Growing up, we are offered two broad choices:<p>1. Accept the current system, and improve your place in it. You may be assigned a low-status role, but you know the rules of the system and can use them to raise your status. More importantly, you won't be attacked just for being outside the system.<p>2. Reject the system. This gives you the opportunity to find one that better suits you, but comes at a very high cost. Many people will shun you, and even attack you.<p>"Woke" is an example. It's used by people in category 1 as a signifier that somebody is in category 2. It signals that they should be rejected, that every one of their ideas is bad, and that they are moral failures. That's a lot of power to pack into one word. You can see why people would avoid it.<p>Just saying "toxic masculinity" makes me "woke". And I don't care. That's the trick to avoiding it. It doesn't teach me how to treat women, but it at least puts me on my guard against the default responses.<p>I would never have any interest in Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate was the kind of guy who would steal my lunch money. I could buy into his way of looking at the world, in the hopes of using it to protect me, or I could reject it -- at the cost of being called "woke", and all that implies.<p>To be honest, HN might not be the place to ask this. Hackers have a reputation for being outsiders, and being picked on. We were accused of being non-masculine. But I don't think this is true any more, and you see a ton of toxic masculinity on HN. Perhaps worse: the people who see themselves as having to defend their masculinity will be the most toxic.<p>Teaching art could achieve some of the same effects that hacking used to. They'll be considered un-masculine. They'll either reject masculine assumptions, or buy into them harder.<p>Look... if I could go back in time and give myself one piece of advice, it would be to be a "theater kid". Being a theater adult got me <i>so laid</i>. Nothing like lots of sex to convince you of your own masculinity. Especially if you're surrounded by the kind of women who aren't impressed by stereotypical masculine men.<p>Because women are affected by this just as much. They have the same choices. A lot of women would rather accept a second-class place in society than have everyone think that they are hairy-legged man-hating lesbians. And they look for the kinds of men who also hate hairy-legged man-hating lesbians, just to be sure.<p>So I guess... teach them to be happy. Teach them that art can make them happy. Find ways to give them affirmation for art that they'd get by beating up a nerd, being on a football team, or cat-calling women.<p>Me, I didn't figure most of that out until I was about 30. All I knew is that I was living with the horrifying contradiction: I wanted women for their bodies, and I didn't have any right to their bodies. This turns a ton of men into incels. It horrifies me that I could have done that.