It’s great to see that there are young men who are actively looking for alternatives to the kinds of masculinities displayed online (I’m a teenager who was lured into the manosphere. Here’s how to reach young men like me, 2 November). But to me, Josh Sargent’s article is about more than just the manosphere. It’s about the platforms that facilitate it, and how social media diverts attention away from things like reading and toward things that largely don’t matter. Josh says it himself: “in fairness, short-form content is slightly more engaging than Macbeth quotation flashcards”. That’s truly worrying.
It’s true that the education system can and should do better, but I also think we need reminding that young people have always felt alienated from the education system. They have always been disillusioned, with feelings of being ignored and misunderstood, and I think many young men today forget that. It isn’t just them. John Hughes made an entire career of writing about disillusioned youth and the pressures to conform to expectations around masculinity and femininity (women have long endured the pressures of not being “feminine” enough, of “failing” as mothers, as women etc). It’s taken a long time for alternatives to emerge, and we’re still not there yet. So what frustrates me most about the idea of toxic masculinity is that (some) men think that their trials are somehow unique, so they lash out at women.
