Nothing Stands In Your Way When You're A Boy

It was outside a haunted trail, with the last tendrils of sunlight illuminating the faces of the zombies trundling around a roaring fire pit, that I heard my son and his friends talking about sexism. 

Trying to be a good dad and stay out of my kid’s business as he socialized with his buddies before paying approximately one bitcoin to enter the haunted forest, I perked up at the sexism talk and stopped scrolling my phone. I took a few steps toward the sixth grade boys without drawing their suspicion and listened to talk about sex-based discrimination – an unexpected topic after talk of “no scope kills” on Fortnite and “giga chad jawlines” and "skibidi toilet" on the car ride to the forest. I had never felt older.

These boys and their enlightened talk of sexism, I thought. How wonderful that they’re identifying a problem that has festered for so long, a problem that, when merely pointed out by women a decade ago, left American men no choice but to elect a lifelong, unrepentant sex criminal to the White House. 

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Oh, how the human race is evolving, I thought for a fleeting moment. How much hope we might have in this young generation, so much better than the fascism-curious older Zoomers. These intellectual babies speaking so high mindedly of discrimination that permeates the culture.  Then I heard them accusing a teacher of sexism against the boys in her class and I wanted to jump headfirst into the fire pit. 

My son and his friends said a teacher that day had called out a group of boys (including them, I assume) for talking during class when, per the boys, girls in the classroom were also making noise and carrying on, things of that nature. This, they said, was a pattern: Targeting disruptive boys and ignoring the disruption of the class’s various talkative girls. 

Not wanting to immediately alienate them, I asked if they had in fact been disruptive. They said yes, they were laughing and a couple boys kept whispering after the teacher had asked for silence. The girls though, they cried. The girls were laughing too and did not draw the teacher’s ire. The boys decried a deeply unfair system perpetuated by a deeply sexist teacher who dared use her power in the classroom to target and oppress the class’s male population. They were subjects of a boy-hating regime bent on silencing any and all male voices while girls enjoyed their unimpinged freedom. These boys, my son concluded, were nothing short of political prisoners within their own middle school. 

First of all, I said as calmly as possible, shut it. You sound like idiots. In no way are you being oppressed, in no way are your rights being violated, and if you didn’t want your teacher to tell you to be quiet, you should have simply shut your mouths. I told them I was certain that girls in their middle school did not enjoy any freedoms or privileges that the boys did not, and that girls were not permitted to be disruptive during class. Maybe, I suggested, the girls were not repeat offenders, making a goddamn ruckus every three minutes while the teacher tried to conduct class. Perhaps they weren’t being as loud as you pre-teen caveboys and your hooting and hollering and cracking adolescent voices. 

Through their protestations and whataboutisms, I told these little boys that they never faced, nor will they ever face, actual sex-based discrimination in the United States or elsewhere. I know this is disappointing to you, I said, because being a victim justifies being an asshat and acting the way you want to act (like an asshat). Like any dominant group that uses bad faith to position themselves as the victims, not the aggressors, these boys – and they’re surely not alone – desperately wanted a reason to keep acting the way they were acting. They needed the girls in their class to be part of some grand conspiracy – in concert with their oppressive female teacher – to keep the boys down. Because, they figured (subconsciously), those aggrieved by discrimination and prejudice could justify any and all behavior. 

I didn’t give them an inch. As the bonfire raged and some dopey zombie with an eye hanging out of its skull tried to get my attention, I told my son and his friends that they had not been victimized, and they would never be victimized for being boys, or eventually men. They seemed deflated. It was time to file into the woods and have chainsaw-wielding actors chase us around a maze of bloody horrors. 

Fashy Zoomer Dudes: A Worldwide Phenomenon

I wrote a month before Donald Trump won a second presidential term that Gen Z voters, particularly bros, were leaning hard into fascist politics, if the numbers were to be believed. I cited polling crosstabs showing zoomer men favoring the fascist candidate by startling margins, and was immediately and vociferously chastised by folks on Bluesky whose entire personality is based on distrusting polling crosstabs. 

These were mostly millennials and Gen-Xers telling me that there was no indication young men – guys born in the late 90s and early 2000s – preferred the fascist candidate over the pro-democracy candidate. Critics argued in tremendous levels of bad faith that my piece excused zoomers who were ready and willing to put Trump back in power after he tried and failed to overthrow the American government in 2021. These furious millennials pointed out that other generations had also faced struggles and did not abandon representative democracy. That fascism was not on the ballot for those generations was never acknowledged for whatever reason. 

I was surprised by the backlash to the BFT piece on zoomer dudes going fash. Of course they’re going fash: These fellas have been inhaling the most toxic cultural fumes in human history for their entire lives. They have been dipped headfirst into a manosphere media culture that pulsates with violent misogyny and virulent racism designed to both generate self loathing and deep insecurity within men and numb them to the experiences and struggles of women and folks of color and LGBTQ people. These guys were made into fascist stormtroopers sitting behind their keyboards in mommy’s basement long before the 2024 election cycle rolled around. 

Raising Men in the Manosphere

The date was April 28, 2009. I didn’t realize it at the time but this would be the date my life truly began. I wasn’t there for the birth of my oldest son, who is technically my stepson though I’ve never seen a difference between the two. At the

Bad Faith TimesAnthony Reimer

I take no pleasure in reporting this is not exclusively an American phenomenon. Young men worldwide are embracing fascist politics, as the Financial Times reported. The young dudes in Germany and the United Kingdom and South Korea are becoming more and more right wing as the women in their cohort become progressively more progressive. To answer a question you might have in reviewing this data: No, this is not normal. Men and women of previous generations had not seen this sort of extreme political bifurcation as they grew up (this is especially true for millennial guys, from the only good generation in human history). 

In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany, where today’s under-30s are more opposed to immigration than their elders, and have shifted towards the far-right AfD in recent years.

It’s not all that difficult to understand why women in these countries are becoming more liberal in their politics while the boys with whom they grow up become hardened fascists. Guys born 20 or 25 years ago were promised the same thing as men born 40 or 50 or 70 years ago: Total domination of the culture, women served up as products to be consumed, good-paying jobs that are simply given to them after college, and unchallenged dominion over their spouse and children. 

Women’s changing roles – they can have credit cards and driver’s licenses now! – and capital’s corrosive effects on working people meant these guys could never even dream of what they believed had been promised to them at birth. They are brimming with resentment about life not turning out the way they believed it should have. The expansion of human rights and the proliferation of cultural liberalism are the worst things that ever happened to them, or so they’re told by Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and others in the manosphere paid handsomely to turn young men into the darkest versions of themselves. 

Heaven loves ya, these young guys were told. The clouds part for ya, they were promised. Nothing stands in your way when you’re a boy. 

Young men’s open embrace of fascism naturally dings marriage rates and birthrates since no one can possibly love a fashy little unbathed troll sitting behind a computer 18 hours a day, whining endlessly about how the world has done them wrong, ingesting the internet poison meant to make them weak and scared and, yes, full of resentment toward women and society and, naturally, the vast left-wing conspiracy that kept from from claiming the power and riches they were meant to have. 

These guys are told by malignant, brainworm-ridden cultural forces they were meant to be Roman soldiers with chiseled eight-pack abs with women fawning all over them as they destroyed their various enemies and ate and drank with glee at the feast of a life of domination, of unbridled happiness. Instead, they’re jobless and in a basement watching unseemly amounts of porn, touching exactly zero blades of grass, and eating the shittiest food the world has to offer, wondering why they have not claimed the glories of their fathers and grandfathers before them. Where are these glories? Who has hidden them from me? Maybe they're in the next depraved porn video. It's worth a click.

Woe is me, they cry out in one zoomer voice. What have I done to deserve such a cruel fate, they cry out, clicking on another fascist YouTube video telling them the cure for their inner pain is to lash out against the women who refuse to love them. These guys are promised a return to the glory they have never known through sheer force of wishing it will be so. They are told they will dominate the world once again if only they keep voting for fascists. It’s a dirty little trick, and they keep falling for it. What they are not told is that life requires effort. That might mean exiting mother's basement.

Zoomer dudes are furious that society has not coddled them. They are a weak and fragile and easily influenced cohort with no mind of their own, even as so many position themselves as Free Thinkers, whatever the fuck that means. 

Maybe mommy didn’t tell them they were her special boy. Maybe daddy didn’t show them how to be a man, to take responsibility and put forth a little effort in one’s social and work life. I understand I sound like a goddamn boomer wagging his finger at the young folks who just don’t get it. And I get that it’s way cooler not to care about any of this. Unfortunately we have to care about internet-poisoned young men – men grotesquely chanting, “Your body, my choice” at young women – opposing multiracial democracy in frightening numbers. I would say we have no choice but to care. 

That people’s formative political experiences often shape the rest of their political lives isn't the best news for the world if it hopes to overcome the radicalization of Gen Z and shore up democracies in the face of such horrid politics. And I don’t have the answers for how these men can be de-radicalized in the coming years barring some sort of internet regulation regime that could never come to be in the western world. 

All we can do is talk to these guys, to tell them to find a group of humans with whom to hang out in real life, to read a goddamn fucking book once in a while, to go on a motherfucking walk. This falls on millennial men more than anyone else, since Gen X-ers are too far gone down the fascist rabbit hole to be of much help. If you know a zoomer being influenced by bad actors on the internet, talk to him. I tried to engage with my son and his preteen friends around a bonfire back in late October, and though I’m not sure it will count for much as counter-programming to the far-right messaging on their favored social media channels, it felt good and right to make eye contact with them and say no, you are not a victim of sexism, nor will you ever be a victim of sexism. 

It felt right to tell them not to project their anger and fear onto everyone and everything else, but to look within. To be a man. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social