This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.
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I’m a gen z male, raised in a far right Republican household. I’m a social democrat. I am progressive.
Good on you. No group is a monolith
Same. I live on a ranch in a deeply red area. Voted Kamala. I’m also happy to say my conservative parents are ex-republicans.
Unironically, congrats on breaking free of the brainwashing. I grew up in an insanely red rural area and a very conservative religious family, unlearning all that shit has been a decades long process (and still continues).
It seems counter intuitive but I don’t think Gen Z is as good with technology as most people assume they are.
I think they just believe everything they see on YouTube and TikTok. Those algorithms just feed people what they want to see and don’t challenge anyone.
Who thinks they’re good with technology? They’ve never had technology that requires any more knowledge than how to swipe. They’re shit with technology.
I mean that many people just assume younger generations are better with technology.
Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There’s no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.
Older people grew up on BBSes and later “Bulletin Boards”, which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a “celebrity” vs “fan” content model where it’s all geared around followers and likes. It’s all parasocial relationships from the “fan” side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.
It really fucking sucks that platforms that used to be designed to allow 2-way communication between equals have flopped so hard trying to follow the exact model you just outlined. For all its faults, Facebook used to be a really great place to keep in contact with long distance friends and family. Now it won’t even show you anything anyone in your friends list posts, and the options for interacting are completely neutered on their mobile site. It went from being a site I enjoyed, to a site I despise. And there aren’t any alternatives. The era of a platform for friends and family is over.
The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.
Before Facebook people weren’t locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.
Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn’t a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you’d be nuked from orbit.
Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can’t leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don’t want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can’t leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn’t owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.
Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don’t know how we back out of this shitty situation.
I lived through those early days, and although they were glorious, those boards, and forums, and ICQ chats weren’t filled with friends and family.
MySpace was the first place where everyone was. It was the first time in history where you could go find out what happened to all of your old friends and rekindle a relationship if you wanted to.
I remember going through basic training when the Drill Sergeants told us we’d make the best friends of our lives, that we’d never see again. And that held true for 10 years after I got out. Then suddenly MySpace became hugely popular and I found them all again! Because of Facebook I’m still friends with several of them today.
Facebook got really lucky with the timing of their public launch. They still kind of just sat around being empty until MySpace started massively changing the platform under new ownership from NewsCorp. I think that acquisition was the worst in history up until Twitter.
Anyways, in their infinite corporate wisdom, they wiped everyone’s profiles. Like seriously, WTF? They deleted everyone’s pictures, all of their blog posts, comments, and just about everything. Talk about not understanding what they bought. They did release a tool to get your pictures back, but why the heck would anyone trust the site after that. People were already checking out Facebook, so they all just jumped over there. Plus the clean design, with lots of white space (which is completely gone now), was very Web 2.0 and people liked it.
Anyways, like I originally said, and like you confirmed, that era is over. We both know the government is never going to split them up, and even an exact clone of a service today would fail. Social sites need people to succeed, and people don’t have any interest in creating a new community when there’s all of these ready-made communities that they already understand, regardless of how bad they have become.
The only reason TikTok succeeded is because it had backing from CCP and basically infinite money to market and attract new people. No start-up would ever have those types of funds these days. If somehow through a miracle a start-up did acquire enough funding to be a threat to meta or Xitter, then the billionaires at the heads would make an irresistible offer, buy it, and kill it. It’s over. The free Internet is dead.
Many of them are low prospect, so it’s not a surprise. They’re hoping a male supremacy will help them survive financially, but most will still suffer as that’s just how number games work in a callous system. If they’d voted for Harris they’d at least get some benefits while being low prospect
As a zoomer that’s old enough to be working class now. Man, my childhood was fucked. At school, being a right wing troll was the norm, at least for boys. I was too.
The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.
And our education system doesn’t do anything to combat this shit either. Quite the opposite, the dogmatic authoritarian approach schools take coupled with zero-tolerance policies pretty much ensures people shouting this hateful shit get away with it.
After all saying “Hitler did nothing wrong” only gets annoyed looks, gets completely brushed off as “edgy” or something. But then when someone points out that person’s shit, suddenly that’s an attack???
White women as a majority still voted for Trump. Why just blame men?
There is a lot to be said here. I’ll use my own experience as an example.
I’m a millennial male who had a terrible time as a young adult through my mid 30s. I grew up in a fairly religious/conservative area of the US, and I didn’t have the ability to even start questioning that before my college years because literally everyone I knew was either a vocal supporter of or tacitly accepted that cultural status quo. Mental health issues were either not discussed or not recognized in any serious fashion. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I finally understood that I had severe depression and anxiety and sought help, despite suffering from it since my early teenage years.
Socially, I never felt like I was cool enough or good enough. I didn’t understand women, and the endless series of rejections and confusing encounters only served to erode my low self confidence further. I had no idea what a healthy relationship looked like because my parents were just going through the motions at that point, and the relationships I saw in TV shows and movies were incredibly shallow. The few people I considered friends did not support me in any positive way. I eventually kicked them to the curb, preferring solitude to being the butt of their jokes.
I was a prime target for recruitment for the alt-right: depressed, alone, disaffected, and ready to lash out. The only thing that kept me from going in that direction was a keen sense that the rhetoric was bullshit and its leaders only cared to take advantage of the rank-and-file to accumulate money and power. Many people I knew were not so perceptive and became victims of that movement.
My only saving grace was that I had a decent job with healthcare benefits, which allowed me to get the therapy I needed to overcome these challenges. Again, most people I knew did not have such resources. Nearly a decade later, I am now a family man with a wife and child. I am far happier than I have been at any other point in my life. Despite that, there is still plenty I don’t understand. I don’t have a good grasp of what positive masculinity looks like. I cannot point to anyone who has served as a good, male role-model in my life. I still don’t have any close male friends with whom I can share my feelings and challenges.
However, I do understand how easily young men can be swayed to far-right crusades. Social media warped my view of reality, and it’s far worse now than it was 10-15 years ago. Moreover, there is no alternative to far-right echo chambers for young men to commiserate and get help. Those spaces simply do not exist on the left. If you dare to complain or vent, you will immediately be told your problems don’t matter and called a misogynist. I can readily call multiple conversations I had with liberals and feminists who rejected my problems, even being told that I was “living life on easy mode” because I was a man.
For all the women who are reading this, I get it. As a man, I don’t have to worry about the government meddling in my bodily autonomy. For the most part, I don’t have to worry about walking alone at night or being accosted or raped. I don’t have to worry about being taking seriously at my job or being passed over for promotions because of my gender. However, none of that negates the challenges that young men are facing. Their gender does not save them from broken homes, abuse, mental health issues, a bad job market, degrading standards of living, student debt, double-standards, confusing and contradictory narratives surrounding dating and relationships, etc. Yes, privileged men with no right to complain do exist, but they are an extreme minority. The vast majority of young men are in a bad place, and the only people reaching out to help have ulterior motives. If you want things to change, try having some empathy. Maybe you will get empathy for your problems in return.
This. Men are more often victims of violent crime, homelessness, mental illness, suicides, do worse in school, incarceration, die in wars, work dangerous jobs. Classic male institutions, structures, and spaces don’t exist anymore like they used to.
Add to that that men showing emotions is still seen as weakness.
These issues aren’t addressed or even mentioned.
Men are more often victims of violent crime, homelessness, mental illness, suicides, do worse in school, incarceration, die in wars, work dangerous jobs.
The victims of other men. That’s the joke of it all. And the folks screaming loudest about being victimized are inevitably the ones quickest and most eager to take their own pound of flesh at the first opportunity.
Add to that that men showing emotions is still seen as weakness.
Primarily among other men. This isn’t a gendered issue nearly so much as it is a socio-economic hierarchy. The “excess males” problem is what’s driving the violence, the poverty, and the declining health. Young men are pressed into the social hierarchy by their elders, often from an extremely young age, through physical, emotional, and sexual violence. They climb the social ladder by proving their tolerance for abuse by those above, while exhibiting a sufficient capacity for sadism on those below. Anyone who cannot endure the abuse and find their own cohort to abuse in turn becomes the social excrement that the system exudes.
This is literally “The Patriarchy” that feminists rant about and seek to abolish. But efforts to abolish the system invoke its most violent tendencies. The result is a youth population that is selected for the most sniveling and cruel to lead it into the next generation.
When Terry Crews came out about his sexual assault. So many men publicly derided him. I felt so bad for Terry.
For the record, fifty cent, Vlad from VladTV, DL Hughley were those that made fun of Terry and some even insinuated he was possibly gay.
This entire comment is exactly the kind of lack of empathy that the gentleman was talking about.
Primarily among other men.
The worst I ever got for showing emotions in front of other men was being called sensitive. Women on the other hand dismissed me with fury, insulting my manhood and even hitting me.
They climb the social ladder by proving their tolerance for abuse by those above, while exhibiting a sufficient capacity for sadism on those below.
Where did you learn this fucking nonsense, gender studies?
The Patriarchy
Interesting name for it given how many men will tell you it is women upholding men’s gender roles. Men are still expected to pay for dates, to be able to support families, to have a home and a car before they’re even worth attempting to date…
The patriarchy sucks for most men, that aren’t on the top. Their grievances are still legitimate and either ignored or belittled.
The men at the top maintain their position by deflecting the consequences of their exploitative policies onto the lower rungs of the ladder.
Why is this downvoted, but not the comments its responding to; wtf? But yeah, you could not be more right on the patriarchy bit. All the things being cited here are things actual feminists have known for a century. What men need, beyond positive role models, is a rebranded classical feminism. The reason you cant just call it feminism is kinda the problem. The term has been associated with misandrists, who feminist advocates tolerate way more they tactically should. Because us vs them narratives are very appealing
Feminist in general is the wrong word because it inherently sounds like placing women first, rather than treating men and women equally
I would also say that everyone regardless of gender is treated pretty shittily at the moment
I’m using the term because it…is the word for that philosophy. I’m not exactly campaigning here
You are right about that though. Men and women both get shitty treatments, the funny thing is they’re almost polar opposite experiences and both manage to suck monkey farts
half joke first. nobody’s trying to meddle in our bodily autonomy, yet.
edit: i havent looked too close at it but the mensliberation space on lemmy.ca may interest you? cancermancer down bellow has a rec for r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates that looks to have another good perspective in the topic. so im sticking it right here with the other.
I’ll try to approach the topic from my perspective as well. my gender has never really be part of my internal view of myself. but it is an inescapable part of how other people will see me, and the rules are always whatever the other person wants. so maybe not the poster child for speaking on masculinity. i’m literally the default charater generator in every videogame, but it’s just a hallucinating meat suit.
talking about gender concepts and social roles was a norm growing up because i did that growing up in the weird outside groups the christian kids chased. any reference to maculinity was done at me as an attack, even when i was doing it according to the rules. i agree, there are few places for young men to explore their way out of those strict views. especially in the early years. i’ve often seen them jump straight into spaces meant to be safe for people who’ve had not great experiances with the topic, especially women. and press other people to do all the work, explain things to them and navigate their often* harsh language. and i get it. when you’ve only ever been allowed to express 3 levels of the same emotion, it’s gonna be rough sorting that out.
it’s going to be on people who have worked their way through that mind set to make those places for kids to start the process. most importantly, people who share their experiance and perspective. yes folls like me can and really need to come in there and talk openly. but my own experiance is never going to line up in a way that will connect with those kids. even when i look exactly like our experiance should line up.
…if theres more spelling mistakes then there are more spelling mistakes. fuck it thats too much text for a phone
Bodily autonomy? What’s this scar on my cock again?
Have also heard people talking about giving men vasectomies at 16 (people who don’t understand they can’t actually be undone)
FWIW I’ve only seen that used to illustrate how ridiculous it is that we find it essentially normal to have laws controlling what women can do with their reproductive systems but not men. I’ve not seen a single credible example of someone seriously suggesting this.
As a Gen Z man who statistically should have fallen down the incel and alt-right pipeline but didn’t, this echos exactly what I see in my generation. We don’t have positive examples of Masculinity, and the left just yells at us that we’re trash, when we struggle with things and most don’t have many (or any) good friends to lean on. So of course they go to the alt right.
and the left just yells at us that we’re trash
I’m a millenial and I never got this. There must be a split somewhere when people fell into different echo chambers or algorhythms. Like 7 years go I used to frequent reddit subs like MGTOW and pussypassdenied, looking for something to connect to because of clinical single-ness. These were the only spaces I would find comments like that. On my other, left wing, socialist Internet spaces this wasn’t present. That is why those pro-men/anti-women subs never connected to me. The work on yourself, improve yourself and keep reading was great, but the insane amount of hatred and religion pushing was crazy.
Yet it feels like men in my situation these days don’t have alternatives. It’s sad when Andrew Tate is considered masculine. Terry Crews or Keanu Reeves are much better. Sure they’re not podcasters, but they give off a much better vibe.
It’s a shame that the space these men find themselves is pushing against freedom of expression for others.
there is no alternative to far-right echo chambers for young men to commiserate and get help
I feel like there’s an adjacent issue where any space like that without a clear political lean quickly gets pushed rightwards by shitters
ugh I remember my last straw on Facebook was my high school alumni group becoming a shit-storm of sea-lioning and a couple folks blocking people and also spamming nostalgia-posts to drown out and push down more serious discussion. A high school famous for it’s science-focus but alas, the older (but not much older) folks were openly commenting about that black-people-crime-percentage “statistic” and gay people.
If you want things to change, try having some empathy. Maybe you will get empathy for your problems in return.
Funny a man has said this twice this week. Women have higher EQ than men in general - how do you think they developed this?
Extending empathy to men is not what helps men feel empathy, though. That’s not how empathy is developed. If it was, movie actors and kings etc who have empathy extended to them constantly, would be the most empathetic people on the planet. Yet they are the least empathetic.
The thing that gets men to feel empathy, is the man feeling empathy. It’s like a mental weight - you have to choose to lift it. I can’t make you do that by rolemodeling. You have to actually take time and do the work. Actually sit down and think and perspective take without projecting or objectifying. Just radical acceptance. You have to do that work. Your comment asking women to once again bear your emotional burden of empathy is silly. We can’t. It’s a skill you gotta develop. And the sooner you do it instead of thinking it’s women’s work (which is why you just asked us women to be empathetic - our assumed role), the sooner the world is less shit.
And only then can you be truly caring, empathetic, or a feminist - by examining your own actions as a man. It’s great to allow men to have a sense of community outside of toxic masculinity, but this isn’t how men develop empathy or Feminism and that’s weird to phrase it like that,as if it’s valid for men to punish women by removing rights, voting for Trump, removing empathy, and not being prosocial. In fact, that’s quite controlling and abusive.
I once saw a gif on Reddit of a little girl being forcibly kissed by a little boy (both about 6), and she shoved him off and he looked sad. The entire thousands of comments focused on the little boy’s first rejection. No one even noticed it was the little girl’s first sexual assault. She even wiped the kiss off, reminiscent of victims cleaning themselves after assaults.
When I pointed this out, people were angry. How dare I suggest that little boy is a monster. But I wasn’t. I was entirely focused on the little girl’s experience and I wasn’t advocating for anything relating to the boy. In fact, I think an appropriate “punishment” would be to explain to him to not touch people without asking etc. And that’s it. I just wanted to see her experience and make sure she was okay. Her situation is more important and critical in this moment than the little boy’s. But these men heard ‘sexual assault,’ and instead of empathizing with the victim, they empathized with the assaulter, so much so they started defending him from a nonexistent attack. Do you not see the clear problem here? Do you see the issue?
But men were so unable to extend empathy to a girl, to a woman, that they literally couldn’t absorb this information or perspective take as her. It was impossible for them to imagine what she felt like. This was like 3 years ago. It was astonishing. No, men do NOT empathize with women. Men empathize with themselves as an idealized version of who they would be as a woman - that’s projection by definition and is entirely how they feel entitled to control women and objectify them.
They went for Trump by 2%. Calm the fuck down. Go after millennial men, we went for Trump by something like 10%.Gen X men went for Trump by 22%. And Boomers were actually better than X at 11%.
So if you want to go after someone go after Gen Z’s parents.
Would have been more than 11% but Trump killed a bunch of them off the first time around with COVID.
Holy shit you are fucking nazis, i can’t believe i fell for your guys lies
The main source of this recent trending fascism, anti-scientific thinking and so on is social media or the web in general. To resist or refute the mass of false information and find out what’s likely true and what’s not, requires education, literacy, media competency, things like that. I guess current generations are lacking this so they fall easy prey to “funny” fascist memes, fakes and rhetoric, then vote for rightwing extremists, destabilizing their own country as a result, not realizing that this leads to big disadvantages for everyone including themselves. We failed to protect these younger generations from misinformation, and now they are turning the world into what they are misled to believe is true.
We used to have relatively high living standards in the Western democracies. This will soon all crumble and we (most people who aren’t rich) will suffer from it, regardless of who you voted for. And on top of that, climate change will finish us all off, because battling that isn’t even on the radar for those fascists because they don’t even believe in it. So instead of doing too little, we’ll do literally zero and even accelerate the problem, meaning it’ll affect us all much sooner already and with higher intensity.
So enjoy your still existing relatively privileged life while it still lasts. It’s ging to get much, MUCH worse before it’s going to be better again. Buckle up and prepare yourselves.
map of climate change outcomes. 2.7 warming. Violet - unhabitableDo you have the source for this? I’d be interested in learning more, this is pretty useful imo
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6
Its heavily processed and prettified https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6/figures/15
Lemmy right now is saltier than the earth of Carthage after the Roman’s victory.
Are you surprised? America just voted away all its freedoms and democracy
There is no war but class war.
thumb war
The culture wars are about the class war indirectly. Women are famously the first large underclass, worse than workers who don’t own the means of production: workers who don’t even own themselves, workers who do a second shift at home which goes unpaid and unrecognized in pensions and healthcare.
Failure to understand how these are connected translates into failure to achieve solidarity.
Women asked for some basic goddamn respect and when they got “uppity”(because us men weren’t listening) they really got a “you were mean to me so I’m gunna elect Hitler again”. Millions of people alive today want women strip women of the rights they fought for and women are supposed to be polite about it?!
It’s crazy how weak they are and I’m sad sharing a gender with them.
More like men don’t want to elect someone who actively and publicly tells them they’re the problem based on a minority that believe those things
A not-insignificant number of men are the problem. Where are you seeing the democrats saying this so blatantly? I haven’t seen it yet and would love to know where it’s coming from.
It’s just right wing propaganda.
Because the Republicans succeeded at fully killing education. It’s dead.
Maybe because one political party despises them and wishes for “the bear”?
Stop being worse than a bear then
If you tell an entire group of people they’re evil and dangerous because of a small percentage of them how do you think that’s gonna affect their opinion of you and their self esteem
Trump seems to be targeting men with low self esteem and people who are afraid, which the left have played right into
Democrats really did not do themselves any favours by saying stuff like that in the same way trump didn’t do himself any favours by saying stuff about women
Its not that all of you are evil, but that any one of you could be evil. Big difference. Take my brother for example, who explicitly supports me, voted the same way, and is specifically asexual. I would obviously take him, or any man I know to be similar, over a bear. I know Ill be safe with them. But if I don’t get to choose the man, then yes, the bear is the safer option. At least with a bear, I know exactly how to proceed: make noise so it can avoid me, dont leave food out to not atteact it, pack bear spray in the worst case scenario. With a man, I dont know anything about them. And if theyre the minority that will actively hunt me, there’s not a whole lot I can do to deter them or defend myself the way I could with a bear.
On a similar note, if that effects your self esteem when youre clearly not part of the problem, thats a you issue.
Did not say my self esteem, nor that I support trump
I said that’s the group trump is targeting, and the democrats are making it too easy for him to win them over by pushing that same group away
I don’t think any good sentence has ever started with “it’s not that all of (group) are evil”
Fam, we cant outreach to people who hated us first
I hate my gender so fucking much. If every man in the US dropped dead on the 4th the world would be a better place.
Fuck you, I didn’t vote for the fucker eother.
Cool. But most men did. What’s our lives compared to the fucking planet?
How about we don’t punish millions of innocent people like a fucking lunatic and look at why this happened.
It’s not about punishment. It’s about what is best for the planet.
I disagree, you want to eradicate millions of people because some went against you. Not only that you are only targeting part of them, the men. Women shifted right just as much
No some. Most. And face it 50% of the population would rather deal with a bear then you what are you actually contributing to society to make up for that?
