And the death of the macho man is finally here, says Jenny Wennberg. In her own words:
For a long time "soy boy" or in Swedish "soy boy" has been an insulting word in right-wing extremism and conservative circles.
The soy boy is the antithetical role of the patriarchal man. He is not aggressive, he is often a feminist, he is also uninterested in traditionally male coded leisure pursuits.
The term originates from a popular theory in extreme right circles that soy milk contains estrogen and therefore men make feminine and affect fertility negatively. What it is all about, though, is that the macho man, whose main advocate is only right-wing extremist, is on the verge of extinction.
The toxic macho masculinity of the Patriarchy has not given us much more than shootings, boys who underperform in school, a gender-segregated labor market, men who discriminate against women and beat them. It has also given us leaders like Donald Trump and movements like Incel, that is, women-hating men who live in what they themselves call involuntary celibacy.
Unlike pseudoscience that soy milk makes men women, at the University of Stockholm, convicts have been studied between 1970 and 2017.
15 million convicts show a pattern; a changed man's norm in Sweden may have led to fewer crimes. The crime of younger men has diminished and is now approaching that of women.
To Sweden's radio , Felipe Estrada, a criminologist at Stockholm University, says that an explanation may be that men's traditionally aggressive and masculine behaviors are no longer considered equally reasonable and attractive, which has led Swedish boys and men to learn to control this type of behavior better.
At the same time, firearm violence in Sweden has increased, it is pointed out in the interview. However, this is a violence occurring in a very small circle, says Felipe Estrada, who also says that the trend of firearm violence therefore does not contradict the more general trend of declining male crime. The fact that equality in Sweden has not reached the groups where firearm violence occurs is a reasonable interpretation, Estrada continues.
It is clear that the toxic masculinity that automatically means, among other things, a repression of women and a glorification of aggressiveness has no future. In general, we cannot afford a male role that fills prisons, creates physical and mental suffering, and also keeps women's employment rate and wage growth down.
That the right-wing extremists created the soybean as a model of thinking is therefore really excellent.
Because even though he is hated by right-wing extremists, it is quite obvious that the soybean, unlike the macho, has a role to play in society.
Original Article: https://www.aftonbladet.se/ledare/a/Vbmk5W/sojamannen-ar-framtiden
