I think Spooky Frank is spot on that young men are increasingly economically insecure and lonely and that manifests in different ways.
Young people (men in particular) are much less likely to meet someone, form a lasting relationship and have children than previous generations.
Something went wrong somewhere and the young generation have been screwed over. The other thing is much more interaction now takes place online and I feel like it's harder for young men to have normal interactions with young women that aren't filtered through apps/algorithms.
<lots to take in here but I'll save you the pain of writing another doorstopper and mostly do a Me, Too!>
I work with a probably disproportionate amount of twenty-somethings (of the geeky kind) - almost universally amongst the ones I've spoken to about it, they find it incredibly hard to meet other people socially, with almost everything that could be construed as dating only occurring through the chaperone of The Apps. It's frequently despised - putting yourself across genuinely over t'internet is difficult at the best of times, and nigh impossible in what has become a competitive environment with people feeling they need to have the doctored photos, the right make-up, the right filters and the right amount of superficiality, don't tell people about X, lie and say you've done Y, else they'll be ignored by the rest of the herd... and then you've got the companies running the apps either looking to tweak your matches to try and make as much money as possible from you, and/or mine more of your intimate personal data to sell. I swear if I was their age now I'd be having conniptions about it all. A lot of them are a bit lonely and find the whole situation depressing, but don't see any viable alternative than to play along with what they're told to do.
FWIW I don't actually know what sort of crap that Tate and co spout besides catching the headlines in the papers (I don't do much interwebs outside of technical stuff, it's largely all too horrible) but I did lose a colleague and one-time friend to the manosphere about fifteen years ago and had to cut all contact with him. Triggered by a move to another country followed by a divorce (and ensuing loneliness, drunkenness and too much time spent on the internet whilst being in a bad place psychologically, economically and geographically) he went full throttle on hatred of all women, to the extent that's all he could ever talk about.
Other comments about economic insecurity and social media are probably the biggest factors currently I think; the first is fertile ground for divide and conquer, us vs. them, etc - it always has been - so any mantra that can get a toe-hold has a good chance of becoming much stronger. Post-2008 the world's become a fairly terrifying place economically, perhaps especially in the first world, and that
always ushers in a period of social conservatism, to varying degrees of extremity.
The second means that thanks to the power of the internet, what might have previously been a tiny clique of fuckwits that would have died of natural causes can link up with all the other tiny cliques of fuckwits, to the point that it can become big enough to be self-reinforcing and culty and ultimately self-sustaining. I reminds me of the Babel fish - "by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, it has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation". The same can and does happen with tiny cliques of nice people too of course - I'd wager the present-day awareness and general acceptance of the LGBT community is another side of the internet coin that became a force for good.
Like most cultural phenomenons, I suspect (and hope) that Tate and his ilk are largely a pendulum, swinging one way until it becomes so extreme as to encounter a reactionary movement that over time sends the pendulum swinging vaguely back in the opposite direction.
Whilst there are good points being made, I am finding myself thinking back to
hitmouse ’s post about the huge age gap in the data and thinking a) what percentage of men aged in the middle have these views (not necessarily about Tate but all the other stuff), and b) what percentage would my generation have had if they’d been polled aged 16-29? Point being is there’s always been a sizeable group of men with dodgy views of/behaviour towards women, and there’s been a backlash against feminism since it began. Not saying that it isn’t increasing, I’m just wondering by how much.
I'm not sure it'd be possible to accurately extrapolate this given the difference in the economic and cultural climates between the generations (not to mention regional differences); it's possible that the same proportion of men have always had these thoughts (I've certainly met my fair share of anti-feminist men of every generation) but it's only when they feel "safe" or "justified" enough to do so that they display it outwardly, and in varying forms, and that's a factor largely beyond their direct control. Certainly (well, according to my mum anyway), in the second-wave-feminism period of the 60s/70s there were plenty of men who started to champion feminism because they thought it just meant a form of sexual liberation in which all women would be sluts and sleep with them... and turned in to rabid anti-feminists when they found out it didn't mean that at all. How would they answer the question even if they were even capable of understanding and answering it honestly?
