Gen Z takes the red pill

Election Day has always contained its share of surprises, but one that floored most pundits as the polls closed was just how strongly Gen Z-especially the men of that generation-went from blue bastion to red redoubt.

But for Karen Ashcraft, the writing was on the wall. In fact, the writing was from a book she published two years ago, which warned that "viral masculinity" was a growing threat to young men and boys not just in the United States but worldwide.

"I think a lot of people picture the manosphere as individual content creators, or trolls and shitposters and such, but actually, it's a movement-a form of digital organizing that has absolutely mushroomed over the last 20 years," said Ashcraft, a CU Boulder alumna and professor of communication at the College of Media, Communication and Information at CU Boulder. "It's a viral stew of aggrieved manhood-the seething sense that real manhood is under attack and must fight back. This feeling now saturates the environment to an extent that men and boys cannot escape repetitive contact with it."

Ashcraft is not a new voice on this topic. As she was earning her doctoral degree from CU Boulder, Hollywood was premiering "Fight Club" and "The Matrix," which set the stage for key tenets of the manosphere. But even before then, Ashcraft brought a perspective to the discipline that other scholars have not.

"I was born and raised a right-wing populist," she said. "Well before Trump, my family was part of the religious right, we were preppers-all of it. So, I come at this from a place that is not anti-populism, but pro-men and boys. We need to address the challenges they face, and we can do that in a pro-feminist way."

The challenge is how successfully right-wing populist movements have changed their approach to suit the digital age-it's no longer just Rush Limbaugh preaching to a comparatively narrow audience on talk radio. But, Ashcraft said, this is not a case of "the internet did it," nor is it just about the gravitas of personalities like Andrew Tate or Lex Fridman.

Instead, "The sentiment of aggrieved manhood got rebranded," she said. "It went from bitter old guys in their basements, plotting militia activity, to becoming this sort of punk, anarchist, edgy thing. It's a new counterculture that happened through this explosion of online activity."

And while there are different flavors to that extremism-from the United States to Russia to Iran-they all start with the same ingredient-a light touch of misogyny and aggrieved manhood. It is, Ashcraft said, "a gateway drug to the far right."

"The feeling that manly rights have been wronged-men versus women-travels the world very easily, because it's a simple binary," she said. "People all over the world-men, but let's not kid ourselves, women, too-can get infected with this feeling that men have lost out to women. And because it's everywhere, boys get enticed by this idea, and then it opens up into this larger far-right world."

Family ties

If you're dreading the conversation at the kids' table this Thanksgiving, Ashcraft said you shouldn't. As someone who's watched these attitudes become more common in her classroom, and as someone who works hard to maintain strong family ties with people who don't share her worldview, she said the first-and hardest-thing to do is to stop trying to persuade people.

Not only does that not work, typically causing people to retrench deeper into their beliefs, her research has found that arguing the facts and trying to fight disinformation is a source of oxygen to this particular fire. So, too, is the empathetic response of trying to understand the legitimacy of the anger and aggrieved feelings spewed by the manosphere.

Instead, Ashcraft's research proposes the notion of lateral empathy, in which we put greater care on how people become "infected" by the viral feeling of manly grievance and less care on the content of what people say.

"When I see this in class, or when I talk to young people, I address it at the level of feeling," she said. "'You seem agitated. Tell me about that-what does that feel like? What really riles you up?'

"For the sake of smart and new and adaptive interventions, we need to grasp that in today's communication environment, feeling is in the driver's seat. Content has become the secondary thing that gives feeling an outlet."

And teaching younger generations will require a shift, as well.

'A very big shift'

"We teach people all about how to sift through good ideas but nothing about how to understand the circuits of their bodies that receive emotion," she said. At CMCI alone, she said, researchers in information science, journalism, media studies and elsewhere know how feeling works when it engages with algorithms, news, movies and beyond.

"It's a very big shift, and not an intuitive one, but we need to cultivate lateral empathy in many different arenas, and education could play a big role in that," she said.

It already plays a role in her own life. While Ashcraft doesn't subscribe to the populism of her family, she works very hard to keep her familial ties strong.

"When you're talking about family, love is on the line," she said. "At the Thanksgiving table, stop the content, surrender that desire to argue head-to-head, and settle into that deeper level of feeling.

"I had a recent conversation with a relative, where I said, 'I know we're trying to avoid these topics-but they keep coming up, my heart rate is increasing, I'm scared. I love you, and I hear your agitation. What is the agitation? Can you tell me how you're hurt by my concern for women's reproductive rights?' So it's at the level of the feeling that is relevant to preserving the relationship."

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