One thought on “Steve Attridge: “They Never Understood the Working Class They Are Now Busy Destroying.””

1. Yes it is. It took me back to my University years in the late 70s. Though doing Economics we were encouraged to attend other lectures. I took an interest in Sociology. I recall vividly the moment that I realised, during a lecture about “the working class”, “oh they mean me!” As the lecture, sounding like an anthropologist having returned from some distant island, described me and mine from a prosperous industrial suburb about 7 miles from where I sat (as a measure of my working class innocence it hadn’t occurred to me that you could “go way” to University).

   This from the Guardian gives the sort of “spin” that still holds sway. The Guardian view on modern masculinity: boys need mentors, not marketers | Editorial | The Guardian It begins with “Boys used to be raised by their parents” Before heading off into the current moral panic about the almost God like Andrew Tate. A little later it again accidentally hits the truth.

   “Encouraging boys to be resilient, empathetic and capable of real relationships requires investment in families, schools and youth clubs that foster connection. They need space to be themselves – and the confidence to reject the empty validation of a social media feed. Resilience isn’t innate; it’s built through experience, effort and good example.”

   There have always been things that might send boys (and Girls) off the rails but in my “working class” suburb there were families, encouraging schools, youth clubs, spaces for boys to be themselves and opportunities to get knocked down, and get up again both figuratively and literally. And what of now? Well on ITV news, picking up the speech by Gareth Southgate, our reporter goes to interview some young men and a “Professor”. And what do the boys say? Well too few Dads, too few male teachers, no spaces that are male only, always hearing about how all attention must be on girls, no one listening to their problems even a girl wishing he brother got all the encouragement she experienced! For all his apparent omniscience not one mention of Andrew Tate. Of course the spin is “mentors”. Because of course really listening to boys would entail asking what happened to families with Dads? Who doesn’t like males meeting together without Girls? Why exactly are the % of male teachers falling? Why are boys being ill served by education? Why aren’t they encouraged in their schools and colleges? And who is who says that because there are a few billionaires with penises 100s of millions of boys need to be held back ? And most ironically of all from the feminist paper ” boys should not be seen as dangerous or inherently suspect – they are children who need care and support just as much as girls do” given the sex and relationship education now mandatory due to feminist lobbying built on the idea boys are uniformly latent abusers without extensive “education” on “consent” and “respect”.

   Rather than the apparent Archangel of Misogyny, Andrew Tate, it seems the Boys themselves have far more basic reasons to believe that they without male role models and mentors and are ignored or actively discriminated against and are told to shut up and definitely not allowed to seek comradeship/brotherhood in all male “spaces”. All the sorts of things (archaic though they were to my lecturer in 1978) I grew up with. It was the feminists and other “ists” who were so keen to dismantle it all to bring down “patriarchy”.

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