Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers
“As soon as I mention feminism, you can feel the shift in the room; they’re shuffling in their seats.” Mike Nicholson holds workshops with teenage boys about the challenges of impending manhood. Standing up for the sisterhood, it seems, is the last thing on their minds.
When Nicholson says he is a feminist himself, “I can see them look at me, like, ‘I used to like you.’”
Once Nicholson, whose programme is called Progressive Masculinity, unpacks the fact that feminism means equal rights and opportunities for women, many of the boys with whom he works are won over.
“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,” he says.
But he is battling against what he calls a “dominance-based model” of masculinity. “These old-fashioned, regressive ideas are having a renaissance, through your masculinity influencers – your grifters, like Andrew Tate.”
Yes, imho it’s in the exact same area as All Cops Are Bastards, where it’s a critique of a system (in this case the patriarchy) that corrupts every willing and even unwilling participant through privilege and toxic expectations.
Not every cop is literally a bad person, not every man is figuratively trash. But every cop participates in an unjust and toxic system and every man benefits from certain privileges while having toxic societal expectations many suffer under placed on them.
It’s an expression for a need to change the system not a condemnation of all who fall under it’s umbrella, but it is presented as the latter by removing the context for propagandistic purposes or simply through an intellectual lazyness that wants to feed their own biases.
There is a big difference between something you can choose and something you cannot choose. Your two examples are not analogs. Cop isn’t a sex or race it’s a job and you must choose to do that job.