Boys and men from generation Z are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good, according to research that shows a “real risk of fractious division among this coming generation”.

On feminism, 16% of gen Z males felt it had done more harm than good. Among over-60s the figure was 13%.

The figures emerged from Ipsos polling for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. The research also found that 37% of men aged 16 to 29 consider “toxic masculinity” an unhelpful phrase, roughly double the number of young women who don’t like it.

“This is a new and unusual generational pattern,” said Prof Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute. “Normally, it tends to be the case that younger generations are consistently more comfortable with emerging social norms, as they grew up with these as a natural part of their lives.”

Link to study: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/masculinity-and-womens-equality-study-finds-emerging-gender-divide-in-young-peoples-attitudes

  • kescusay@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Seriously doubt this (and most polling these days). Gen Z is particularly unlikely to respond to polls or answer unknown callers in general. Until those issues in polling are solved, I take them with a grain of salt.

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        That’s an interesting thing to note. If the people more likely to approve of Tate and his message are the ones looking for easy money then that could indicate a degree of selection bias.

        • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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          The existence and popularity of people like Tate and toxic dating strategy shit might be an indication of how Gen Z is handling misogyny. It’s possible Gen Z hasn’t been exposed to misogyny in such heavy doses as the rest of us. Seeing your peers undervalued and objectified could sort of be an inoculation. There also might be a perquisite strong belief in equality component.

          For things like feminism, the battle is never over. Insidious ideals like misogyny needs to be constantly kept in check.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        Your first link disagrees with the article you posted…

        And while younger people overall have a more favourable view of this phrase, there is a big gender divide in views among them: 37% of men aged 16 to 29 say “toxic masculinity” is an unhelpful phrase, roughly double the 19% of young women who feel this way. Correspondingly, young women (47%) are considerably more likely than young men (29%) – or any other age category – to find it a helpful term.

        By contrast, views among older age groups vary less by gender – although older men are more likely than younger men to say “toxic masculinity” is an unhelpful term.

        It sounds like the only change is you get women are more supportive of feminism than older women…

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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            Looked at the pdf …

            The public think the oldest group of men are most likely to believe equal opportunities for women have gone too far – but it is actually men aged 30 to 59 men who are more likely to feel this way47% of the public think older men aged 60+ are most likely to believe attempts to give women equal opportunities have gone too far – the top answer given. But in reality, 20% of men aged 30 to 59 hold this view, compared with 13% of men aged 60+.

            For 16-29, it’s 5%

            So yeah, still not sure why you’re using a string of different articles, but they don’t agree with you main post bud…

              • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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                Thank!

                I saw the survey was just British respondents, but I didn’t know that question was specifically about British culture…

                Sorry, it’s really hard to follow all the omissions and misrepresentations a survey went thru to get to the post you decided should be the main one.

                But yeah, older people are going to remember what it was like 40 years ago and can see the good feminism has done.

                A teenager would have know first hand knowledge how bad it was even a decade ago.

    • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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      There are multiple studies showing the same thing. Denying it isn’t going to change anything.

      • stoly@lemmy.world
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        That is NOT what they are saying. They are suggesting that the methodology may have been wrong, which is a perfectly reasonable question that EVERY person should ask themselves EVERY SINGLE TIME they hear about a study releasing results.

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    The wording here is really important. We don’t know how masculinity and feminism are being defined here.

    Stuff that began with “woman’s suffrage” are honored by people in this age group. They think it’s normal women vote, have jobs, leave the house etc. Some of this stuff probably isn’t even “feminism” to them but just “normal.”

    Remember that these guys are on social media a lot more than us and see those words misued frequently for click bait, etc.

    • BluesF@lemmy.world
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      But that misuse of the word is harming the overall cause. It’s not like the need for feminism has evaporated, although it has surely evolved, and if young men think it’s harmful… Even if what they think is harmful is not an accurate representation of what feminism is, they aren’t going to be supporters of what it actually is if it has the name attached.

      Maybe it is time for a new movement with a new name.

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        I suppose that could work. I do know several religious women who wouldn’t identify as feminists but still believe in abortion, etc (remember that not all religious people are white supremacist Protestants). The word may have fell out of favor but honestly it’s the idea that matter anyways.

        If I have to take a guess, perhaps there is a base woman’s suffrage that is now universal and now feminism is now used by the younger generation to be what was considered “feminist extremism” by us. Words do change, it happens.

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      I’m really happy you commented this. “normal” reflects norms.

      Part of any generational attitude divide is the base conditions aka norms. When a change / progress is made, it sets those norms.

      It’s normal for my generation that people wear seat belts and don’t smoke in pubs, that women have extensive varied careers and dads don’t beat their kids. It wasn’t for the generation before me.

      It’s not normal for men of my generation to talk openly and confidently about their sexuality and mental health. Yet that seems to be normal for some of the younger generations, and I envy that.

      I find that the easiest way to tap into the generational norms is to listen to comedy. It often represents the edge of what is considered acceptable, because comedy does play with that edge.

      It’s amusing to see the pitchforks come out for comedians where they’re judged for edgy content from 25 years ago and society has moved on a bit. Amusing because most of this judgement seems to happen online, and thus is a permanent record, so in 25 years time we’ll have a bunch of embarrassed mid 40s people trying to explain their cruelty to an unsympathetic younger generation. “you weren’t there, man! You don’t understand!”

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      Watching from country, where even 70 years ago everyone voted(although single-candidate elections are shit), everyone worked, state provided daycare for all children and my grandma worked as loader in shop because she had to work somewhere like everyone else had to, it is bizzare what shitshow happens 4 km to the east of my country.

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    I can’t say I’m surprised that people like Andrew Tate, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro have gained quite the social media following. Society has failed a lot of young men, and the oligarchy that controls our world has a lot to answer for.

    Men are disproportionately affected by a lot of the socioeconomic issues currently plaguing the Western world because despite decades of progress towards creating an egalitarian society, men are the ones who are negatively impacted if they cannot provide. Look at the US and how judicial decisions on child custody and alimony are heavily favoured towards women as a very good example of this.

    And before you dispute me on this notion, can you offer any other explanation for why the biggest role model for a lot of teenage boys is some bloomy rind dick cheese who looks like a spitting image of the Stonks meme guy?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      I can’t say I’m surprised that people like Andrew Tate, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro have gained quite the social media following.

      I can. Their content sucks. It’s whiny and boring and utterly tasteless. Tate’s an absolute skeez. Crowder has zero swag. Peterson is an incoherent puddle. And Ben Shapiro… well… just come on, wtf is this?

      And before you dispute me on this notion, can you offer any other explanation for why the biggest role model for a lot of teenage boys is some bloomy rind dick cheese who looks like a spitting image of the Stonks meme guy?

      Because that’s half of what YouTube / Twitch / Netflix / et al serves up anymore. These people are the dregs of modern media, but they and their promoters are everywhere. Its the same way that AM radio is the endless cesspool of senile racists whining about scary foreigners and Daytime TV is washed up fashion models pretending to have the secret to fame, fortune, and eternal youth. The lowest common denominator of mass media is overflowing with gross, juvenile bullshit.

      And when you simply cannot escape the morass of filth, that’s going to affect you one way or another.

    • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world
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      Because their content is controversial, thus driving engagement, thus being favored by the algorithms of many social media platforms. I still get recommended some of their garbage on YouTube, despite never having watched anything remotely similar to it.

      Younger people tend to be easier to influence, and they often lack the experience to smell bullshit. And the more people hear something, the more likely they are to believe it.

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      Childless men don’t have a stake in child custody, visitation, child support or spousal support so that can’t be it.

      I used to be sympathetic to these types of arguments until I actually gained relevant experience with the formula that gets used to calculate family support.

      I have to assume you’re talking about Andrew Tate. Pretty much everyone who ever pushed cryptocurrency as part of their social media sponsorships I assume is or was on the Russian take. We experienced the same exact type of messaging in 2014-2015 about how unfair life is for men when women are by default responsible for raising and providing for kids if Dad skips town or otherwise leaves the picture.

    • Kittengineer@lemmy.world
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      It’s easy to get a following by fostering fear and hate. Literally just blame and vilify a group and blame them for all the problems your target audience has.

      I do agree males are disproportionately impacted by certain things… look at prison, suicide, etc. but I also think feminism would correct that. I’m a truly equal society, men wouldn’t bare the brute of the stress of financial support, for example. I also think in a truly equal society, the notion that men chase women goes away. People are just out there trying to find love and/or happiness.

      If you have that, a lot of the symptoms you mentioned, where men are disproportionately affected go away.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        but I also think feminism would correct that

        Maybe if feminism paid more than lip service to men’s problems, I would believe that. Instead, whenever feminists are confronted with men’s problems, the response is usually along the lines of “men should sort that out themselves”.

        Feminism is fundamentally not concerned with equity. It’s concerned with advancing the status of women. Historically, since women have been so discriminated against, that’s been functionally the same thing. But that’s less true now.

    • uienia@lemmy.world
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      Men are disproportionately affected by a lot of the socioeconomic issues currently plaguing the Western world

      Absolute nonsense. But good job exemplifying the segment the article is talking about by regurgitating that imaginary talking point.

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    Feminism has 100% turned into a push for superiority, not equality.

    Modern feminists believe it’s “their turn” to be the abusers.

    Just listen to the disparaging jokes we’ve all heard them make towards men and imagine how they would react if the same things were said about women.

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    I think a big part of the problem is that, among younger Americans especially, both men and women that refer to themselves as feminists conflate it with benevolent sexism, and not the same sets of social rules for both genders.

    Benevolent sexism is a tough concept to swallow for men. It means respecting and practicing the old mores men practiced with women, with none of the toxic expectations. Things like expectations of men being the breadwinners, running to get the door, etc aren’t compatible with a desire for equality, especially when correctly rejecting the trade-offs those perks used to be tied to.

    The first waves of feminism cleared the way, but in having done so, the newest generation of women are asking “but why don’t I get these cool perks I heard about” and men are answering “because we no longer get the social power that facilitated that cool stuff.”

    Everything is trade offs.

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      Some years ago I was waiting for a bus, there were four of us and as the bus arrived we lined up behind the man who had got to the bus stop first. He looked behind him as the bus arrived, let out a large sigh, rolled his eyes and moved to the side, motioning for us women to board first. Not wanting to slow the bus down, i boarded silently whilst he muttered ‘move it’ at us. Was that you?

      The male propensity to play the victim is quite imaginitive.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    To be fair—they’re asking people to judge the effect of a movement, but only one of the groups remembers what things were like before the movement. It could just be that more gen Zers honestly don’t know the answer.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    Is this just a cyclical thing that will swing back and forth like a pendulum? Feminism surges for a few years, following a big sort of zeitgeist-defining event (#metoo being the recent one), but then it sort of just gets taken for granted, attention lags, and a quasi counter-feminist movement emerges that pushes back against that. Have we had this happen before in the past few decades? I feel like recently at least I’ve seen a lot more men online bemoan the fact that nobody is paying attention to their inner-world. It’s not even men bringing up or attacking feminism as a problem, I feel like more of the arguments are careful not to go there, more that society in general just doesn’t care that much about men’s emotional world. I would assume that along with that, you’d have some men pushing back against feminism or as seeing it as having over-extended itself.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    The problem is the so called Third Wave Feminism, which is far too often just middle and high-middle class women trying to obtain special benefits for themselves by claimimg the whole group they were born into “is a victim” (even though they themselves were born into and are amongst the most priviledged 1% of people in the World) and hence “must be compensated” in some way which is discriminatory against all those not in the group and which is invariably in a form that is mainly usefull for middle class and high-middle class well educated women in well-of western nations. Hence things like Quotas or the practice of Benevolent Mascism in power situations such as in Court (for example the whole gender-discriminatory idea that the Mother should be prefered as the custodian of children when a couple separates).

    This is generally neither fair, nor equal (you know, the whole judge and treat people based on what they do, not based on the genetics they were born with) and even has zero positive effects for the vast majority of women out there who aren’t the well-of scions of well-of families in well-of countries: you get loud noises about the “glass ceiling” that stops well-of women from maximizing their income from being in the upper classes, not about the 3000% difference in incomes between those above said glass chieling such as corporate CEOs and the average worker, which includes most women.

    This shit isn’t Leftwing, it’s just a “make believe leftie” facet of “Greed is good” Neoliberal Capitalism: personal upside maximization hidden behind “the group” so that it doesn’t just look like naked greed, hence why you see this mostly supported by Liberals in Anglo-Saxon nations, not traditional Lefties.

    Previous generations of Feminism (and those who still now fight for Equality and Fairness) are the ones who are deserving of tremendous respect and support, not these pampered, priviledged, greedy people who happen to have been born with 2 X cromossomes and who want to maintain the discriminatory and prejudiced treatment of people base on the genetics they were born with, as long as theirs is the group getting benefited by that discrimination.

    It’s thus not surprising that amongst those who are not in the groups that benefits form the discrimination these people defend and are exposed to this highly moralistic variance of greed is good, grow negative about it. The thing is made even worse in the US because Politics ther is entirelly in the Moral space (people have no genuine choice on how the Economics is managed in that country since both sides of the Power Duopoly do the same in that field) so you end up with equally pro-descrimination groups on the other side, who just differ in who gets favoured by said discriminationand face off against these, muddling the whole “equality” domain.

    It’s pretty hard to find a space if you’re genuinelly pro-Equality and pro-Fairness and not be confuse by either side of selfish fucker as being in the other side of selfish fuckers.

    • uis@lemmy.world
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      Just remembered article about working in foreign company(I think it was on habr and I think it was in Intel, but it could be anything else) where they had something along the lines “diversity list” which is list of race of employee. So america’s answer to racism is more racism.

      in Anglo-Saxon nations

      I think brits support it the least. It is more North-American thing.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        I’ve lived in Britain and I suspect it’s actually worse over there because the dominant culture of the middle and upper classes in that country is what in most other nations would be seen as fakeness and hypocrisy, the higher the class the worse it gets.

        People from the outside aren’t really aware of what’s behind “posh” and “gentleman”: let’s just say that not only is it entirelly fake (it’s all about saying what others expect and doing so in a certain style), but the dominant interpersonal relationship style in the upper class can only be described as slimy two-faced adversarial, which isn’t at all healthy IMHO.

        Certainly a lot of what I wrote is based on observations and discussions I had in Britain and British discussion forums, all informed by my experience before that living in The Netherlands, a far more equalitarian country with a culture which is significantly different (to illustrate it, let me just point out that 2 decades ago Pim Furtijn - the leader of the largest far right party in The Netherlands - was very openly gay. In which other country in the World would the far-right thinking not include aversion to homosexuality??!)

    • CharAhNalaar@lemmy.world
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      Replace “woman” with “Black” in this rant and it sounds just like someone trying to make reparations look bad by strawmanning its supporters.

      I agree that neoliberal capitalism has (largely successfully) used feminism as a way to distract from society’s real problems. But this ain’t it.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        You can just as easilly replace “women” there with “the arian race” and suddenly find out that my post is a critique of the social side of Nazism that would apply even before they started exterminating people when all their messaging was about “protecting the arian race”.

        If you’re deeming people worthy/victims or unworthy/aggressors merelly on their genetics rather than on their actions and what they support, you’re part of the problem because you’re being prejudiced rather than fair - by judging people on externally visible genetic differences you end up de facto protecting bad people when they have the genetics of those you deem victims and treating badly good people when they have the genetics of those you deem agressors.

        It doesn’t matter what “genetically defined group” you put in there because there will always be good people and bad people amongst them and if they can the bad people in that group will do exactly what the bad people amongst Feminists are doing: use the goodwill of others who see the world in an oversimplified prejudiced way, to maximize personal upsides, and along with them drag many from the neutral middle who see an opportunity for personal gain, so they gladly jump on the bandwagon.

        (In simple terms, every group of people defined by things that have nothing to do with their actual actions, contains assholes and lots of people who will easilly turn into one if they come out better of by doing so).

        That’s why one fights actual actions of unequal and/or unfair treatmente and do so no matter the “genetic makeup” of the victim and the aggressor - it’s the acts themselves that are wrong, not the chromossomes with externally visible expressions of the victims and aggressors.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      I am seriously disgusted that there are more upvotes than downvotes to your comment.

      • deranger@lemmy.world
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        Why? I see comments claiming the commenter to be hateful but nothing addressing what he actually said.

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    Considering the kind of feminists that are extremely loud today, and how they’re borderline, if not literally, misandrist… I’m not entirely surprised.

    This, of course, leaves them wide open to suggestion from bad actors like Andrew Tate.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      LOL people have vomited precisely what you just said for 100 years on this subject. Of course, 100 years ago, they were using the police to torture women who wanted to vote, so maybe there is progress.

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        No, no they didn’t. But hey, who am I to expect current day militant brainlets to be educated in history?

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            It’s always funny when people who propagate a certain detrimental idealogy cry about being personally attacked.

            You are the problem. Of course you’re getting personally attacked.

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    > makes games shitty because reasons

    > makes game developers to suicide

    > Gen Z play games more than baby boomers

    I wonder why…

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    Yeah I saw this over on Mastodon, and there were a lot of stats folks questioning the methodology. I’m not qualified to do that, but my sons are Zoomers as are all their male friends, and they are all good feminists. This is in NW Europe, so might be a bit biased.

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    “1/5th of one quarter of the small group of men who participated in one survey that was only taken in a single country know who Andrew Tate is and approve of him, thus all GenZ men hate feminism”

    This article is a fucking joke