We Need to Talk about Heterosexual Boys and Men

Marcus Maloney, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, and Kate Babin, one of our doctoral candidates, were pleased to contribute a blog post to the Council on Contemporary Families. The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organisation based in the University of Texas at Austin which provides the latest research and best-practice findings about American families and the way that families are changing and facing new challenges.

Maloney and Babin’s piece appears in The Society Pages, an open access social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and discusses the appeal of the manosphere and figures like Andrew Tate to heterosexual boys and young men.

“We argue that it’s time to shift to a more empathetic investigation of what’s driving boys and men into the arms of the manosphere. For one, we need to be more cognizant of the way in which a concept like “male privilege” renders invisible the wildly complicating dimensions of class and/or race. Indeed, try telling a young working-class man from the British Midlands or American “flyover country,” with no girlfriend and dubious job prospects, that he’s the beneficiary of undue “privilege.” The realities of male privilege remain true in an overarching systemic sense, as well as in the countless minute ways men experience the world differently from women. However, it is important to recognize the various socioeconomic factors that prevent many men from experiencing this privilege in any sort of life enhancing way.”

Read the full blog post at this link: https://thesocietypages.org/ccf/2023/10/24/we-need-to-talk-about-heterosexual-boys-and-men/

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