• 3600 boys and men were polled in London
  • 16 percent said that feminism was more harmful than good
  • one in four said that men said that being a man was harder than being a woman
  • one in five said they view Andrew Tate positively
  • 32 percent said they view Jordan Peterson positively
  • 37 percent said that “toxic masculinity” is an unhelpful phrase

Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute, said the opposing views of some young men and women is a surprising trend. “This is a new and unusual generational pattern,” he said.

The reason for the contrasting views of young men and women could be the result of social media consumption. That’s the view of Rosie Campbell, Director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s. She said: “The fact that this group is the first to derive most of their information from social media is likely to be at least part of the explanation.”

    • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      You can’t just flip the questions because of all the neutral answers, exact wording matters which is why surveys are easy to bullshit.

      We have no idea the split between neutral and negative views in this survey so it could be depressing or not, inconclusive.

    • dead [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      That is not how data is interpreted. None of the numbers you gave are accurate. You can’t assume that everyone else believes the opposite of what one group says and polls rarely have just 2 responses to a given question.

      The shocking thing about the poll is that Gen Z men responded more negatively to feminism than men from previous generations.

      The poll showed that 16% of Gen Z boys/men said that feminism is more harmful than good. The poll also shows that 30% of Gen Z boys/men says that feminism does equal amounts of harm and good. Only 36% of Gen Z boys/men responded that feminism was more good than harmful, compared to responses overall who responded in 43%. The expected result was that younger men would be more progressive than previous generations, but Gen Z boys/men responded less positively to feminism than previous generations.

      Only 35% of Gen Z boys/men said that it’s harder to be a woman than be a man, 33% percent said that there was not much difference. Again, the results seem more pronounced when compared to other demographics in the poll.

      While 37% of Gen Z boys/men viewed the phrase “toxic masculinity” as unhelpful, only 29% said that the phrase was helpful. Compared to girls/women of the same age demographic, 47% said that the phrase was helpful.

      I found the full poll data on the college’s website. The shocking thing about the data is that Gen Z men responded more negatively towards feminism than previous generations. For the data on Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, look at the full data.

      https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/masculinity-and-womens-equality-study-finds-emerging-gender-divide-in-young-peoples-attitudes

      https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/emerging-tensions.pdf

    • BoxedFenders [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      This poll suggests that a sizeable majority of men are basically feminists in some capacity.

      Most people are, but many refuse to identify themselves as such because the term has been weaponized as a slur for decades.

  • dumpster_dove [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    37 percent said that “toxic masculinity” is an unhelpful phrase

    I remember some guy on reddit-logo I think it was the menslib sub, wrote a rant about “toxic masculinity” being feminist hogwash, and the real problem is [goes on to describe toxic masculinity]

    I suspect there are many such cases

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    It’s really not surprising that jackasses like Tate and the Crying Canadian have purchase. They “tell it like it is” aka tell kids what certain boys want to hear. If I got on TV and said “bed time is oppressing you” I bet I could get some kids to think I’m some kind of intellectual too. Kids are gullible but they aren’t stupid. They can see that there’s problems in the world. What kids (and a lot of people) lack is the wisdom to understand that retreating to an imagined past or set of norms is never a solution. Even if their whole narrative of “the way things used to be” was true it doesn’t change the fact that the history proves that those preceding events got us to where we are now.

    Even in societies that appeared to have long periods of stability or were static is a lie. The centuries of “pax romana” were punctuated with wars and rebellions. The millenia of Confucian stability of China was full of famines, uprisings, and dynasties faltering and being replaced. The Maya were never a unified empire - it was a collection of polities tied by shared culture and language that rose and fell over the course of hundreds of years, closer to the disunited city states of Mesopotamia than some kind of contiguous body. These are macro examples but I think they prove my point.

    It is by viewing these things from an external position that people are able to mistake them as possessing a structure that they do not in fact have. It is similar to how a mountain is seen as a singular body from a distance but up close it is actually a collection of smaller stones.

    These kids are only working with the tools that we equip them with. We are not equipping them with the tools necessary to understand and reject these grifters because we do not give them a materialist education. We allow snake oil salesmen to creep into their lives by abdicating our social role of educating children and allowing algorithms to guide their media consumption. We cannot consume our way out of this crisis, especially when that consumption is tied to the very worst metrics like outrage based engagement.

    However there is a nugget of hope within the terrifying truth of the predatory nature of the manosphere. It relies of the undereducated and naive to propogate. It relies on ignorance and bias and a sense of aggrievement and a historical illiteracy. There are cures to these and we know what they are. Deradicalization is possible especially when it comes to kids because their toxicity has not fully calcified. What is quite evident, however, is that capitalism and neoliberalism have no solutions to these problems hence the hand wringing and hopelessness of the people who worry about these things publicly in their papers-of-record. The insufficiency of their solutions and motivation to address the problem are always at odds with the declared severity of the problem. If Tate is truly an existential threat to your world abduct him, [redacted] where the skull meets the spine, and be done with it.

    • Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      If I got on TV and said “bed time is oppressing you” I bet I could get some kids to think I’m some kind of intellectual too.

      Well Chomsky had a pretty good career so I’d say that checks out

  • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    good news everyone! these are brits so real countries probably score better, 37% being the highest and for just an opinion on a term is a lot lower than i expected from a headline like that. like literally all of these positions are minority ones and the severe ones, smallest!

    • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      TERF island. But I don’t want to come across as chauvinistic because I’m a queer American and I need to have some faith in the Brits to liberate in their own time. Not that Stalin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin or anything - that would be too extreme injecting my own default anti European bias tendacies because my ancestors rejected Europe to form their own settler colonial project which could be seen as paternal or even disrespectful.

      Yes I’ve reached new levels of apathy and cynicsm.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I think there’s a developmental aspect to this. Young boys are not fully developed yet, the part of the brain that processes empathy doesn’t even fully develop until 25+. Due to the process of development young boys are uniquely susceptible to manosphere grifters.

    I’ll also say that I think competitive gaming plays a negative role in this ecosystem and is rarely looked at. There’s a reason freeze-gamer and reactionary behaviour have easily recognisable patterns. I’d wager that competitive gaming plays a role in reinforcing the ideas of everyone for themselves, alpha, aggro aggro aggro, types of behaviour. Boys learning to win in these videogames find that the things that help them win at games sound a lot like the things that these manosphere grifters tell them will help them win at life, getting girls, fighting, etc. What these boys want to do is “win”.

    Why do I think that’s a thing now and wasn’t a thing 10-20 years ago despite games being prevalent? Because the industry has moved to live service models, which are literally ALL built around competitive esports ladder-climbing in Ranked modes gaming. Box sale models were single player games, or when they were competitive games they didn’t push their Ranked competitive so hard because the goal wasn’t to create an infinitely long never-ending grind to keep players playing permanently.

    These two things blowing up at the same time is not a coincidence. And this is not about games making people violent or anything like that, but that the ideas of “how to win” in a hyper-competitive zero-sum system reinforce reactionary beliefs. You could also tie this to CONTENT influencer grifter culture that has developed initially through youtubers but then through twitch and social media.

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I think it goes both ways. Many are significantly more in the know, and many are significantly more out of the know with completely fucked up warped views.

    • MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      In competition someone wins and someone else has to lose.

      Under Socialism if you lose it’s OK, your basic needs are met. Dust yourself off and try again.

      Under Capitalism? If you lose and you don’t have a family or money or other resources, you’re fucked. Have fun being homeless!

  • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I don’t think it’s that “shocking”, social media is littered with anti-feminist propaganda (part of the entire anti-anything vaguely left wing propaganda). It’s all funded by right wing think tanks/billionaires too, so they have infinite money to spend. It’s incessant too. If you create a new account on YouTube or Facebook, twitter and now threads, you just get promoted right wing media.

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I wouldn’t necessarily call 1/3 a shock but thanks paternal China for your chauvinism. Why can’t you leave the Brits to their own foolishness and timeline? Have some faith in the 2/3 and The West.

    This isn’t a fringe take and there are many that also hold this view. Is that how this international socialst solidarity thing works? 🤔

    Or maybe solidarity is just buying my improve-society head in the sand to the rest of the world.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Sample size of 3600? That’s a fucking rounding error in a proper survey

    Edit: apparently i do not understand statistics which is fine

    • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I don’t think sample size is a problem here at all. That would be a problem if you were trying to detect a tiny change from a previous survey or detect something very rare in a population. But to ensure the accuracy of these numbers within just a couple percentage points, you wouldn’t need anywhere close to 3600. It’s been a while since I took Stats so I don’t remember the particular math for calculating a confidence interval, but if you were trying to find out if say, half the population has brown hair, or a quarter of the population has brown hair, you could figure that out within a few percentage points by checking a random sample of like 20-30ish people.

      • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Admittedly I don’t really get the math behind this so I guess I’m talking out my ass. So to rephrase:

        After 2020 I will never trust the results of a single poll I see ever again for the rest of my life