“As soon as I mention feminism, you can feel the shift in the room; they’re shuffling in their seats.” Mike Nicholson holds workshops with teenage boys about the challenges of impending manhood. Standing up for the sisterhood, it seems, is the last thing on their minds.
When Nicholson says he is a feminist himself, “I can see them look at me, like, ‘I used to like you.’”
Once Nicholson, whose programme is called Progressive Masculinity, unpacks the fact that feminism means equal rights and opportunities for women, many of the boys with whom he works are won over.
“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,” he says.
But he is battling against what he calls a “dominance-based model” of masculinity. “These old-fashioned, regressive ideas are having a renaissance, through your masculinity influencers – your grifters, like Andrew Tate.”
The attitudes of young men came under further scrutiny this week after a survey suggested that 16-29-year-olds are more negative about feminism than men over 60 – and one in five had a positive view of Tate, the self-professed “misogynist” influencer.
Prof Bobby Duffy of Ipsos, which carried out the research for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, called this a “new and unusual generational pattern”, as younger cohorts have tended to be more liberal.
Not everyone believes attitudes have altered. Keziah Featherstone, executive headteacher of the Q3 Academy in Tipton, West Midlands, says: “I have not noticed anything significantly change. And I have worked in education for 30 years.” She is more worried about vaping and school absences than a spike in misogyny.
But other teachers, trainers and parents told the Guardian about shifting values and behaviour, against the backdrop of ubiquitous social media.
Anna, a secondary school teacher for 15 years until 2019, says she witnessed “a decline in feminism among young men” over that period – accompanied by an increase in troubling behaviour.
“We interviewed our students talking about the everyday sexism they encountered,” she says. “The upskirting, slut-shaming, predatory behaviour and casual microaggressions. It was horrifying to see how the girls saw it as just another part of life.”
Michael Conroy was also a longtime teacher before he founded the consultancy Men at Work, which runs workshops for teachers and social workers.
He too describes a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes, which he says accompanied the widespread availability of smartphones. “That shifted what we were used to in school. So instead of, like, a dick pic a month, it was five every week. And it wasn’t just year 10, it was year eight.”
Over that time, he says, the educators he works with have described “an obvious harshening of the way boys talk about women; and a growing sense that somehow they must be mistreated and hated because they are boys and men”.
He says Tate’s influence results from being able to channel boys’ powerful feelings – and his message fell on fertile ground among a generation with easy access to pornography.
Conroy says: “He wants to just exploit the naivety and confusion of boys.”
Tate is facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, which he denies.
His slick videos, often delivered shirtless, cigar in hand, exhort men to work hard to make a lasting impact on the world – and combine that message with attitudes to women that he concedes are misogynist.
Daniel Guinness is the managing director of Beyond Equality, which carries out workshops with boys and men in universities and workplaces, as well as schools, challenging norms about masculinity. He says many feel under pressure because of “internalised expectations” about manhood, which they may feel they cannot fulfil.
He says: “It’s not showing that emotional weakness. It’s also the expectation to always be right. Like you are not able to show that you can fail; that there’s more shame in doing something and making a mistake than there is just sort of sitting it out or dropping out.”
He stresses that many of the men he deals with have positive attitudes to women and feminism, but he says some can feel they are being stereotyped, or blamed for others’ actions.
Guinness cites the Everyone’s Invited website, where young women in the UK shared their experiences of sexual harassment and assault, including in school environments, as part of the wider #MeToo movement.
“There was a collective raising awareness of the violence that women and girls experienced in certain parts of their lives. And the fact that that was being perpetrated by men, and the fact that some of the norms in our society either excused that violence as being just a joke, or part of flirting, or no big deal.
“That message was often heard by many rightwing commentators, but also by young people in schools, as, ‘people think that all men do this’ – rather than, ‘these things are happening, and they’re often being driven by some of these attitudes that men have, and so all men can play a role in fixing that and challenging that’.”
Some parents of boys worry that they are treated less sympathetically than their female peers. “My son is reluctant to go to school due to bullying by a group of girls,” says one woman from Derby, who wants to remain anonymous. “He feels that there is a big power difference in schools, where boys are always punished, not listened to, and not believed.”
Nick Hewlett, the head of St Dunstan’s college, a private sixth form in south London, says: “I think we are pushing boys into a place where they see no option but to take a kind of extreme view.”
He argues that what he calls “sometimes quite innate masculine traits” such as “competitive zeal” and “banter” can be punished in schools, instead of understood and channelled.
Hewlett says: “It’s not about stopping that. It’s about reshaping it. It’s certainly about bringing girls into that conversation, and having boys properly understand the impact of their behaviour, not just on girls but on other boys as well.”
And he echoes Conroy’s warning about the effect of pornography in shaping boys’ expectations. “They get drawn into a world where they look at coercive, controlling pornographic behaviour of boys, of men towards women, and they think that’s natural and normal.”
As for Tate himself, currently awaiting trial, teachers the Guardian spoke to suggested he was less popular than before his arrest, in late 2022. But Nicholson says even if Tate is convicted, there are plenty of alternatives waiting in the “manosphere”.
“There are already three or four influencers jockeying for position if he goes down,” he says. “He’s a symptom, not the problem.”