In her Grade 8 to Grade 12 classrooms, Annie Ohana says ideas with toxic undertones are often not far away.
Like earlier this school year, when she was handing out cups for an activity, and a boy asked if any part of it would “lower [his] testosterone.” The student conceded he didn’t actually know what testosterone was or how it impacted his body but, Ohana says, he was familiar with the misinformation that circulates online that claims men who have low testosterone are less masculine.
“I know exactly where that kind of language comes from. It is very much from… the manosphere,” Ohana told CBC News.
“It seems like in the last couple years, the idea of the gender binary has gotten quite strong.”
According to new data, Ohana isn’t the only teacher seeing similar, gendered ideas about the roles of boys and girls, and those that scapegoat women for problems, surface in the classroom.
A recent survey from Angus Reid and White Ribbon, a global campaign to end gender-based violence, asked Canadian teachers and adults about boys’ relationships with misogynistic online content. Four in five educators said they had witnessed sexist or misogynistic behaviours in the classroom.
That’s not surprising to one expert, considering how intertwined the online and in-person worlds are for young people who’ve grown up with the internet.
How harmful jokes made in classrooms normalize misogynistic ideas
Those worlds are “not distinct in the way that they used to be,” said Jonathon Reed, the director of programs at Next Gen Men, a non-profit that works to promote healthy masculinity, in part by working with young men directly.
“That makes for a really easy cross-pollination of the jokes and the memes.”
He says these ideas often bubble up in the form of jokes — and that “meme-ification” of serious topics can help normalize extreme ideas.
Hateful beliefs are no longer buried on 4-chan or Reddit message boards, but are recirculated by influencers like self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate and algorithms, according to Salsabel Almanssori, an adjunct assistant professor of education at the University of Windsor. From there, she says they easily make it to young boys’ peer groups and the classroom.
Almanssori has researched how technology facilitates sexual violence in schools, and her findings mirror those of the survey.
“They see it very frequently,” Almanssori said. “They bring that with them into schools and it becomes sort of a hidden curriculum that’s reinforced among peers… you kind of get more masculinity points for speaking the language of the manosphere.”
Logan Pedwell-Rezaifard, a Grade 12 student in Toronto, says Tate is less popular on social media lately, but there’s lots of gym influencers who have taken his place and promote ideas about what men should look like, and who talk about women in demeaning and sexualized ways.
They will rank them based on their looks or refer to them as “high-value women” based on how they act toward men, he says.
“I think it almost always starts as a joke,” when students make these kinds of comments in school, he said.
Then, if other kids accept the joke, things can “start to be mean.”
How online misogyny finds its way into the classroom
Pedwell-Rezaifard is surprised, however, that not all teachers in the survey reported hearing misogynistic comments in the classroom, given how prevalent it is in his experience — he hears demeaning language at least a few times a week.
Given some of the insults rely on slang terms, he says some seem to go over teachers’ heads. And even more obviously misogynistic comments don’t always get called out, he says.
Ohana says she only understood her student’s testosterone question because she’s familiar with some of those online conversations.
Otherwise, “I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it,” she said.
Ohana, who is also an education consultant with White Ribbon, says teachers need more education about the meaning of different misogynistic terms so they can identify and have conversations with students about them.
“We just don‘t have the tools and equipment yet… to really deal with it in ways that go beyond just a harsh reaction or a judgment because of what someone might say or do,” she said.
It will take legislation to address the root cause — social media — according to Almanssori.
She says Canada lags behind other countries that have banned or limited youth access to social platforms — like the U.K. where social media platforms must prevent young people from encountering harmful content, or Australia, where kids under 16 years of age will soon be barred from social media.
Almanssori says the actions taken so far, like phone bans in the classroom, don’t help because they do nothing to prevent kids from picking up on certain harmful ideas on social media during all other hours of the day.
In the meantime, Reed, at Next Gen Men, says because unrealistic ideas about masculinity thrive on poor self-esteem, creating strong student-teacher relationships to help build boys up is also part of tackling the problem. That might mean a teacher finding things they like about a student who tends to make these comments, and helping the student see their own good qualities.
Confronting these ideas in the moment with a phrase like “Can I challenge you on that?” could also help the student and teacher talk about what was said without making the student feel shamed, Reed says.
And for parents, Reed says they shouldn’t stress about trying to understand the online manfluencer world in depth, but should instead foster a relationship that allows their kid to talk honestly about what’s being shared online so that parents can address these harms.
“It’s not that you have to understand every single thing about every single masculinity influencer. Really just get to know your own kid and they’ll tell you what’s relevant in their lives,” he said.
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