In Post 23 of 100, I talked about the pain of sitting through a Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) video to make sure I was responding directly to his criticisms of the TV show Adolescence, and not my own imaginings of his argument, or how he might have been represented by someone else. One idea that he mentioned that I have been wrestling with since watching that video is trying to answer the question that titles this post. How can anyone, especially a grown man living in Suburban England, really believe that there is some kind of matriarchal authority that is currently controlling western society/culture?
After only a small amount of internet research, I realized that this question is at the heart of the entire Manosphere/Men’s Rights Movement (MRM)/Incel identity and is going to take some time to research and write about, over the course of several posts, so I will step back from trying to look at that question in its entirety for this post, and instead look at the one thing Carl Benjamin said in that video that has some truth behind it…but only really one small aspect of it.
The vast majority of school teachers in the US and in the UK are women. Benjamin is UK-based and looking at those figures, but I am in the US, so I will point to this Pew Research Center report, and acknowledge that 77% of K-12 public school teachers in the US are women, and that the ratio of women to men in the profession skews even more heavily the younger the student grade level. Carl Benjamin uses this statistical reality to make the claim that this is the root of young boys growing resentful of the authority of women, because they are having their social behaviors monitored and evaluated by feminized standards that don’t understand what it means to be a boy.
I think there are a lot of people who probably find this argument to be moderately compelling when based on this evidence. I know for me, as college professor and as a male outreach facilitator for a domestic and sexual violence shelter, I absolutely have had an easier time getting male students to listen to me and respect my ideas than many of my colleagues who are women. Male teachers who were adequately trained to address misogynistic violence (like what happens in the show Adolescence, at the extreme end) and the rhetoric that leads to it probably would have an easier time engaging with the boys and young men most likely to need guidance away from misogynistic ideas and behaviors. There is violence prevention research that backs up the claim that young men, especially young men already headed down the road of embracing misogynistic and abusive ideas about gender relationships, will be more likely to listen to men than women. Troubled boys will tend to listen to and respect the opinions of male authority figures over women. However, as Carl Benjamin makes clear in almost all the rest of his video, if young men struggling with patriarchal, misogynistic ideology are turned over to the kinds of men he advocates should be disciplining these boys, then their misogynistic and patriarchal ideas are not only going to be reinforced, they are going to become almost unshakable, especially in an environment like a public school, where most of the student’s future teachers are going to be women that the boy has been doubly socialized to disrespect as an authority figure. Patriarchal and misogynistic male teachers are capable of having a massively oversized reach and effect on the boys and future young men they are teaching, making the “just get more men into teaching/mentoring roles and positions of authority to be a potentially dangerous approach to reducing gender-based/misogynistic violence. For example, just imagine putting Carl Benjamin into a high school classroom…and then stop imagining that right away, because you don’t deserve to have that occupy space in your brain.
But all of that is getting a little off topic to this post. I think one place where the manosphere has been successful in recruiting young men into patriarchal misogynistic (PM) movements has been in framing educational institutions as centers of feminist/matriarchal dominance, and then attributing any fault in a student’s educational experience as being a product of that matriarchal authority. The school is underfunded and lacks resources that would benefit the student or engage with their interests or learning styles…blame female leadership. The school is beholden to meeting specific state/federal standards that require teachers teach specific and required material in such a breakneck pace that nuance and context are impossible, so overgeneralized, “correct” answers to the tests become all teachers can afford to teach…blame female leadership. The school’s physical infrastructure, built decades ago and underfunded at every opportunity, feel structured like a prison, sniffle creative thinking, and limit especially physical forms of emotional expression…blame female leadership.
Another aspect of this situation that patriarchal misogynists manage to avoid addressing when they talk about how terrible it is for boys and young men to be surrounded by female teachers is why this unbalanced ratio became normalized in the first place. While there are many factors that have played a role in women becoming an oversized sample in the field of education, it has never been the case that more women were encouraged into the field of education after that field has experienced increased growth or economic support by society. Women generally are paid less than men in every field, and this remains true for teachers. Hiring women as teachers has been an intentional strategy in past decades for bringing down the cost of schools and reduced educational budgets tend to push men out of jobs faster than women when they see a limit to future pay increases or professional growth. Society devalues education, and, surprise surprise, the field of education becomes more and more feminized. This makes it even easier for PM advocates to point at schools as locations failing to meet the needs of boys and young men for either educational or emotional development.
I think I will need to write a future blog post about more personal experience I have had with women gaining access to positions of authority within organizations and institutions, and how frequently that leads to immediate and harsh critiques of these places as “no longer supporting the value and potential they once had,” as I have seen that in political movements, worksites, and school clubs and organizations many times. Men, even politically conscious ones, grow uncomfortable lending their political, social and economic power to places where they feel limited or controlled in what they can say or how they act.
My last thought that I want to tag onto this blog post, about why some boys and young men see school as a place dominated by matriarchal authority, and limited by that authority from developing into the people they want to be, is that they are not just navigating this space on their own, they are being influenced by familial and social role models in their lives. Fathers/uncles/gaurdians who struggle to listen to, respect or value the work of women in their lives are going to act just like Carl Benjamin when they see their male children learning to listen to, respect and value the work of their female teachers, and every teacher knows that the energy parents and guardians put into their children’s development is going to be massively more persuasive than that put forth by the teachers. For patriarchal and misogynistic parents and guardians, a “feminized” educational system becomes an exceptionally easy breeding ground for instilling hatred for women in positions of authority, especially when schools and adolescence are already naturally going to be sites of rebellion and a growth of independence.
So, no, I don’t think it is really fair to even pretend like having more women teachers than male ones means that schools are sites of matriarchal or feminist authority. But I think it is very easy to feel that way if you are man with a predisposition to misogynistic thinking and are in a location where misogynistic thinking might actually be called out as such instead of laughed off or implicitly agreed with. There are already ample studies that indicate than men tend to think women speak more often then they actually do, it really isn’t all that surprising that many men seem to react the exact same way to seeing a women exert any authority at all in a setting that the man does not expect them to.