Maria Furtwängler, co-founder of the MaLisa Foundation, and youth media expert Dr. Maya Götz (Bayerischer Rundfunk) address how the “manosphere” seduces male adolescents with a worldview promoting political polarization and misogyny.
“It seems like the feminist movement has really been powerful in telling the men what they should not do, how they should not behave”, Maria Furtwängler notes in her introductory remarks. “But there seems to be rather little consensus on what does healthy masculinity look like.”
It is “precisely in this void”, she adds, that young men are “very easily seduced by a worldview that is promoting political polarization, promoting misogyny, and denying climate crisis.”
Götz presents findings from a recent study on social media, gender images, and values among male teenagers in Germany. “What does it mean to be a respected, successful and strong man?” is a question that many adolescents boys “are asking themselves on an unconscious level”, she explains.
Social media play an outsized role in answering this question. “What shapes the worldview and the values of young people today is social media, especially TikTok and Instagram”, Götz says.
For a significant portion of young men, algorithms create a “TikTok-shaped view” of society and the world that is “anti-social, anti-sustainability, and anti-democratic”, Götz notes. In Germany, about a quarter of young men hold right-wing views, see men as naturally superior to women and reflect positions often found in the “manosphere”, she adds.
Watch the video to explore this session in detail.
