Trump isn’t an icon of positive masculinity. He also did very little for young men during his four years as president

  • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 months ago

    Nor does half the country. I just don’t understand why trump appeals to young men at all. He’s just some horrifically uncool geezer.

    • aramis87@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      Because all of the aggrieved male content on yt, TikTok, podcasts, etc. There’s an entire normie-to-nazi pipeline ffs, and the social media algorithms continually promote stuff that’s just slightly more “edgy”, and suddenly kids have gone from Joe Rogan to Andrew Tate. Because all of the white males behind social media - spez, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc - agree with that content and continue to find excuses to “free speech” it.

      • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        Pair that with white males feeling entitled to things (mostly money, women, and even friends) and society currently being set up to keep them away from those things. They’re rightfully angry, it’s just their anger is being directed at the wrong things.

        • futatorius@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Society isn’t set up to keep them away from anything: that’s paranoid rationalization. They’re just shit at relating to people and lack discipline and intelligence. Once you make the empowering realization that the world doesn’t owe you a fucking thing, you have a realistic starting point. Blaming other people, or “society,” is just an excuse for inaction.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Yeah, when white men do the shit that people who are successful and not white men do they often find themselves among us. Not always, but nobody gets perfect odds

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Those boys should put in more work getting laid. And that’s only a partial joke.

        The incel thing drags them in, step 1 into the pipe. The can’t get laid, must be something going on they can’t put their finger on, but that thing is damned sure someone else’s fault.

        “I’m white, OK looking and I’m a nice guy!” The unspoken question, the unthought question, is, “What happened to my privilege?” For past generations, life seemed to work out well enough for white guys, but it sure as hell isn’t working out for me!

        Demographic shift has been wild in my lifetime. Too young to have experienced this, they get a feeling that something nebulous has changed, for the worse. They see minorities of all stripes stepping onto a more level playing field and then tune into YouTubers saying, “Yes! Now you get it! The other is the thing you didn’t realize was holding you down!” Well god damn, now it all makes sense!

        Back to getting laid, the fun part. Nothing like a good screw to smooth those rejected feels. You’re wanted, wanted as a man. But if they think going hard-right is going to land them some pussy, oh boy… The few women in that scene are strictly for the alphas! Your beta ass won’t even get scraps.

        Dated quite a bit couple of years back. That was an education. Few women had political statements in their profiles, but many wrote something akin to, “I’m not interested in politics.”, often followed by a lovey, flowery sentence to lighten the mood. Men: This is code for, “Don’t come at me with your Trump bullshit.” Yes, apparently guys often pull that horsepucky on the first date. These woman are screening for conservatives, they ain’t gonna hear it. Talking on the phone to a potential date (who I ended up dating for a few months!),

        “(laughing) Yeah, I’m a bit of a redneck.”

        Silence. Wrong thing to say there, buckaroo.

        “…uh, just how redneck?”

        “I loathe Trump if that’s what you’re getting at.”

        “Oh, whew! Just checking, can’t be too careful these days.”

        tl;dr: We need to get the word out to these young men, “This crap you’re watching is anathema to getting laid.”

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I cannot emphasize enough to men: nobody wants to hear how overarmed someone pursuing them is.

          But seriously, the right wing loves to imply that “real men” are right wing and that women want a “real man”. And the left can’t really counter the first part because “real man” is a concept rooted in patriarchal expectations and is partly associated with real jackasses. But the second part we only have an unsatisfying answer for: that women are people and all want different things.

          But they’re training young men to struggle romantically and be pissed about it without the emotional intelligence to deal with that anger. Oh and they’re encouraging those men to buy guns and to take offense at women being scared of men. That’s not how you make your fans into happy husbands and fathers who credit you for setting them on the path to that. It’s how you make them into suicide terrorists, it’s far closer to what Al Quadra did than what loving fathers do.

        • futatorius@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          The few women in that scene are strictly for the alphas! Your beta ass won’t even get scraps.

          The reality is that in humans, there’s no such thing as alphas and betas. The ethology that claimed that’s how wolves organize their societies, and that meme-level social darwinists tried to apply to people, was wrong too.

        • Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Feel like calling them incels and assuming you know every thing going on there gives them an easy out. Need to start asking these turds what gives them the right? Who entitled them to feel so fucking special? Was it popular media? Because that’s all bullshit and we’ve known that since day one, so why the fuck do they think they get to live a delusion?

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      That’s the problem with colts from the outside you don’t get it.

      From the inside they don’t get it either but they still keep going.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yep, he’s a very weird old man. I think they might think rallying around him is a way to reclaim their manhood.

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Look at 99% of media before 2001 AD. White male hero. Star Trek TOS was a giant ground breaker showing Uhura, but all the real critical leaders were males. Think on this; the James Bond movie Thunderball has a scene that’s pretty much rape; they were selling little kids’ toys based on that movie. There’s a John Wayne movie where Wayne throws someone else’s kid into a river to teach the boy how to get over his fear of water.

      This is what these young men and their fathers consume. And Trump plays to that. He’s a macho hero who plays by his own rules and doesn’t take crap from anyone.

      Muhammed Ali did more in real life than Clint Eastwood ever did in all his movies put together; guess which one these folks admire?

      • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        No offense, but I’d safely bet maybe 0.1% of current generation young men have watched any of those movies. This article is primarily talking about younger Gen Z folks (18-30), so people born 1994-2006. These males specifically consume idiot social media personalities vs old school macho man movies from the 50s and 60s.

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        This is what these young men and their fathers consume. And Trump plays to that. He’s a macho hero who plays by his own rules and doesn’t take crap from anyone.

        How the fuck do they think Trump is macho?

        • dirthawker0@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Because all his earlier life was spent paying pretty women (and girls) to hang around pretending to be attracted to him (when it was actually money, food, and/ot entertainment).

        • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Because he has money, he can say whatever the fuck he wants and no woman can boss him. Kind of like Elon. If you have a broken brain, that is “macho”.

        • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Because Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson tell them Trump is macho and the young men don’t know any better. They think these morons are authority figures

      • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com
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        4 months ago

        I’m a zoomed so I can confirm you completely failed to bring up any media relevant to Gen Z, and Star Trek TOS and Ali are closer than Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Bond.

      • futatorius@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        And Trump plays to that. He’s a macho hero who plays by his own rules and doesn’t take crap from anyone.

        Except he’s not. He’s a lard-assed con artist, appearance-obsessed but ridiculous: fake hair, fake tan, trying to exaggerate his height and hide his obesity, a bully, a coward, a liar, and anyone who’s seen the video of him grovelling in Putin’s presence wouldn’t say he doesn’t take crap from anyone. He’s a servile, fawning toady who would have been nothing without his daddy’s money. If this society were a meritocracy, he’d be pounding farts out of shirttails in a steam laundry in New Jersey, if he could be employed at all.