I had a conversation with my grown-up boy last week and we both shared our dismay at the seeming denigration of men and boys, their constant vilification as toxic monsters, the slump to the bottom on the education achievement ladder of working-class white boys and the positive discrimination against men. The result is devastating: 12 men commit suicide a day in the UK. Yep, a day, it isn’t a typo, sadly.
So, what on earth is going on? Well, I have my view and this was cemented last week with the release of the Lost Boys report. In the foreword, Andy Cook said: “What we have uncovered is stark. Boys are struggling in education, more likely to take their own lives, less likely to get into stable work, and far more likely to be caught up in crime The numbers don’t lie - something has shifted, and we cannot ignore it any longer It’s not just about Andrew Tate or online influencers; they are the symptoms, not the cause The deeper truth is that too many boys are growing up without the guidance, discipline, and purpose they need to thrive.”
So why have we ignored it? In the same way that we have refused to discuss issues around Islamism, for fear of offending, we have refused to discuss the problems faced by boys for the fear of offending those who worry that focusing on boys might distract from the challenges facing girls. And this is one focus that I have often voiced.
Let's look at education. It has gradually become more suited to girls; lots of coursework works better for girls. There is less practical work and boys often learn better in a more practical way. They are also prepared for work outside of education by practical subjects that may lead to qualifications such as NVQ’s/BTEC’s in professions dominated by men due their physicality, but this has fallen by the wayside as education focuses on getting everyone to university and a workforce that has been structured around high achieving graduate men.
No one seems to care about the boys who could be the plasterers, bricklayers, builders, firefighters that we so desperately need. There is an apparent reverse snobbery about aspiring to these kinds of roles.
We as a society need to address the real reasons our boys and men are failing - not make facile excuses
Getty Images
Couple with this a focus on female empowerment, as we should, we have lost sight of many important aspects of life that require a healthy male AND female role model.
As a society, we have for many years now continually told boys that they are toxic, are predators, and that even asking a girl for a drink may result in abuse or even accusations of sexual inappropriateness. Is it any wonder that teenage boys find it easier to turn to the internet and porn for their sexual outlet? And over time that porn has become easier to access and more violent. Sometimes our young boys have no idea what romance, flirtation and a beautiful coupling involves. Their teacher has become internet porn. So, our attempts to ‘detoxify’ our boys have actually exacerbated their toxicity as their image of a healthy sexual relationship is warped.
We should then be concerned not about Andrew Tate, but why our boys are flocking to his ideology. What has turned them away from us? I think we have driven them away, convinced them that they have no worth, no role. We have told our girls constantly that they are equal to men, even better, that they don’t need men, they can have everything and do everything on their own. In so doing, we have forgotten the most important relationship that humans have and are biologically formed to have; the male-female partnership.
Over millennia women and men have formed groups and couplings and worked together in an efficient and functioning unit wherein one cannot exist without the other. Men go out and bring back food, and then money to buy food. Women stayed home, raising children, arguably the most important job of all in society, looking after the home, preparing food and often running a small cottage industry business. This was the norm prior to the industrial revolution, and then the break up started. Women were moved into the factory where they couldn’t look after the children or make dinner. Mary Harrington writes beautifully on this being a step backwards - not forward. I would argue that from this point forward as we ‘empowered’ women, we denigrated the family and told people it wasn’t important; the role of men was belittled and lost.
And as each decade went by it got worse. More women had fewer children and later, often raising them in fatherless households. The data is clear; children raised without a father achieve less in every area of life, go to prison more, and earn less.
As men lost their roles and we did nothing to help them redefine themselves and their role as we focused on women, they spiralled downwards in every area. Education, relationships, work. They are truly lost boys.
We need to help them feel valued, to understand their role, to rebuild the family unit. The family unit of a mother and father, preferably the mum raising the kids at home until at least three, if not five, is in my humble opinion the best place to raise healthy children of both sexes. We need, of course, to tell our girls how amazing they are, but we also need to tell our boys, both at home and in society, that they too are brilliant, can achieve anything, that they are needed. We need to re-establish their role, explain that in pure terms we are here to procreate, to do that in a loving equal relationship where no role is superior, both roles rely on the other to exist and that supporting each other in the raising of children is the most important role either sex can do.
We need to reshape education to suit boys and girls even if it means two curricula and teaching the sexes separately, in the same school, so that they have each other outside of the classroom. We need to reintroduce technical schools for those who want to go that route and stop denigrating any pathway that isn’t university. We have enough young men in this country to supply our desperately needed manual workforce, let's be proud of them and get them there, where they will make a very good living.
Somehow, we have to reintroduce flirting, dating, and boy meets girl over the photocopy without being too terrified to ask her for a drink. Society depends on it.
We also need to encourage men’s networks, a garden shed if you will. Men have fewer friends than girls. When they try to have men’s places/clubs/societies, they are told they can’t, it's discriminatory and women must be allowed in. For crying out loud; they are different to us, let them have their space where maybe just maybe, instead of taking their own life, they might talk it through with a mate.
And when we have done this, we need to incentivise relationships, marriage and having children. Again, society depends on it and men do better in a relationship; they live longer and have better health than their unmarried counterparts. We need to treat this as a societal problem that needs a societal focus and solution.
