Fifth of men aged 16-29 look favourably on social media influencer Andrew Tate
It’s almost like there’s been a continuous effort in right wing media to demonize and bastardize feminists. When they talk about feminism they always screech about the most extreme views held by the smallest amount of people, and make it sound like that represents the entire group.
It’s the same strategy they use to attack any group.
If you consider Andrew Tate a meaningful source on any subject I really don’t care what generation you’re a part of - you’re a fucking idiot and you need to sort yourself out. All you are to him is a gullible mark to extract money from.
The thing to keep in mind here is that he’s very much targeting kids (teenagers but still minors lacking real-world experience) and this is exactly the wrong response to that sort of phenomenon.
I’m not saying you’re wrong but there’s also a LOT of men in their 20s-30s and upwards who’ve bought into his shit. And even teens (speaking as parent to some) know that someone who’s been arrested for sex trafficking isn’t someone to listen to.
Flanderization is a thing.
You know the whole process where the most cartoonishly exaggerated viewpoints gain the most media attention?
Well, that doesn’t only apply to people on the outside - groups and movements internally select for attention-grabbing as well. Over time, whatever gains the most eyeballs gradually becomes normalised. When you get people like Clementine ford unironically saying things like Honestly the coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough, the attention it garners moves the Overton window a little bit each time, pulling the mainstream closer towards it. We’ve become accustomed to the clickbait, but the kids these days are a lot more resistant to it.
Gen Z are a lot more OK than people give them credit for. They grew up living and breathing meme culture, which is massively intertextual and has more layers of irony than my genX ass can even count. They don’t do uncritical acceptance of anyone’s messaging, because they contextualise the living shit out of everything they see, and it’s frankly terrifying.
I’m willing to bet that a lot of the survey respondents ‘looked favourably on’ Tate because they find his awfulness hilarious, and because they find pretending to admire him even funnier because of course he’s a festering piece of shit, that’s the joke (under 27 layers of self-reference). That’d be completely on-brand for my kid, certainly.
At the same time, they’re also going to find terms like ‘toxic masculinity’ unhelpful, because of course they can see how an originally-helpful concept slid via unfortunate phrasing into little more than a derogatory term through popular use and cynical attention-grabbing. They are going to grow into hellaciously effective arts majors, because not only can they see the mechanisms at work, they find them a lot more interesting than the actual content.
I really don’t think this poll reflects what people think it does.
I can hate on the boomers because they had every opportunity to not be shitty. I think in the case of gen z, society ultimately failed them. They have no bright future to look forward to, just rampant inequality and a dying planet. When some loon comes around and tells them all they can go off and be little apes venting their frustration on society with violence and bigotry there’s less reason to ignore them than there should be. That’s not to say everyone’s blameless, but it’s not like 20% of the cohort was born evil and will forever be that way; something external influenced this situation and we need to fix it.
Big yikes. Hopefully this is a symptom of radicalization on both sides, and not a trend of increasing conservativism overall.
