I will say it’s very easy to accept that victim attitude. I did. I don’t any longer, I’d consider myself a humanist with the belief we need to make society better for everyone.
I’m going to whine for a bit, I’m in my mid 30s now, and when I was in high school social media was new and Facebook was pretty much at its peak. I don’t know what growing up is like for kids these days, but I do know my 11 year old nephew is like the kids in the article and he knows all about “red-pill” alpha/beta/sigma shit (but not how incorrect it is).
As a teenager it felt like being a white straight male meant I was being pushed backwards to make room for helping push women forward (I saw felt like because sometimes how somethings feels outweighs reality).
As an example, to pay for university I went through lists of scholarships and almost all of them were focused on minorities and women, and so I was ineligible. I worked 30+ hours a week after school school and I worked really hard to get up to an A average so that I could get some scholarships to help afford tuition (and I still ended up with debt). It was a really tough time and I was filled with fear about the future. At the time I felt that that I had to put in more effort to get less than my peers did because I was a straight white boy. My girlfriend at the time ended up getting so many scholarships and bursaries that she could afford her tuition, and her residence, and fun money leftover, and she never had to take on any debt to pay for her even more expensive university. I only got one scholarship (not for lack of trying) based on my grade cutoff, and I ended up taking on debt which took years to pay off. It felt very unfair by comparison, and I know her experience did not reflect the average, but that’s what I saw as my comparison.
I also was a frequent 4chan user at the time, I joined for the memes, but there was a lot of commentary about how the education system had been changed to favour girls and that when it was more adversarial boys performed better. By then the statistics had already swung so that more girls were getting accepted into university, and they were more likely to graduate. I still have no idea how true the things I read on 4chan were vs reality, they definitely excluded the narrative of sexism against women in the old days, but they felt real, they matched with real statistics, and it was a cohesive narrative. I got sucked in, and I was bitter, and I saw all the ways in which I was the victim.
Obviously I never experienced any of the downsides of being a minority or being a woman. I never got the perspective of why things were harder for them and why they deserved help. I only saw there was help for them while I was struggling to keep afloat. I only saw the still present expectations on men to be providers, all the bad sides of patriarchy without knowing what patriarchy was (except meaning male and bad). Also at the time, there was stuff like anti-rape pledges that schools were making boys take, and it sorta felt like being treated like a criminal for crimes you knew you would never commit.
Anyways, I’ve meandered a lot. The discourse has evolved but I still don’t think men’s issues get the discussion they need, and I don’t think we’ve seriously focused much effort on the question of “how do we help boys too”.
Now that alarm bells are ringing and it feels like we’re still not adequately discussing men’s issues, and sadly it feels like the only people who actually are, are those alt-right red-pill influencers (who are massively warping the truth to fit a narrative) because they’re not afraid to get labelled over it.
And just to sign off, over 15 years after high school I now see a lot of the privilege I actually had, I’m more aware of the realities minorities and women face, and I know I was a whiny teenager with blinders on to all of the benefits and luck I actually had.