Séamas O'Reilly: We need to stop lying about what makes lost boys such easy marks for cons

The problem with such explainers in the mainstream press, is they often come freighted with the same curious question: yes, these people are objectionable, but is their appeal merely a reaction to the woke messaging emasculating young men elsewhere?

MP Rupert Lowe — elected for Nigel Farage’s Reform party but recently ousted amid an in-party bullying probe — neatly summed up this argument last week: “Young white men must be looking at the country and thinking — what have we done wrong? ... You’re told that you’re racist for feeling patriotic, far right for going to the gym, bigoted for having a joke, chauvinistic for enjoying a beer and the football.”

This chain of straw man arguments is hardly convincing — I wonder if there is a single man on Earth who has been called ‘far right’ for going to the gym — but it’s useful in tracing the garbled reasoning that underpins much of this discussion.

The fact is, the vast majority of the problems facing young men in Ireland and the UK are the same as those facing young women; rising cost of living, precarious work, a shrinking social safety net, and poor mental health provision. On to this, however, can be grafted many additional ailments that are indeed worth addressing; boys underperform girls in education, report higher rates of homelessness, drug and alcohol dependency, gambling addiction, and suicide.

These are all real problems, with real harms, and it behoves us to engage with them seriously. But we cannot do that by proclaiming ‘woke over-reach’ the villain when actual, structural issues go unaddressed. In the UK, for example, if asked to solve the impenetrable mystery of why so many boys are aimless, dissocialised, and credulous, I might point to the fact that 70% of schools have less funding than they did in 2010. Or that two thirds of council-run youth centres in England have closed in the same period, along with 30% of leisure centres and 20% of libraries. Add to that thousands of football pitches, swimming pools, boxing clubs, and communal spaces. Pretending that the effects of such obvious social vandalism are somehow outweighed by people on Twitter talking about ‘male privilege’
demeans the issues at hand, as well as our collective intelligence.

We are not quite so selectively gullible when it comes to other issues facing the same cohort. Consider the way we talk about young men’s struggles with gambling, versus how we talk about them succumbing to the likes of Tate. Last year, the UK’s National Centre for Social Research reported there were 1.3m problem gamblers in Britain — the ESRI reports that the Irish figure is broadly similar per capita, at around 279,000 — and that young men are seven and a half times more likely to enter this cohort than their female counterparts. Not once have I found a journalist stumped by what attracts all these young men to gambling in the first place. Nor have I seen them wondering if negative portrayals of gambling have pushed all these men toward the industry, or whether we could all learn something from betting companies about how to reach them better.

Such an approach would be ludicrous, since gambling’s appeal is easily deduced via the facts at hand; economically depressed young men are aggressively targeted with the oldest, most seductive pitch there is — money for nothing — by bad faith actors with enormous wealth, whose interests are served by every branch of mainstream television and media advertising, and sitting governments.

It seems clear to me that a large part of the attraction of the manosphere fits a similar brief. They, too, pitch one of the oldest offers in the world — blame your problems on people who aren’t like you — and utilise a vast ecosystem of wealth and influence to target young men in their millions, buttressed by the tacit support of broader right wing orthodoxy in mainstream news media and governments the world over.

The distinctions between the two are muddied further when one considers that the manosphere, itself, overwhelmingly offers ‘money for nothing’ too, since it’s entirely in-hoc to advertising from gambling companies, and speculative investments like ForEx trading, dropshipping, and crypto which perform the same function: promising quick cash in the form of ‘hustle’ to impressionable young men. When their victims inevitably crash out from this casino economy, these grifters are on hand to tell them to keep going, while laundering any shame and anger about their failures into the very same ‘blame everyone else’ rubric that leads, invariably, to the racism and misogyny that is their calling card.

At a certain point, the sympathy we have toward those whose personal circumstances lead to self-destructive addictions must be greater than our sympathy for those who agitate for the denigration, abuse, and assaulting of women and minorities. But if we want to reach these lost boys and turn them round, we need to stop lying about what makes them such easy marks for a very old, and very transparent set of cons. Pretending it’s down to anything else is not just stupid, it’s gambling with all our futures.