muscovyduck
Good IT skills and food hygiene competent
The problem is, if you're a woman and you get good at fighting, you're going to find people keep trying to throw you back in the bear pit for their own ends or amusement
Men’s violence against women and girls is a national emergency
- Thread starter ElizabethofYork
- Start date
story
Changing the facts
Intervening when things get lairy in public is obviously a big vexed issue and needs discussion.
But again, I’m trying to pull it back to the other more tricky discussion about what we do about the more subtle stuff.
What about the normal everyday interactions. Should we intervene there? If we’re out as a group of couples should we intervene when we think things look like they’re going wrong? How? If we think a mate isn’t doing well, or behaving well, inside their relationship how do we get involved without being an interfering busybody?
Is it even our business?
What about of we see them raising kids in a way that looks problematic (eg “boys will be boys etc”)
What about the stuff that happens at home in normal relationships. How do we examine and parse the way we divide housework, dominate the remote control etc. Of our relationship is “good enough” do we still need to do this work?
What about the daily grind of this stuff?
How do men and women recognise the way we all contribute to it? How do we take that apart in ways that are thoughtful, useful, co-creative?
But again, I’m trying to pull it back to the other more tricky discussion about what we do about the more subtle stuff.
What about the normal everyday interactions. Should we intervene there? If we’re out as a group of couples should we intervene when we think things look like they’re going wrong? How? If we think a mate isn’t doing well, or behaving well, inside their relationship how do we get involved without being an interfering busybody?
Is it even our business?
What about of we see them raising kids in a way that looks problematic (eg “boys will be boys etc”)
What about the stuff that happens at home in normal relationships. How do we examine and parse the way we divide housework, dominate the remote control etc. Of our relationship is “good enough” do we still need to do this work?
What about the daily grind of this stuff?
How do men and women recognise the way we all contribute to it? How do we take that apart in ways that are thoughtful, useful, co-creative?
InArduisFouette
Well-Known Member
it's more the manner of participation, such as one poster coming in and suggesting that teaching women and girls MMA or some other in vogue chop socky was the solution, then we have an equally new obviously male poster jumping to their defence and flagging off a multiply marginalised woman who iphas a relevant professional and personal background....
Derek S-H
Klaatu. Barada. Nikto.
To be honest, it's all rather typical.
This Thread has featured calls for men to be more proactive in their attitudes and behaviour around women, both publicly and privately. And when you do, you're then accused of not doing so for the right reasons.
I'm a member of an ethnic minority. There are similarities in terms of discrimination, hatred, stereotyping and being marginalised with misogyny. You speak to any ethnic minority and a huge percentage will say they've had an experience of racism at some point in their lives (I have).
I think a solution is integration, not segregation, so people can realise they have far more in common than differences. I love seeing Black and White people together, I love seeing Mixed-Race couples and I think men should have far more female friends and vice-versa.
We can all learn from each other in real life, not just academic texts or studies.
Derek S-H
Klaatu. Barada. Nikto.
The personal relationship stuff is quite interesting.
I have female friends, colleagues and bosses and get on well with everyone. But I haven't had a personal relationship for a long time as it nearly always seems to descend into some sort of power struggle, and I simply can't be bothered with any of that. I'm more than happy to share responsibility for anything and support anyone, but I'm really not interested in endless conflict in my personal life.
I’ll add to that thoughtful list: and what if your partner (male or female) doesn’t want to engage in the reflective attitude and challenge the common-sense norms? If they stick with the banal ways that the domination is reproduced. Relationship systems take (at least) two people to make them.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
This is often the way with young boys, they'll talk a lot of shit and quote people like Tate as role models but you'll also see that they've got that fundamental kindness to them where they'd never actually do anything cruel or abusive, and quite the opposite would look to protect those more vulnerable than they were.
But I'm also aware that that's what I'd like to believe about everyone, and that I won't always be right. I can sometimes spot the boys that are maybe more at risk of going a bad way, usually the ones with dogshit fathers and troubled home lives generally, but the truth of it is you don't know.
A lot of what we can do as teachers is reactive, not proactive. We can model kindness and empathy but you can't really teach those things, particularly to kids who come from an environment where they're not valued things. And I'm not just thinking about your deprived and broken homes here, lots of wealthier families are severely lacking in empathy and kindness. Which is hardly surprising when you think about the sort of behaviour that is rewarded by our society; grasping at whatever you want and trampling over other people to get it.
One thing we can do is try and foster self-respect in boys. Tell them well done when they've got something right. Try and get them to acknowledge their own virtues and take a beat now and then to see themselves as being actually worth something. Because I do think a lot of crimes against vulnerable people come from a place of fear and a sense of inadequacy. I don't deserve this loving partner and she'll figure that out sooner or later so I need to make sure she doesn't leave. I'm a piece of shit so she's probably cheating on me because why wouldn't she? I doubt this is ever a conscious thought process but I think it's there in a lot of cases.
As always with this stuff I'm guessing a bit because it seems so alien to me, the idea of being violent to anyone I care about. But then again it's maybe not that far away from my own experience. If you're a man, or any kind of human at all, you know what anger and fear and weakness feel like. You know what kind of actions those feelings can lead you to if you allow them to take over.
Rational thought takes longer than emotional reaction, which is important if you're dodging predators in the savannah but a liability for us in a complex society mostly devoid of existential threats. That is not something that is on the school curriculum. The fact that there can be a gap between stimulus and response in which you can make a choice is something I often find myself explaining to students, particularly boys. They often look at me like I'm mad, like this the first time anyone has told them that they can make choices.
Rompipalle
“Mad as hell & I’m not going to take this anymore”
Sorry but I’m struggling to make complete sense out of this post - maybe partly due to what appear to be typos but I’m not sure.
What is chop socky?
I worked with a particular male teacher who transformed the lives of teenage male students. He was an amazing teacher. He "got" to them. He built self esteem in them through activities. Sports. Running. Music. Performance. And he talked to them ... really talked. Listened..to them. Challenged them. He became a father figure in their lives.
He definitely worked harder and longer than other teachers. He made them part of a family ... in his classroom. Sadly he passed away too young. But I have no doubt his impact has changed their lives and the lives of everyone they become close to.
He was a rarity in teaching in that the curriculum for him was secondary to the personal development of these teenagers.
zedr
new but not *that* new
This is something I’m finding very difficult in schools at the moment.
There doesn’t seem to be one solution, but a myriad. Schools and teachers aren’t often given the time to be able to try and work out what those are in their specific contexts, and often don’t have deep relationships with home to be able to understand what’s going on in individual kids’ lives. And even if they do, often home doesn’t often know what’s going on either.
One thing we’re trying to do where I work is promoting the idea of therapy and self reflection. A few years ago we noticed a few 12 year olds getting quite stubbornly into the manosphere, rejecting therapeutic support and claiming they didn’t need help because they weren’t ‘broken’. We have done lessons, PHSE sessions and 1-2-1 support to try and break this down and a few of this group have accepted therapeutic support (though I has taken some big outbursts and a few punched walls!). They’re quite a dominant group, and we’re hoping that this leads to a bit of a culture shift, where talking about feelings, looking out for one another is seen as a positive thing for their year group and the wider school community.
The Sex Education (Relationships and Sex Education) course we have designed looks at (as well as all the classic things) social power dynamics in forming, maintaining and ending relationships. We were concerned by the classic manosphere response to rejection being defensiveness and potentially violence and abuse, so facilitated discussions between the students to encourage them to empathise with why rejection can be difficult, discomforting but also sometimes necessary and how to cope with it.
I think teenage boys feel a huge amount of shame and insecurity. I’ve noticed a trend of boys going to the gym to build muscle from very young ages (12/13). I was speaking with some teacher friends at the weekend who were complaining about boys not taking off their coats/jumpers/hoodies in the sweltering heat and i wonder if this is also a body image thing for them. Its only something i’ve noticed in the past few years but wouldn’t be surprised. As has been said upthread, Tate and that lot are a symptom, but a very powerful one, and one which harnesses the shame of boys and turns it into something vile and violent.
One of the newer stances i’ve learnt about this year is the male anti-pornography sentiment. That masturbating is unclean and porn is for ‘weak’ ‘betas’. This also often goes hand in hand with homophobic and transphobic bigotry and is (from my experience) expressed by those who are most likely to be using pornography and with very low self esteem. This is one of the reasons we’ve been working so hard on increasing the positive framing for therapy, and trying to support the boys (in particular, but other students as well) to talk to their friends about how they feel, and to hold one another to account when they fuck up.
Another aggravating factor I’ve noticed is undiagnosed/unsupported learning needs and mental health. The young men who express these thoughts loudly and (seemingly) confidently in my context have a lot of unmet needs either at home, at school or both. As always, funding for proper support is desperately needed, but I can’t seen the new government putting anywhere near enough money into this.
There is also the societal level and all the stuff we can’t control in school. The content on the internet can be bad, but I think that’s a bit of a cop out. I grew up with those awful comedy panel shows normalising people like Russel Brand, and Little Britain normalising racism, misogyny and transphobia. We didn’t have the option to like or share it online, but we’d endlessly repeat the jokes in the playground or when together. In some ways that feels worse. This is one of the things I don’t feel I know how to deal with. I hope all the stuff we do in school helps people to check/critique what they consume, but that’s not always going to be possible. There is no magic bullet. To all the men on here who have acted shocked or as though they aren’t the problem: it’s all of our problems. It has been time for men to sort our shit out for a long time. We have the tools and resources available, and we can create our own for our specific contexts.
I’ve posted it here before, but a few years back I was part of a men’s group discussing this, and how men could respond. We used resources from the 80s through to nowadays. It was uncomfortable and occasionally confronting, but also very powerful and productive. It helped a lot of us begin some deep unlearning and self reflection, whilst also being open about shame we felt. The resources are here and I’d encourage people to have a look through.
There doesn’t seem to be one solution, but a myriad. Schools and teachers aren’t often given the time to be able to try and work out what those are in their specific contexts, and often don’t have deep relationships with home to be able to understand what’s going on in individual kids’ lives. And even if they do, often home doesn’t often know what’s going on either.
One thing we’re trying to do where I work is promoting the idea of therapy and self reflection. A few years ago we noticed a few 12 year olds getting quite stubbornly into the manosphere, rejecting therapeutic support and claiming they didn’t need help because they weren’t ‘broken’. We have done lessons, PHSE sessions and 1-2-1 support to try and break this down and a few of this group have accepted therapeutic support (though I has taken some big outbursts and a few punched walls!). They’re quite a dominant group, and we’re hoping that this leads to a bit of a culture shift, where talking about feelings, looking out for one another is seen as a positive thing for their year group and the wider school community.
The Sex Education (Relationships and Sex Education) course we have designed looks at (as well as all the classic things) social power dynamics in forming, maintaining and ending relationships. We were concerned by the classic manosphere response to rejection being defensiveness and potentially violence and abuse, so facilitated discussions between the students to encourage them to empathise with why rejection can be difficult, discomforting but also sometimes necessary and how to cope with it.
I think teenage boys feel a huge amount of shame and insecurity. I’ve noticed a trend of boys going to the gym to build muscle from very young ages (12/13). I was speaking with some teacher friends at the weekend who were complaining about boys not taking off their coats/jumpers/hoodies in the sweltering heat and i wonder if this is also a body image thing for them. Its only something i’ve noticed in the past few years but wouldn’t be surprised. As has been said upthread, Tate and that lot are a symptom, but a very powerful one, and one which harnesses the shame of boys and turns it into something vile and violent.
One of the newer stances i’ve learnt about this year is the male anti-pornography sentiment. That masturbating is unclean and porn is for ‘weak’ ‘betas’. This also often goes hand in hand with homophobic and transphobic bigotry and is (from my experience) expressed by those who are most likely to be using pornography and with very low self esteem. This is one of the reasons we’ve been working so hard on increasing the positive framing for therapy, and trying to support the boys (in particular, but other students as well) to talk to their friends about how they feel, and to hold one another to account when they fuck up.
Another aggravating factor I’ve noticed is undiagnosed/unsupported learning needs and mental health. The young men who express these thoughts loudly and (seemingly) confidently in my context have a lot of unmet needs either at home, at school or both. As always, funding for proper support is desperately needed, but I can’t seen the new government putting anywhere near enough money into this.
There is also the societal level and all the stuff we can’t control in school. The content on the internet can be bad, but I think that’s a bit of a cop out. I grew up with those awful comedy panel shows normalising people like Russel Brand, and Little Britain normalising racism, misogyny and transphobia. We didn’t have the option to like or share it online, but we’d endlessly repeat the jokes in the playground or when together. In some ways that feels worse. This is one of the things I don’t feel I know how to deal with. I hope all the stuff we do in school helps people to check/critique what they consume, but that’s not always going to be possible. There is no magic bullet. To all the men on here who have acted shocked or as though they aren’t the problem: it’s all of our problems. It has been time for men to sort our shit out for a long time. We have the tools and resources available, and we can create our own for our specific contexts.
I’ve posted it here before, but a few years back I was part of a men’s group discussing this, and how men could respond. We used resources from the 80s through to nowadays. It was uncomfortable and occasionally confronting, but also very powerful and productive. It helped a lot of us begin some deep unlearning and self reflection, whilst also being open about shame we felt. The resources are here and I’d encourage people to have a look through.
zedr
new but not *that* new
Listening I think is such a key thing. I think a lot of teenage boys feel so powerless yet are told they hold all this power. Which, they do in some ways but don’t in many other ways. One of my frustrations with certain liberal approaches to talking about patriarchy in schools has been to ‘teach’ it, rather than explore it. So instead of telling boys they’re more powerful (when most of them don’t feel that way at all) and just have to control themselves, exploring the ways it negatively impacts everyone, and how to collectively take responsibility to shift that culture.
Skinny Ethel
Well-Known Member
The one thing i think we all agree on is i'm wonderful.
I've always said this. It doesn't ever go down very well, the posts that get the likes are the ones that talk about entitlement and 'the patriarchy' because anything that tries to get under the apparent 'entitlement' is seen as letting men off or blaming women or women being the solution because there's a need to understand men, again. And I understand that. But I work as a therapist, sometimes with boys who've been abused by both fathers and mothers, and it doesn't make sense to me to not look under the surface of these things, how can we not? 'Entitlement' is something built into economic and social relationships, but it can also be a psychological defence against feeling small and not a masculine enough boy/ man. Without looking at the research, I'm fairly sure that paranoia and feelings of humiliation have been found to be drivers in male violence, so we need to look at where does that come from on a social level.
trashpony
Hag
There’s a real disconnect between the lived experience of most teenage boys - a world in which girls seemingly hold all the power both sexually and academically- and adulthood where the tables are turned.
Navigating them through that in a way that doesn’t turn them into bitter incels in a world which is flooded not just by Tate and co but social media, porn and all the other malign influences feels really hard.
That says I’m encouraged by how kind and considerate my son and his friends are to one another. They talk a lot.
Navigating them through that in a way that doesn’t turn them into bitter incels in a world which is flooded not just by Tate and co but social media, porn and all the other malign influences feels really hard.
That says I’m encouraged by how kind and considerate my son and his friends are to one another. They talk a lot.
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equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
It seems to be a generalisation referring to martial arts. Why they couldn't have said 'martial arts' instead of that quite dismissive and quite frankly bordering on racist term I don't know.Sorry but I’m struggling to make complete sense out of this post - maybe partly due to what appear to be typos but I’m not sure.
What is chop socky?
I was trained to work with very traumatised young people but I don't think its my special training that's most helpful, its that I like the boys I work with and I'm interested in their experiences and they sense that. I don't think boys get a lot of that.
I'm having a bit of a crisis in my work currently but the strength of psychoanalytic therapy is that it acknowledges conflicts as the basis of emotional difficulty. In schools having some input into group work is where I think we would be really helpful.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
It certainly doesn't assist them in making the point, and like you, I felt there was something quite pejorative about the term.
zedr
new but not *that* new
More therapeutic training for teaching staff would be wonderful imo. Or specialists coming in to deliver training/support with young people. Can’t see it being rolled out any time in the new future though :/
I found that the move towards behaviourist, zero tolerance punishment in schools has has a negative impact on building positive, healthy, listening and respectful relationships between teachers and students. In my previous school I didn’t have much chance to build those relationships, we were just encouraged to punish poor behaviour. Those kids you did take the time to listen to really valued it, but we were so squeezed for time in other ways it was very hard to maintain the relationship.
There is also the issue of home not caring and with the manosphere actively encouraging.
I've noticed this. The jumper thing can be quite extreme. Multiple laters no matter how bloody hot it gets and yes a lot of it is down to body image. Self harm is also ever increasing.
There is I think a genuine repulsion among some for the way women are treated in porn. Maybe it starts as the beta thing and then they look it up and find other negatives. This wouldn't mean they don't use it and that would likely lead to more shame.
100%
I touched on this as well. TV has been full of this crap as long as I can remember. I think as well girls are exposed to this stuff. I remember struggling as a teen as girls seemed to like a lot of the people on TV who were shits coming out with sexist crap. Same with lads at school. I'd say something I'd read somewhere or positive I'd seen (my brother in law was quite involved in housework, bringing the kids up etc which I didn't see a lot of elsewhere) and get laughed at by both boys and girls. If I said something shitty I'd seen on TV or something similar (I had a gift for repackaging shitty humour tbf) I'd get laughed with. It could seem like the worst behaviour would be rewarded.
Rompipalle
“Mad as hell & I’m not going to take this anymore”
Thank you. I don't think I would ever have guessed what is was... not least because afterwards I wondered if the "in vogue" bit before it was part of the same concept.
These policies are violent ime, psychologically violent and very damaging.
The problem with 'therapeutic' approaches is that they're introduced in the context of mental health prevention and I think that MH framework makes things worse, as well as encouraging the idea that these are individual psychological problems. But I think psychodynamically informed thinking in schools would be great. Not a focus on trauma (which is how everyone sees us unfortunately) but being able to help thinking about relationships and conflict.
zedr
new but not *that* new
The Relationships and Sex Education courses? They’re statutory (though parents can remove kids from sessions specifically about sex). The ones I helped design were in collaboration with some academics and targeted at KS3 (Year 7-9).
If you mean the men’s group, it was a group of loosely connected people who knew one another from punk shows in London (and then friends of friends).
e2a, sorry, just reread the post, and it was the men’s course! There were plans to rerun it, with people who’d taken part in it the first time facilitating it, and inviting more people in. Quite possibly something to start up again.
ElizabethofYork
Old Crone
As a multiply marginalised woman, it's a shame you feel the need to bully and ridicule other women here. And chop socky sounds somewhat racist.
This is a big issue IME. This is also connected to what you say elsewhere about learning difficulties being missed. I have heard "there is nothing wrong with me." A lot.
Like so much it is worth persevering, challenging, suggesting and supporting. You will often get ignored, a load of abuse or dismissed for your efforts but that doesn't mean they haven't heard. You'll quite often hear something a few weeks or months down the road that seems very familiar.
LakieLady
Well-Known Member
From what I hear from friends in teaching, the demands of the curriculum have become all-important, and made supporting personal development near impossible.
Yes.. it's gone crazy. There was scope to be creative in the past but now everything is itemised and targets are very much set. A lot more paperwork too.
My colleague was a brilliant teacher. Managed to cover the curriculum in his own way by making it more relevant to the teenagers we worked with and be there for them as a mentor, listener, counsellor ... He was never someone who just stuck to the bottom line.
Callie
Pivoting
Massive downside to social media. Now boys can be constantly bombarded by imagery and advice about appearance, health, firness and this is incredibly harmful.
We haven't learned...have we
Girls have dealt with this for so long. Even before social media the pressure on girls to look and act certain ways was huge.
It's just so wrong. And now boys are getting the same.
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