Look at what men are missing and how the right is selling it to them.

Men aren’t doing so hot right now, emotionally and mentally. They feel like they are not manly, and criticized for trying to be manly or liking manly things. There’s a lack of transitions into manhood, and the bar that is seen as a successful man with a good career is pretty much impossible.

If you have a poor paying job, you’re not manly. If you have a well paying job but it’s blue collar you’re not manly because you’re a dumb working stiff. If you have a white collar job you’re not manly because you’re not doing anything tough with your body. Maybe if you’re a CEO who owns the company but also does rock climbing and bear fighting are you seen as manly enough, maybe.

Then you have these guys, your Andrew Tates and so on, who act very manly and tell you it’s ok to be a man and then spout off some of the most toxic, asinine shit saying that’s how you be a man. And young guys fall for it because they aren’t shown any alternative.

Then on the left you have people who speak ill of men as a whole, and manliness as a whole. Sometimes the criticisms are correct, but a lot of times it’s presented as men overall. If you try to say that it’s not every man out there who’s a monster, you get blasted with criticism for saying “not all men”. They also don’t provide anything positive or solutions for feeling manly, with the best they can be offered is to be more like women.

So young men, especially young cishet men, are actively pushed away from leftist spaces, leaving them feeling demonized by those spaces, and actively pandered to by the right which are offering mind poison dressed up as solutions.

So what do we do? There’s a few things to fix.

1. leftist media has to stop demonizing men and start demonizing actions. Instead of saying “men are rapists” start saying “rapists are bad”. When people start to say things like “cis people are shit” other people need to call them out of it, because if you’re supposed to be the side that accepts people’s gender identity, it should be for all gender identities. It can feel cathartic to rail against the majority demographic, especially when people of that demographic have hurt you, but if you feel that it’s unfair to rail against a group because of the actions of a few members of it, that should apply to all groups. Things like “what’s wrong with the straights” doesn’t help build bonds with allies, and it turns young men away from leftist spaces.

2. there needs to be validation and recognition from the left for problems men have, like suicide, workplace death and heavier prison sentencing. The left needs to show that they are trying to fix these problems, too, instead of telling young men to suck it up and be a man about it because they are the oppressor demographic.

3. there needs to be people who counter toxic masculinity, not with telling men to be more like women, but with positive masculinity. If a man is having emotional or mental problems, toxic masculinity says to push that down. Femininity says it’s ok to be soft and vulnerable. Positive masculinity would say that a real man is true to himself and his feelings and expresses then freely, even if others might ridicule him for it. There’s a subtle difference, and the end result of femininity’s and positive masculinity’s tactic might be the same, i.e. the man expresses those feelings, but the way that they get there is very different. The former makes the man feel less validated in his identity, while the latter uplifts it. The memes where they say stuff like “I always tell my homies I love them before they go to bed” actually work.

4. leftist influencers need to make fighting for the rights of minorities seem manly. Badass. Like a hero. Worthy of praise and celebration.

5. while they won’t get the financial and political backing that the toxic male influencers get, there needs to be positive male influencers who talk about masculinity in a positive way, while promoting the ideas above. There needs to be an alternative, who acts manly but in the fun, positive way, that validates young men’s feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and isolation, while promoting an egalitarian perspective.

6. there needs to be a cultural shift in what makes a man. A shift away from dying in battle or becoming a tycoon, and a resurgence of the working class hero. Mass media itself needs to change and promote positive male figures. It can work and be popular, like in Avatar the Last Airbender. We need to show men that they are still men, and still worthy of love, respect and adoration, even if they aren’t a super soldier or a wealthy elite. A lot of this is counter to capitalistic goals, so it may have to be subversive, but eventually it needs to be made the norm.

7. other men need to continue to step up and speak out about injustice towards minorities and against toxic masculinity behaviors in the day to day, and start decrying those behaviors as unmanly. People need to call Andrew Tate and the like unmanly.

8. ideally, the men’s rights movement should be absorbed by the left and the toxic incels kicked out. It should be done in the name of gender equality. Fixing only woman’s problems won’t solve the patriarchy (which could be changed to a different term so everyone feels like it’s less of an us vs them) and feminists should try to help solve men’s problems directly rather than indirectly. Young men would see feminism as more appealing if feminists actually focused on men’s problems as well, rather than ignoring or worse, demonizing them. Feminism could be rebranded as an egalitarian movement for all sexes and genders, maybe get a name change. If the patriarchy affects everyone, then the focus should be on everyone. Maybe it would have to be a whole new movement entirely.

So it’s a larger problem than just getting more leftist male influencers, and some of those problems are systematic. Some can get worked on today. Talking about masculinity in a positive way, promotive equity, stop both their side and your side from bigotry, and, probably the thing that would get young men on board the most:

Actually trying to solve the problems young men are going through.