I read a piece this week on the aftertaste Andrew Tate has left on young boys’ opinions on feminism. It outlined a sudden surge in oppression based masculinity; seducing young men into being overly preoccupied with their strength and individual mark on the world, and where the woman’s place is in silent support.
This paired with the anxiety in the hangover of MeToo, has made some men fear the consequences of female agency. The author suggested that this leads to a misunderstanding of what feminism really is. The word itself is ‘smeared’, and leaves men ‘shuffling in their seats’ upon its utterance. That week, when in male company, I dared let slip the F word. The air in the room turned stiff and uneasy; I could see all frightful visions of green hair, septum piercings and hairy armpits, whirring in his mind. In the hundred-odd years since the dawn of women’s suffrage, and the millennia of general struggle for agency- you’d think this new ‘breaking the glass ceiling’ era with all its female additions to Forbes and so on, that acceptance would bloom with each passing generation.
Unfortunately, my grandpa is more in tune with this stuff than my male peers. A King’s College poll showed 16-29 year olds are more negative about feminism than over 60s. This may be because our over 60s witnessed the rise and reasons behind feminism. Younger men haven’t had tangible enough proof to justify its necessity- they see rights women have in the modern western world and wonder what there is to complain about. They can’t see the necessity in upholding feminist values to keep from reverting to past submission, nor the wide disparity in equality between western and underdeveloped countries.
The Tate model taints the word because the link he forms between feminism and undesirability twists the feminist into an embittered ‘rageuse’. He fills a gap in the male market: role models. The epidemic of male loneliness and suicide rates is no secret, and Tate represents the advent of opportunists seeking to shepherd lost men. The primary issue is that he intertwines what manhood should be and what this means to the man’s relationship with women.
Unlimited access to this branch of content has turned feminism into a time bomb to be disarmed. But, despite how new-wave meninist would have it, female prejudice today stops at diversity quotas and a more lenient jury. On a gradual scale of change overtime, gender equality becomes more balanced. However, the concept of capital F feminism remains feared, which is an immense obstacle to total egalitarianism.
Illustration via Kat Cass