Growing up, we are offered two broad choices:
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 so laid. 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.
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.
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.
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.
