I keep seeing posts mentioning this phenomenon more and more often.

For instance:

More and more men are being sucked into parts of the internet that circulate misogynist content, leaving their families to deal with the wreckage

‘Andrew Tate phenomena’ surges in schools - with boys refusing to talk to female teacher

Like, why? Why now? Why even? I really wish I had a time machine where I could go to the future and ask them what the general reasons were for this social development. But I feel like I’m looking for the specific thorn on a cactus that popped my balloon.

  • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
    3·
    23 hours ago

    I feel the same way. I find it near miraculous I didn’t fall into the trap that’s being sold to young men these days.

    I’m hesitant to share too much of my own story, but it makes me feel real sympathy for the guys being ridiculed for following Tate and such. I know the leaders are garbage, but its hard to not feel attacked when I hear the general internet lashing out at the followers for being ensnared.

    I know what its like to be young and dumb, to be told you have so much potential, but then to also feel direction-less and like a loser.

    I know the leaders are charlatans that are selling snake oil…but I don’t know what to tell these guys to get them unhooked from that crowd.

    • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
      3·
      22 hours ago

      I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

      Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

      Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

      Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

      I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

    • witnessbolt@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Haha I tried to be… mostly vague

      I’m not sure either. It’s really hard for me to come up with things since it took a breakup for me to WANT to change, and of course I’m lucky that it’s for the positive.

      I really hope it doesn’t take such powerful inciting incidents for a significant portion of them to change how they feel.