Are men okay? Christ. After the grimmest spate of appalling male behaviour in recent memory, from the accounts of Russell Brand’s alleged victims to Lawrence Fox and Dan Wootton’s abhorrent exchange on GB News, and from the murder of 15-year-old Elianne Andam and corresponding arrest of a 17-year-old boy to the teenager who allegedly chopped down that beloved tree, it is hard to hold on to any optimism about male kind.
In any given week, however, the outlook is hardly positive. No, is the consensus of psychologists, counsellors, educators, columnists, feminists, incels and people airing grievances about their exes on social media. Men are not okay. The serious bleeds into the trivial. The specific opens out into the general. Grievances become weapons. Anecdotes become theories. It’s because of the patriarchy. It’s because of testosterone. It’s because men are too busy thinking about the Roman Empire. It’s because computer games are simply too good. It’s because men never call their friends.
It’s because, as Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, ‘the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women’ and now that women are outperforming men in school and at work, the mediocre males can’t handle it. It’s because, as Caitlin Moran claimed in her recent book, What About Men?, ‘I couldn’t think of any book, play, TV show or movie that basically tells the story of how boy-children become men.’ It’s because men are facing ‘cultural redundancy’, explained Richard V Reeves in his rather more rigorously researched Of Boys and Men. It’s because it’s a cruel world. ‘Nobody really cares about me,’ complained one specimen in a recent documentary about the malaise. ‘If I’m not tough on myself, nobody else will be... That’s what I learnt from Andrew Tate.’ To which end, he had paid thousands of pounds to be punched in the face.
I don’t mean to dismiss the hurt felt or caused by these men — or to disparage any sincere efforts to get to the bottom of it. Hell, I may even have shovelled some takes on to the great male content heap, always wondering if it were really possible to say anything meaningful about half of humanity. And yet I always feel something is missing. A tiny shard of optimism, perhaps?
I honestly don’t think there has ever been a better time in history to be a man. There has never been as wide a variety of socially acceptable ways of being a man, examples of how to be one if you choose to look or ways of being celebrated as a man — provided, of course, you’re not a massive dick about it (even then, there’s GB News). Certainly, as a man who has taken on most of the childcare in my household, I’m delighted with the way gender roles have evolved in my lifetime. I find my position rewarding, interesting, meaningful and fun. And yes, there are a thousand complaints I could list the cost of nurseries; societal atomisation; unequal parental leave; the particular tenor of my three-year-old’s whine; existential dread — but I promise, actual or perceived affronts to my masculinity do not come into it. I suppose what I’m saying is, I got 99 problems but a dick ain’t one.
Lucky me. You will counter that married, white, middle-class men have always had it pretty good. But it is so rare that I see feminist progress, greater LGBTQ+ visibility and expanding notions of what a family can be presented as any kind of gain for the average man — including men like me — that perhaps it needs stating. I have conversations along these lines with many different kinds of men, too, and I promise this shift to a more caring, supportive, equal role is something that almost all welcome. The rapper Skepta, for example, was proud to highlight his ‘dad swag’ when interviewed for this magazine recently: ‘I always vowed that I would be a good dad, innit?’ And when I speak to young men, too, I am consistently impressed by their eloquence and thoughtfulness. People often hark back to some golden age of male esteem. But would we swap this for, I don’t know, trench warfare or feudalism or Nuts magazine, or being called ‘gay’ in the playground? I don’t think we would.
And yet the idea that men might in some way have benefited from an opening up of attitudes seems to be anathema. ‘That’s an interesting angle,’ says psychotherapist and couples therapist Hilda Burke, when I try to express some of this. ‘These are not the experiences I’m hearing in the consultation room.’ Among her patients she finds a lot of ‘ambiguity’ around masculinity. ‘Men are wondering: “What are men for?” It’s shifting. And it’s healthy. But it’s hard for men.’
But as she points out, it’s easy to identify the men who are acting out. ‘I think most of us know what toxic masculinity looks like by now,’ says Burke. ‘But maybe we don’t know what healthy masculinity looks like. There’s not much talk about that.’ And this, as it turns out, is a common observation among those who have gamely entered the field. If we don’t talk about positive masculinity, we leave it to the embittered likes of Lawrence Fox and Andrew Tate to define the modern male experience.
Sarah Sternberg, who leads the Reimagining Masculinities project at the men’s health charity Movember, points to a phenomenon she calls the ‘masculinity perception gap’. ‘When we interview young men, they’re interested in a greater plurality of ideas of masculinity,’ she says. ‘They’re much more open and flexible than you’d think. But what’s really interesting is that younger men think that everyone else is much more inflexible and traditional than they are.’
Take vulnerability as an example. In a survey of 3,000 British men, a huge majority disagreed with the statement ‘a man who talks about his worries, fears and problems shouldn’t get respect’. Among younger, working-class men, only 20 per cent agreed with this. However, 44 per cent felt that society told them real men don’t talk about their problems. There were similar discrepancies when it came to household chores, sexual partners and perceptions of homosexuality.
‘The majority of these men have much more liberal ideas, but they’re a bit afraid because they think everyone else thinks something different,’ says Sternberg. She feels that somewhere in the generalised panic about masculinity, we are failing to listen to young men (who are often scared to voice an opinion at all) and instead, assuming — and reinforcing — the worst. Even when it comes to the most toxic emanations of the manosphere, she suggests, there is scant research into what the numbers at the bottom of, say, an Andrew Tate video actually mean. ‘There’s a real lack of nuance. It erases the lived experience of people who are thinking about this stuff.’
This is a concern shared by Nick Hewlett, headteacher at St Dunstan’s independent school in Catford, which has implemented a programme aimed at countering the toxic content his male pupils were seeing online. ‘I think you’d be very surprised if you talk to the boys,’ he says. ‘They all have very different ideas about what it is to be a man.’
Hewlett agrees that there is a tendency to ‘over-platform’ positive female role models, while drawing attention to negative male role models. ‘There’s definitely a vacuum for boys and men, because if there weren’t a vacuum, it wouldn’t be filled with the sort of hate speakers that we’re seeing.’ He notes a glaring absence of positive male role models. ‘They haven’t been packaged up as neatly for us for a whole variety of reasons. And I think now is the time to actually do that.’
There’s definitely a vacuum for boys and men, because if there weren’t, it wouldn’t be filled with hate speakers
One thing that any half-decent parenting manual will tell you is that labels count. If you persistently label a child as ‘naughty’ or ‘rude’ or let’s say ‘toxic’, they soon start to think of themselves as naughty or rude or toxic and start to act that way. What you should do instead is highlight good behaviour and reward it. ‘That was so kind!’ ‘You’re such a helpful boy,’ ‘You’re a great friend.’
I don’t see much of this happening on a societal level. And yet I wonder if these men aren’t hiding in plain sight. I mean, Paul Mescal seems to carry himself pretty well? Marcus Rashford? Louis Theroux? Riz Ahmed? Idris Elba? Olly Alexander? Lewis Capaldi? And have you seen that video of Jack Grealish being sweet to the little blind girl at the Champions League final? I wonder why a footballer being kind or campaigning against child hunger doesn’t register on the masculine-o-meter? The instinct to care comes more naturally to most men than, say, the instinct to get punched in the face or launch a career as a GB News pundit. Then again, my strong hunch is that the people who are keenest to present themselves as defenders of ‘masculinity’ are not the ones who have their masculinity under control.
All the same, Sternberg feels the ‘lack of male role models’ point is a bit overdone — and as we all know, public figures can quickly fall from grace. ‘The role models in most people’s lives are people that they know personally — people they’ve worked with, family members, teachers, coaches,’ she says. ‘When we asked men about role models in our research, they would often cite men in their own sphere a little older than them who felt a little bit aspira- tional. I do think it’s easy to look at mass culture and despair, but most men are seeking and finding role models much more closely in their own lives.’
Hewlett agrees. In fact, the biggest problem boys face is the ‘addictive nature of the online world we’re living in’ — in which we are algorithmically sorted into genders, fed content explicitly designed to make us angry and depressed and, well, we haven’t even got into the free availability of extreme pornographic content. These are, of course, problems that girls face, too — with, if anything, worse effects. ‘I think that’s harder than any of us recognise because they’re just being swarmed by these tech companies with images all the time of idealised stereotypical versions that are often gender portioned,’ says Hewlett. ‘We need to try and counter that. We need to get out of that space.’
In the real world, by contrast, he says he notices men being vulnerable, caring, open-minded, supportive, kind, helpful and attentive all the time. ‘I was out this morning at seven walking into school and watching kids playing football with their coach, who is just an inspiring, modern young man. They all clearly thought he was wonderful for all the right reasons. Look around you. Positive men are everywhere. But it’s about making boys think about that and articulate it — rather than being locked into a social media world where they view identity through that digital lens.’
Look around you. Positive men are everywhere. But it’s about making boys think about that and articulate it
I also wonder if men should spend less time trying to define such slippery concepts as masculinity — and recognise that men are far from homogenous, and that working-class teenagers in Deptford, say, have almost nothing meaningful in common with fifty-something bankers in Richmond. ‘We need to approach any given issue in an intersectional way,’ says Ben Hine, chair of the British Psychological Society’s male psychology section. ‘This means that we shouldn’t pit different groups against each other, but instead we should seek to understand how their experiences are shaped by a variety of different characteristics. It shouldn’t be a zero-sum game of “who has got it the worst”, and it doesn’t have to be.’
My feeling is that it would be far more useful to coalesce around concrete campaigns — equal parental leave; regulation of tech companies; properly funded mental health provision — rather than pin down something as slippery as masculinity. ‘There is change needed at every level to achieve that equality yearned for by all,’ says Hine.
Ultimately, says Hewlett, what he is trying to do in his classes is beyond gender. ‘We’re reflecting on what it is to be human rather than what it is to be male and what it is to be female. And maybe, actually, this vacuum speaks to a broader societal point around humanity. What is human identity? What are we here for? It’s about creating a world in which everybody, anybody, whatever their individual identity, can feel respected and valued as the individual that they are — and the only way that you can do that is to set up structures that enable it.’ A-men.
