You will tell me, in that informed, thoughtful and balanced way of yours, that declinism – the belief that society and culture is in a state of permanent decline – is skewed by a cognitive bias that views the past more optimistically than it warrants and the future more pessimistically than it warrants.
That being said, when Clarendon’s parents were teenagers, popular counterculture figures were the beat poets Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, the second wave feminist Gloria Steinem, and musicians like The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Nowadays, popular counterculture figures amongst teenage boys are online influencers from the ‘manosphere’ (online communities that espouse narrow, toxic views of masculinity, as well as anti-feminist and misogynistic views), including such luminaries as Andrew Tate and HS Tikky Tokky.
Ginsberg’s famous poem, Song, spoke directly to disaffected, lonely teenagers:
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the wight we carry
is love.
Tate speaks to the same audience, but with a different message:
Moody females steal your power. It’s dangerous for a man.
(Now, I’m pleased to say that Clarendon is not familiar with the oeuvre of Tate, so this quote came from goodreads.com and sources ‘The Tate Bible – Book II: The New Testament’. I couldn’t find anything from his old testament, but, given that even the actual Bible’s Old Testament contains some slightly dubious views on women, homosexuality and slavery, maybe that’s for the best)
Worryingly, these toxic views have become more and more prevalent in UK schools in the last few years. 5,000 female teachers took part in a recent survey, and 23% reported misogynistic behaviour aimed directly at them in the classroom, up from 17% in 2023. If one in four female teachers experiences this, one can only imagine what the poor schoolgirls now experience (and there is more than enough anecdotal evidence to support this fear).
Clarendon asked a few teenagers it knows at top UK independent schools if this survey tallied with their experience.
A student at St. Paul’s told Clarendon everyone he knows thinks Tate is a buffoon and, when they were made to do a debate on it in class, boys had to be forced to adopt Tate’s positions because otherwise the debate wouldn’t have worked.
A year 11 Latymer Upper girl said that although there was some guys who liked to occasionally make sexist jokes for shock value, these were never aimed at female students and certainly never at female staff.
A year 13 student at Eton College said that the school intervened when Tate was being talked about much more – 2 years ago – but that, despite a few off colour jokes here and there, he had never come across anyone at school who genuinely believed “that stuff like men should dominate women.”
It’s a narrow snapshot, we know, but it does appear that these views are by no means rife in independent schools in the UK, which reflects something pernicious and predatory about these charlatans like Tate: they manipulate and monetise the vulnerability, loneliness and anger felt by teenage boys. The Centre for Social Justice released data that revealed that 50% of children in the UK would live in single parent homes by the time they were 15; for children in independent schools, the figure is nowhere near as high. Furthermore, the number of schoolchildren in care in the UK is now over 80,000. Simply put, there are lots vulnerable and angry boys, living without positive male role models.
There are no easy solutions to this problem, but Clarendon hopes that some of the teenage boys of today somehow find their way to a counterculture figures of the past. They may find solidarity in the words of someone like Dylan and feel less alone.
Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying