The tweet at the top of this thread will illicit a kneejerk "hard disagree" response from many (including me), but looking at the quote tweets in the thread, it's actually quite easy to see how many young men end up feeling this way.
Seems like their agency is being short-circuited. They feel it in the education system, online, and in popular culture.
Much of this comes from a justified backlash against centuries of patriarchy, misogyny, assault, etc., which eventually overreached into acceptable viciousness, i.e. variations of "all men are trash".
Normally boys would just grow up, become men, discover their agency in the world, etc. But the recent cycles of messaging seem to have been so overwhelmingly overwrought that many young men just become emotionally stunted and trapped in a cycle of reacting to scapegoats and stereotypes.
As I say, often these messages are just mirrors held up to people's faces in close proximity, and they don't like what they see - the toxicity implicit in 'everyday behaviour'. But at other times it can seem pernicious, nasty and overwhelming, especially if you consider the lack of men in the education system and male presence in formative years.
And then, the final force which causes them to triple-down, is the cannibalising alt-right / incel ideology which reflects the worst of 'anti-men' online messaging, forcing young men to believe there's an us vs them dichotomy and urging them to entrench themselves in learned helplessness instead of breaking free of the isolating self-image.
Perhaps the real cause here, or the missing piece at the end of the chain, is a real lack of genuine role-models for men today. For good or for ill, gender roles have largely been blended, and so many male characters in popular culture may seem to be stripped of 'masculine vibes' in various ways. Sometimes this isn't intentional or overt, but like Pavlov's dogs, the incel-adjacent mind is trained to see it. And they keep seeing it.
And so it's only natural, when alt-right figures like Trump take on the mantle of 'heroic masculine vibes' (along with a lot of other baggage which may conveniently be ignored), you get a lot of young men who find affinity with the call to "fight fight fight" and rail against the system.
Kamala says "we're not going back". Trump says "tear it all down". It doesn't take much work to fall into a camp when you've been pre-conditioned. And why should you care about nuance when you're in desperate search for collective identity?
Obama and co., mainstream media, and Democrats as a whole have never been able to cultivate any kind of collectivism or movement among men. In fact, all the messaging towards men in this election was to think about the women in their lives. I don't raise this to disagree, but to highlight how obviously it skips over what these men were looking for.
It's only ironic then, that admist the ads telling women to keep their vote secret from the punishing male gaze, that many of those (white) women voted the same way millions of young men did, when freed from the shackles of social expectation. What an interesting phenomenon.
A lot of women actually want 'real men' back. I hear the complaints from female friends all the time. Women don't think men want to be men anymore. Men don't think they're allowed to be men anymore (we can debate what this means). And in between them is the panopticon of modern media and self-referential algorithms, which reflect the worst of what you're already inclined to believe.
