I agree with Gaby Hinsliff (I was puzzled by younger women’s reaction to Barbie. It turned out Gen Z men held the answer, 2 February) that “all those well-meaning school assemblies on toxic masculinity” aimed at boys don’t work. How can they? Relationship and sex education lessons have a role, but occasional non-examined sessions can never drown out the drip-drip of misogyny that boys get every day; they cannot counter the narrative boys are exposed to when they go back to their lessons, where women are more or less invisible in every part of the curriculum.
Sexual harassment happens because boys believe they are superior to girls. This is not an attitude they are born with; it is one they learn. Studying a diet of Dickens, Orwell, Steinbeck and Shakespeare leaves both boys and girls with no positive female role models, no examples of female literary genius, and no opportunity to discuss a female perspective of the world.
Our campaign End Sexism In Schools advocates for a range of changes in the education system, including redressing the invisibility of women and girls in the curriculum. There is a direct line between that invisibility and sexism in schools that goes all the way through to sexual harassment, assault and rape.
The education system is designed to equip pupils with the skills needed to become productive members of society through delivering academic results, and to teach cultural values and norms. But the system is a microcosm of our society, and schools are also places where the cultural values and norms of sexism and misogyny are learnt and reproduced, and where the sexual harassment of girls is all too common.
Debbie Brazil
Founder, End Sexism In Schools
• I need more evidence to believe that anti-feminism among Gen Z men is new or unusual. In my experience, as a Gen X-er, anti-feminist backlash views in the 1980s among men were so widespread and virulent that whole swaths of women since have either professed anti-feminism or hidden their sympathies. Yet, despite this, feminist values have thrived in many ways, albeit with a sexualised makeover (think Madonna), and younger men have seemed largely calmer, kinder and less threatened by feminist values.
But it would be astonishing if anti-feminism had been eradicated, given that we live in societies still structurally biased in favour of male power. So it is not surprising to me that there is a minority of Gen Z men who blame feminism for their woes (aided and abetted by social media). But I still doubt that it compares to the breadth and depth of anti-feminism today among Gen X men, where it lingers even among liberal, lefty, social-justice types. You just need to scratch the surface a bit and there it is.
Kathleen Fisher
Nouméa, New Caledonia
