Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers
“As soon as I mention feminism, you can feel the shift in the room; they’re shuffling in their seats.” Mike Nicholson holds workshops with teenage boys about the challenges of impending manhood. Standing up for the sisterhood, it seems, is the last thing on their minds.
When Nicholson says he is a feminist himself, “I can see them look at me, like, ‘I used to like you.’”
Once Nicholson, whose programme is called Progressive Masculinity, unpacks the fact that feminism means equal rights and opportunities for women, many of the boys with whom he works are won over.
“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,” he says.
But he is battling against what he calls a “dominance-based model” of masculinity. “These old-fashioned, regressive ideas are having a renaissance, through your masculinity influencers – your grifters, like Andrew Tate.”
Every single day I see a new reason why I am glad I pulled my daughter out of the hell that is public middle school and put her into online school.
She told me yesterday that boys got into fights in the hallways almost every week. There were definitely fights between kids my middle school, but usually not on school grounds, almost never during the school day, and not constantly for sure. This isn’t some low income, underfunded urban school, we’re in a small city in Indiana.
On top of that, the couple of friends my daughter had in that school vaped and smoked weed. They’re between 12 and 13. Sure, I tried a cigarette at 13, but one cigarette. I didn’t smoke weed until I was a junior in high school.
What the fuck is happening in our schools?
I just wish more parents, especially of girls, had the option to do what we did. We’re lucky that we can survive (just barely) on a single income.
Damn, only a fight every week? They’re daily at my kids’ middle school. And not just the boys.
Just be careful that you don’t “over protect” your daughter, and she ends up going off to college, and now with vastly more freedom and a spectrum of influence needs to “keep it on the rails”. I have seen home school kids lose their shit when that time comes, as they never had to negotiate the gradual increase in both that level of freedom and influences on the way. I think of it much like the Amish Rumspringa (“rite of passage”), in that they go from a sheltered version of the world, to a much wider open one.