly low level discourse because the entire reply chain is responding to a strawman. If anyone has any further insight I’d be happy to hear it. I think we need to elevate our reading comprehension if we’re going to have meaningful conversations about this.
Young boys see comments directed at men as being directed at themselves as well. The foundations of the things that make a man buy into this shit are laid when he’s young. I think it’s quite valid to bring this up.
An adult man doesn’t just join the Andrew Tate crowd. The foundations for agreeing with his misogyny were laid while he was a teenager (or even younger). The people who are alienated by this sort of rhetoric aren’t adults, they’re teenagers who haven’t formed a political identity yet, who can yet be turned away from that self-destructive ideology and it is them who are turned away by such rhetoric.
The term “man” may by all of us be seen only to refer to males over the age of 18, but a teenage boy will already identify with it, will thinks of himself as cool, independent, grown-up. He will see an attack on “men” as an attack on himself.
While the targeted group may have been adult men, the actual targets will have been the twelve y/o Vaush spoke off and they will be driven further away from the principles of democracy and equality and into the hands of waiting fascists.
Post Scriptum
This isn’t supposed to be a defence of Vaush btw, I don’t really like him myself.
Yeah, the next step in the conversation is acknowledging that the same applies to a LOT of adult men. Not the majority, by far. But certainly enough to make a significant difference.
A lotta guys out there are participating in the patriarchy simply because it’s how they were raised, or because they were in a bad spot and the right made a better pitch to them when they asked for help. Or the only pitch. They haven’t thought it all the way through yet, and are just working with the information they have.
Every day at every age, there are some men out there collapsing the cognitive dissonance between patriarchy and basic human decency. Men who could be good people if they discard the right belief when the two finally become irreconcilable. When talking about effective outreach, these guys are important to reach. I’d say not as urgent as reaching out to the malleable kids before Dennis Prager sticks his oily little fingers in their brains or something of the like. But still a very worthwhile demographic to reach out to.
I figure that the assumption being made is that the alt-right social media pipeline is generally accepted to refer to the online ecosystem that was created to court impressionable young boys from the ages of 12-25 into the rightwing and then extreme rightwing ecosystem. And though Men’s Rights Activists is more broad and could be considered a choice, it is the younger demographic that are the ones “falling in”, and that’s where I imagine Vaush clarified that with saying “12 y.o.s”.
Older folks entering involuntarily, would have been through other media like Rush Limbaugh-style AM radio, Fox News or other Republican campaigns directly like Project Redmap in 2010, then those Republican groups shifted even further right over the last 15 years.
Perhaps the correlation that 12 year olds are the ones falling in even if others are doing it by choice, should have been explained by Vaush before jumping directly to the conclusion.
Sidenote: The problem is caused by the difficulty to have nuanced arguments within 150 characters. (The first two Twitter screencaps)
So this is clearly personal to many people in this thread but I’m just going to point out objectively and non judgementally that Vaush and other participants misrepresent the argumemt made by the original poster.
The original poster specifically refers to men. Vaush’s response either intentionally or unintentionally responds to to an argument not made by the original poster by referring to 12 year old boys.
This is actually fairly low level discourse because the entire reply chain is responding to a strawman. If anyone has any further insight I’d be happy to hear it. I think we need to elevate our reading comprehension if we’re going to have meaningful conversations about this.
Young boys see comments directed at men as being directed at themselves as well. The foundations of the things that make a man buy into this shit are laid when he’s young. I think it’s quite valid to bring this up.
An adult man doesn’t just join the Andrew Tate crowd. The foundations for agreeing with his misogyny were laid while he was a teenager (or even younger). The people who are alienated by this sort of rhetoric aren’t adults, they’re teenagers who haven’t formed a political identity yet, who can yet be turned away from that self-destructive ideology and it is them who are turned away by such rhetoric.
The term “man” may by all of us be seen only to refer to males over the age of 18, but a teenage boy will already identify with it, will thinks of himself as cool, independent, grown-up. He will see an attack on “men” as an attack on himself.
While the targeted group may have been adult men, the actual targets will have been the twelve y/o Vaush spoke off and they will be driven further away from the principles of democracy and equality and into the hands of waiting fascists.
Post Scriptum
This isn’t supposed to be a defence of Vaush btw, I don’t really like him myself.
Yeah, the next step in the conversation is acknowledging that the same applies to a LOT of adult men. Not the majority, by far. But certainly enough to make a significant difference.
A lotta guys out there are participating in the patriarchy simply because it’s how they were raised, or because they were in a bad spot and the right made a better pitch to them when they asked for help. Or the only pitch. They haven’t thought it all the way through yet, and are just working with the information they have.
Every day at every age, there are some men out there collapsing the cognitive dissonance between patriarchy and basic human decency. Men who could be good people if they discard the right belief when the two finally become irreconcilable. When talking about effective outreach, these guys are important to reach. I’d say not as urgent as reaching out to the malleable kids before Dennis Prager sticks his oily little fingers in their brains or something of the like. But still a very worthwhile demographic to reach out to.
I figure that the assumption being made is that the alt-right social media pipeline is generally accepted to refer to the online ecosystem that was created to court impressionable young boys from the ages of 12-25 into the rightwing and then extreme rightwing ecosystem. And though Men’s Rights Activists is more broad and could be considered a choice, it is the younger demographic that are the ones “falling in”, and that’s where I imagine Vaush clarified that with saying “12 y.o.s”.
Older folks entering involuntarily, would have been through other media like Rush Limbaugh-style AM radio, Fox News or other Republican campaigns directly like Project Redmap in 2010, then those Republican groups shifted even further right over the last 15 years.
Perhaps the correlation that 12 year olds are the ones falling in even if others are doing it by choice, should have been explained by Vaush before jumping directly to the conclusion.
Sidenote: The problem is caused by the difficulty to have nuanced arguments within 150 characters. (The first two Twitter screencaps)