Mushrooms

I don’t have any big answers, but just a small piece of advice: Don’t shame people for asking questions when they just want to learn.

I would think that’s the perfect opportunity to educate someone, but so many people will just down-vote a naive question and move on without explanation, which is even more confusing.

I’m speaking from my own experience. I still tend to be neutral on a lot of things so far, but my brain is kinda… unusual. I think most people might gradually feel pushed away, “othered”, etc. and eventually lean in the opposite political direction than you might want.

TL;DR: If you want people on your side, stop pushing them away. And maybe ask others on your side to stop too.

What you’ve described is every complaint I’ve had with centrists and neocons in the democratic party. I don’t really know where the progressive part comes in.

Bernie did amazing with men to the point where “bernie bros” were being mocked in media, so has Mamdani in NY in polls.

If anything, I would argue that the Democratic party should be more populist and progressive. Focusing on things that pull up everybody, because everyone is struggling right now.

Man it’s like the majority of people here don’t have ‘regular guy’ friends.

The way to get to regular dudes, is to make them feel fucking included. Yes, diversity is fucking awesome. Yes, having women in leadership roles is fucking awesome. But for your average guy… who do they have to look up to on the left side of things? In the news? In congress? Who is on the national stage for these things? Who is talking to those people?

There isn’t anyone. There are tons of people talking to other groups of people, but there has been flat out no courting of the white dude demographic outside of White Dudes for Harris (which was brilliant but came too late).

Speak to the issues these guys are facing. Talk about dating. Talk about career struggles. Talk about feeling alone, and feeling vulnerable. And then, talk about solution based problem-solving for these things.

Why do you think the right wing latched onto guys who do the whole personal betterment thing? It’s the same shit that white supremacist groups do. They’ll get you with things that anyone can agree with like ‘Hey man if you work hard you’ll succeed. I fucking believe in you when no one else will.’ Then they go into the right wing bullshit because now they have you at an emotional level.

There is no online left presence doing these things, and there are multiple right wing people doing this shit.

Make a left wing Joe Rogan, and bro-dudes will watch that shit like shit on velcro. But it has to be a dude-bro talking to them. It can’t be Rachel Maddow or AOC, it has to be someone who comes from that background.

I think a big part of the issues end up being economic. Things are obviously not great for a vast majority of middle and lower income people. You spend all day working your 1-3 jobs and in the background there’s all the culture war battles going on.

Few regular people have the mental space to even engage with the nuance required to navigate some progressive talking points when they can barely keep a roof over their heads. Toxic masculinity just turns into masculinity = toxic. You’ve lost these people, even if there’s an actually good message in there.

The Right is amazing at drawing a direct line between, “These are the problems we know you’re having” and “This is exactly what you can do about it today”. And for the Right, they actually deliver results. Do the kids turn into insufferable dickheads? Sure. But does the rhetoric sometimes get them what they want? Yeah, it does.

Where does the Left even come close? Almost everything is a delayed effect. Protest for a good cause? Wait to see if the politics catch up. Be nice to people? Great start, but that doesn’t help these guys get people-skills to have good platonic and romantic relationships. Be more open emotionally? What happens when your friends don’t accept that from you?

The Left is full of high risk, upfront demands from people who aren’t already affiliated with potentially little to no reward. Granted, the desired outcome is a better and more just society. But like, carrots and sticks people. You need something that regular people can get behind besides just ideology. Especially when mainstream media has a lock on those that are tuned out of progressive spaces and every now and then see something leak through from the culture war.

We need an actual vision for the future. Not a list of things we don’t like about the present, but what do we see people doing one day. If you don’t have a place for any group of people in your society, they will be indifferent if it burns. You can’t build a progressive future without having an actual, honest to God idea of what opportunities you can provide to legitimately everyone. If your best plan is, “Conservatives get with the program or rot in hell”, don’t be surprised when they take you down with them.

Young men are not some new phenomenon. Their desire, in a word, is agency.

As the world has grown more interconnected, the world has become more visible. This has created a crippling awareness of their place in the grand scheme. Nietzsche’s void has opened beneath them and, in the ignorance expected of youth, they grasp at what is presented to them. Selling hope to the desperate, even false hope, is lucrative, so there is no shortage of hucksters and charlatans offering it to them.

The ultimate problem is that there is no pleasant truth. When faced with the existential horror of being, the truth doesn’t help. You cannot focus on learning to be a better version of yourself when facing raw terror. A comforting lie will get you to tomorrow. Truth will send you to the long, dark night.

So, when offered a pretense of agency, in almost any form, they take it. Some pretend that the problem is simply women. Some say it’s other ‘races.’ Some say it’s this or that ideology, whether economic, social, sexual, psychological, or anything else. They all just want to feel like they can make a difference, just like everyone else.

A little out of the blue but I watched an episode of a German cooking show today where strangers are coupled in groups of five for a week and every day one of them has to cook for the rest of them. They then vote who was the best host.

This week was ALL 30-38 year-old straight Dads. Nobody talked about football.

Nobody chestbumped anyone. Nobody was mansplaning anything. Instead, they were all swooning over each others’ cooking skills, making each other cry over how much they love their kids and hugging each other for feeling insecure about their cooking. In other words it was the most realistic and “manly” portrayal of the male reality that I have seen in the media ever.

It’s easy to blame the media and the “culture war” for male alienation but I strongly believe that our perception of ourselves is largely influenced by our peer group’s portrayal in society. In other words: if I feel antagonized, I tend to overreact. If I am being told by Hollywood or social media to “stop being a mansplaning patriarch” I will be imprinted with the very idea to identify as such.

So long story short: non-toxic masculinity needs more representation AND it needs to come from a place of positivity, not judgement or condescension.

I’ve said it several times on Lemmy. The American left consists of:

• The DNC establishment, the Pelosis and Schumers of the world who are mostly in it for the insider trading. Their stance on issues falls somewhere between Hitler and Nixon, Israel is their #1 priority, and I’m not sure they care about the wellbeing of the average American citizen anymore than a typical seven-armed octopus does. This group holds all the political power of the “left.”

• The rainbow hair collective. The gay trans vegan gender blender ambiguously brown righteous indignation victim complex crowd. Amongst them they agree on very little, there’s actually a significant amount of infighting, basically the only thing that unites them is their mutual hatred of straight white men. This group wields basically no political power; they’re nominally represented by Ocasio-Cortez in the House and Sanders in the Senate and that is literally it. But, this is the cohort has a lot of control over the party’s campaigning and messaging, and they’ve also basically got control of Hollywood.

The result of this is the DNC’s messaging is often centered around identity politics. There was that meme floating around that read:

“Can we have some help?”

🐘 - No.

🫏 - No. #BLM #🌈

Which…sums it up. Neither party will vote to help the citizens at large but the Democrats will pay empty lip service to the non-white and non-male.

During the Harris campaign, there was a pretty big emphasis on finding a straight white preferably Southern male running mate for Harris. My own state’s lame duck governor, Roy Cooper, was mentioned, before it went to midwesterner Tim Walz. They then proceeded to have this straight white man cosplay as…the caricature of a straight white man acceptable to the gender studies majors in charge. Remember the live stream of him doing some repair task to a classic pickup truck?

Everything I heard about Tim Walz was good. I distinctly remember reading about some of the student athletes he coached talking about how much they liked him. Everything they showed me about him was as cringe worthy as Ghostbusters 2016. Harris herself was caught on an open mic acknowledging that they weren’t going to win the election without men, and then they came out with the “I’m man enough to vote for a woman” campaign. Because the people they got to write the commercials just couldn’t fucking help themselves.

I held my nose and voted Harris. Because while I’m unabashedly vocally critical of feminists and the rest of the identity politics left, I’m very much not a Retard Nazi. The Identity Politics left will accuse me of being a Retard Nazi because I score less than a 110% on their purity test, but I’ve voted in every election since 2008 and I haven’t cast a vote for any Republican in my life. That’s not good enough for the voice of the Democrats. Nothing in the universe can be.

Just…keep yelling at teenage boys that the last 300+ years of history which they had no possible way to impact was their personal fault. That’ll start working one of these decades.

Talk about issues that affect the working class. Not the white working class, not working class men, just everyone who makes a living by drawing a wage. Progressive movements are formed by solidarity, and we have more in common with other working class people than any of the politicians or business leaders who set the tone of this debate.

Promote and get behind actual progressive candidates, not corporatist shills like Hillary or Kamala. I like Kshama Sawant because she calls shit like she sees it.

Reclaim patriotism. Republicans love to wrap themselves in the flag, progressives need to do the same thing. It’s just a piece of the whole, but seeing pics of the LA protests with Mexican flags flying - that doesn’t help bring American voters to a cause.

Look at what men are missing and how the right is selling it to them.

Men aren’t doing so hot right now, emotionally and mentally. They feel like they are not manly, and criticized for trying to be manly or liking manly things. There’s a lack of transitions into manhood, and the bar that is seen as a successful man with a good career is pretty much impossible.

If you have a poor paying job, you’re not manly. If you have a well paying job but it’s blue collar you’re not manly because you’re a dumb working stiff. If you have a white collar job you’re not manly because you’re not doing anything tough with your body. Maybe if you’re a CEO who owns the company but also does rock climbing and bear fighting are you seen as manly enough, maybe.

Then you have these guys, your Andrew Tates and so on, who act very manly and tell you it’s ok to be a man and then spout off some of the most toxic, asinine shit saying that’s how you be a man. And young guys fall for it because they aren’t shown any alternative.

Then on the left you have people who speak ill of men as a whole, and manliness as a whole. Sometimes the criticisms are correct, but a lot of times it’s presented as men overall. If you try to say that it’s not every man out there who’s a monster, you get blasted with criticism for saying “not all men”. They also don’t provide anything positive or solutions for feeling manly, with the best they can be offered is to be more like women.

So young men, especially young cishet men, are actively pushed away from leftist spaces, leaving them feeling demonized by those spaces, and actively pandered to by the right which are offering mind poison dressed up as solutions.

So what do we do? There’s a few things to fix.

1. leftist media has to stop demonizing men and start demonizing actions. Instead of saying “men are rapists” start saying “rapists are bad”. When people start to say things like “cis people are shit” other people need to call them out of it, because if you’re supposed to be the side that accepts people’s gender identity, it should be for all gender identities. It can feel cathartic to rail against the majority demographic, especially when people of that demographic have hurt you, but if you feel that it’s unfair to rail against a group because of the actions of a few members of it, that should apply to all groups. Things like “what’s wrong with the straights” doesn’t help build bonds with allies, and it turns young men away from leftist spaces.

2. there needs to be validation and recognition from the left for problems men have, like suicide, workplace death and heavier prison sentencing. The left needs to show that they are trying to fix these problems, too, instead of telling young men to suck it up and be a man about it because they are the oppressor demographic.

3. there needs to be people who counter toxic masculinity, not with telling men to be more like women, but with positive masculinity. If a man is having emotional or mental problems, toxic masculinity says to push that down. Femininity says it’s ok to be soft and vulnerable. Positive masculinity would say that a real man is true to himself and his feelings and expresses then freely, even if others might ridicule him for it. There’s a subtle difference, and the end result of femininity’s and positive masculinity’s tactic might be the same, i.e. the man expresses those feelings, but the way that they get there is very different. The former makes the man feel less validated in his identity, while the latter uplifts it. The memes where they say stuff like “I always tell my homies I love them before they go to bed” actually work.

4. leftist influencers need to make fighting for the rights of minorities seem manly. Badass. Like a hero. Worthy of praise and celebration.

5. while they won’t get the financial and political backing that the toxic male influencers get, there needs to be positive male influencers who talk about masculinity in a positive way, while promoting the ideas above. There needs to be an alternative, who acts manly but in the fun, positive way, that validates young men’s feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and isolation, while promoting an egalitarian perspective.

6. there needs to be a cultural shift in what makes a man. A shift away from dying in battle or becoming a tycoon, and a resurgence of the working class hero. Mass media itself needs to change and promote positive male figures. It can work and be popular, like in Avatar the Last Airbender. We need to show men that they are still men, and still worthy of love, respect and adoration, even if they aren’t a super soldier or a wealthy elite. A lot of this is counter to capitalistic goals, so it may have to be subversive, but eventually it needs to be made the norm.

7. other men need to continue to step up and speak out about injustice towards minorities and against toxic masculinity behaviors in the day to day, and start decrying those behaviors as unmanly. People need to call Andrew Tate and the like unmanly.

8. ideally, the men’s rights movement should be absorbed by the left and the toxic incels kicked out. It should be done in the name of gender equality. Fixing only woman’s problems won’t solve the patriarchy (which could be changed to a different term so everyone feels like it’s less of an us vs them) and feminists should try to help solve men’s problems directly rather than indirectly. Young men would see feminism as more appealing if feminists actually focused on men’s problems as well, rather than ignoring or worse, demonizing them. Feminism could be rebranded as an egalitarian movement for all sexes and genders, maybe get a name change. If the patriarchy affects everyone, then the focus should be on everyone. Maybe it would have to be a whole new movement entirely.

So it’s a larger problem than just getting more leftist male influencers, and some of those problems are systematic. Some can get worked on today. Talking about masculinity in a positive way, promotive equity, stop both their side and your side from bigotry, and, probably the thing that would get young men on board the most:

Actually trying to solve the problems young men are going through.

Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.

If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.

Quit trying to make young white men feel guilty for existing. I come from poor white trash. As near as I can tell, my family never benefitted from slavery in any possible way. So fuck you. I dont feel bad about something I didn’t do, no one in my family did, and we aint gonna pay for it.

Education. You will never be able to explain taxes in a way that can counter propaganda if the person is an idiot. You just won’t. And until then it’s an uphill battle.