Flanderization is a thing.

You know the whole process where the most cartoonishly exaggerated viewpoints gain the most media attention?

Well, that doesn’t only apply to people on the outside - groups and movements internally select for attention-grabbing as well. Over time, whatever gains the most eyeballs gradually becomes normalised. When you get people like Clementine ford unironically saying things like Honestly the coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough, the attention it garners moves the Overton window a little bit each time, pulling the mainstream closer towards it. We’ve become accustomed to the clickbait, but the kids these days are a lot more resistant to it.

Gen Z are a lot more OK than people give them credit for. They grew up living and breathing meme culture, which is massively intertextual and has more layers of irony than my genX ass can even count. They don’t do uncritical acceptance of anyone’s messaging, because they contextualise the living shit out of everything they see, and it’s frankly terrifying.

I’m willing to bet that a lot of the survey respondents ‘looked favourably on’ Tate because they find his awfulness hilarious, and because they find pretending to admire him even funnier because of course he’s a festering piece of shit, that’s the joke (under 27 layers of self-reference). That’d be completely on-brand for my kid, certainly.

At the same time, they’re also going to find terms like ‘toxic masculinity’ unhelpful, because of course they can see how an originally-helpful concept slid via unfortunate phrasing into little more than a derogatory term through popular use and cynical attention-grabbing. They are going to grow into hellaciously effective arts majors, because not only can they see the mechanisms at work, they find them a lot more interesting than the actual content.

I really don’t think this poll reflects what people think it does.