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Notes -
Society vs Male Radicalisation II - Male Role Models/Surely This Time Our Plan Will Work
I was on the internet this week, and I found this:
Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny
It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager. The Labour Party, the UK's apparent next government, has come up with policy to reduce the influence of Andrew Tate among schoolboys with the intended aim of safeguarding women and girls. It means to do this by creating counter role models to whom boys can look up to. This would not even the utterly embarrasing 30 year old boomers trying to guess what resonates with children, but would consist instead of older volunteer boys taken from within the same school. This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.
Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining. This betrays a complete lack of understanding about why men choose the role models they do and how they attempt to emulate them. These role models are deliberately or implicitly chosen as role models for young men by people who aren't young men often because they display qualities that are useful, rather than valued, to society. This is because almost all policy dreamt up by institutions concerning Men and Boys is not to their benefit, but instead to neuter a perceived threat against Women, Girls and the wider society. For every Marcus Rashford, there are multiple Mason Greenwoods or Kurt Zoumas who continue to receive all the signifiers of male success and receive no punishment for any of their transgressions.
It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society. This is in direct contrast to what young men want, which is to be outspoken, to be popular with women, to be socially and economically successful. No role model ever produced or selected by the state could manage this, particularly not when operating under the notion that it must maintain women's liberation, which itself requires the stifling of men. I question for how much longer this approach will be kept in place. There are hundreds of people like Andrew Tate across SM, each ready to teach boys what society is unable to teach them. Educators can more easily dispel Tate because of the sex trafficking offences and because Tate himself is a clown, but people like Hamza, whose lived experience is much closer to the boys he is trying to proselytize to than that of Tate's, they have no counterargument.
The obvious problem is that boys will ultimately reject the role models given by the school whether fictional or real or other children. Boys want to become men and they have a strong bias against boys or man-babies who are not real men. And this is why they aren’t gravitating to liberal adult male role models (and the boys who will be selected for the program) — they are not anything like a man.
The role of man is pretty specific: self-possessed, strong both physically and mentally, responsible, self-confident, a leader, and so on. Liberal men are simply not like this. They’re meek, weak, u confident and quite often suffer from anxiety or depression, often while barely being able to support themselves. None of that is going to capture the attention of a boy looking to find someone to make a man of him.
I personally think this is how the supposed pipeline works. Boys are looking for a man to teach them to be men. The left doesn’t have them, but the right does. So it’s easy to get a boy to follow conservatives because their men are men in the capable and self-assured sense that boys want to be, thus the boy becomes conservative as a result of the influence of men he wants to be like.
I profoundly disagree with this statement as written, but I suspect this is not a real disagreement. Boys don't want men as role models - they want older boys (edging into young men as they get older), who they perceive as manly. This is based on my experience of being a boy, teaching boys, and being a father of boys. Someone who is more than 10 years older than me is a poor role model for that reason alone (this applies less to historical and public figures whose youth is well-documented - in that case your role model can be the Great Man when he was younger). The institutions which are best at turning boys into men (traditional boys' schools and the military) work on this principle.
All of this is helpful at the margins, but in a healthy male-dominated community, prowess is necessary and sufficient. Boys and young men respect people who are good at something they value. A huge part of the role of the teachers (and particularly the younger teachers who are the right age to be role models to the older boys) at a traditional boys' school is to maintain a culture that values the right things - academics, athletics, fieldcraft (developed through the cadet corps or through adventurous school trips), male-coded fine arts, effective public speaking. Sensitive new-age guys and nerds who were high status in my school included the virtuoso solo cellist in the school orchestra, an internationally competitive fencer, two geniuses who won national competitions in their subjects, and the guy who repaired hi-fi equipment to a professional standard using the school workshop.
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