I’m glad this issue is gaining broader international recognition.

The strategies we’ve used to address it online seem to have mostly forced it underground without actually stopping the spread. It’s not just a few dark corners of social media where you’ll find evidence of it, either. You’ll see it pretty regularly in some of the largest communities on Lemmy, and anywhere young men congregate.

As for how we fix it, ultimately I think the way we socialize our young people is long overdue a shift from highly gendered social role reinforcement to a more flexible empathy-centric value system. But for the young men who have already been radicalized, I think an obvious start would be deprogramming by offering them more positive masculine identities than the machismo currently served up by pop culture.

One approach could, for example, emphasize qualities that are already familiar aspects of that identity, such as responsibility to others, protecting the weak, serving a community, etc. Regardless of the approach, there’s power in expectation. IMHO the people most well-equipped to do this are the cis men of earlier generations, simply because they are who these boys instinctively look up to the most.

And if that describes you, it’s something you can start doing today by simply knowing what to look for and when to step in.

Valid point, I guess, but it’s not exactly the internet specifically that’s the source of the issue IMO. I’d say that people hating specific musicians whose music they don’t like/annoys them has been an issue for aeons, but it’s harder to completely escape their tunes now that it’s played practically everywhere 24/7 - mall PAs, the cell phones of people passing you in the street, etc.

The 'net is just the most recent forum to gripe about how annoying so-and-so’s music is, although in a sense it seems to have gotten more extreme in the vacuum provided by online forums. It would take quite a bit for a conversation about an annoying lutist, opera diva, etc. to escalate to plans for murder in the 1st-19th centuries by comparison, despite it presumably happening a few times probably.

Who could have predicted that constantly saying all men are trash could have negative impacts???

And to be clear in no way am excusing the behavior of people who respond in this fashion, but I can also understand how they ended up where they did.

I completely understand hating some people from any category of anything, but when you broadly blame ALL of a group you are absolutely going to alienate people who were either on your side or neutral. I think this is exactly what happened to a lot of guys. They were just sitting there minding. Their business and suddenly they are being told that they are inherently evil and shitty just because they are men. They hear it on the news and on social media. Pop culture takes a shit on them too once in awhile.

It doesn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to see how this could end up twisting around in the minds of some of them.

I don’t have the specific answers for how to combat this sort of stuff completely, but I think a good starting point would be to have more targeted criticisms as opposed to just going after an entire gender broadly. I think that has clearly done more damage for gender relations than it has helped anything so far.

Just my 2 cents as a guy who has seen some old friends who were once self proclaimed feminists now go full on into hating women. It’s sad to see.