Mick Hartley

Belgian academic Maarten Boudry was invited on Flemish public television channel VRT – roughly the equivalent of the BBC – to discuss a survey on rising intolerance among young people. A poll had uncovered some shocking findings about growing intolerance of LGBT people, and a resurgence of conservative values. Apparently 17 per cent of Flemish adolescents aged 12–17, and 16 per cent of those aged 18–44, agreed that there are circumstances in which a man is permitted to hit a woman. One in three young people said they would not want a transgender person in their circle of friends.

He writes about his experience at Quillette:

VRT’s editorial framing, echoed by a chorus of experts and commentators, was immediate and uniform. The villain was the so-called “manosphere”: young boys falling under the spell of Andrew Tate and other social-media influencers and emulating their brand of toxic masculinity and misogyny. To discuss the findings, VRT invited me onto its main current-affairs programme, De Afspraak, alongside a sexologist.

I must admit that I was sceptical from the outset. Andrew Tate is certainly an odious figure, but the narrative surrounding the manosphere has begun to resemble a moral panic among the liberal commentariat. The data on the supposed radicalisation of young men are far less clear-cut than is often suggested. A recent analysis in The Argument, for instance, found that on every question about changing gender norms, men under 45 held more progressive views than Gen X or boomer men. To the extent that there is a widening gender gap within Gen Z, it appears to be driven by young women swinging left rather than by young men moving right.

Perhaps you can see where this is going.

But what about religion—and Islam in particular—which has repeatedly been shown to exert a major influence on attitudes towards women and homosexuality, even after controlling for education and income? In VRT’s coverage, conservative religion received only a brief mention, buried deep in the article and immediately downplayed. Everyone reached for the same script about the manosphere and the generational divide.

Naturally, I asked to see the full report before going on air. I couldn’t get it. That reluctance, together with the uniformity of the narrative VRT was pushing, made me suspicious. Why invite an academic onto television to discuss a survey if you are not prepared to share the underlying data?

Eventually, a young editor sent me a brief PowerPoint presentation that had been circulating internally. To my surprise, every chart contained a bar for respondents of “foreign origin”, alongside the categories for age and education. Less surprisingly, that bar was often the highest of all. The internal presentation even drew attention to the elevated levels of intolerance among respondents of foreign origin—several times.

Then I noticed a marginal comment from a VRT editor that was clearly not intended for outside eyes.

It instructed the news desk not to report the breakdown by foreign origin, even though the data had been collected. 

It’s part of what Boudry terms the “spiral of silence”.

Anyone who has been paying attention over the past few decades knows that the link between Islam and gender intolerance is treated as radioactive in much of academia and the press. Researchers prefer not to talk about it, not to include it in their study designs, and to downplay it whenever they stumble upon it despite their best efforts. What is rare is to catch a glimpse behind the scenes at the moment such decisions are made, as I happened to do….

By the time the story reached the Flemish public, it had become a highly distorted but politically convenient tale about the evils of the manosphere. Note that this explanation is purely speculative, not in any way supported by the survey itself, which didn’t contain any questions about social-media consumption, familiarity with manosphere influencers, or anything of the kind. But it fits a comfortable progressive narrative: it is all the fault of Andrew Tate and other toxic men. Who could question that narrative after watching the Netflix series Adolescence, which the liberal media fawned over for months? Never mind that the series is pure fiction, and not a remotely credible one: a white boy from a warm and loving family turns into a murderer overnight after a romantic rejection and some exposure to misogynistic videos….

Fantasies such as the one depicted in Adolescence are useful precisely because they divert attention from factors that make progressives far more uncomfortable—above all, religious fundamentalism imported through migration. For much the same reason, VRT chose not to ask about religious faith, and then to “drown the fish”, as the French say, in a largely meaningless foreign-origin bucket.

Did I mention that Andrew Tate, the avatar of the new Western misogyny, has himself converted to Islam? The pundits who drop his name so freely, and clutch their pearls so tightly, seldom pause to ask why.