For as long as I’ve been doing this job I’ve been asked to comment on the supposed crisis in masculinity, as if the editor of a glossy men’s style magazine devoted to fast cars and fancy watches and posh restaurants might have some special insight into this sort of thing. And, because I have no special insight into this sort of thing, for the most part I’ve blithely dismissed it as media scaremongering.
Crisis? What crisis? I’m a man, I have lots of friends who are men, colleagues who are men, and we’re all, to greater and lesser degrees, doing fine, thanks very much.
But then I would say that. I’m a white-collar, middle-class professional in my 50s. Any crisis I might be suffering is strictly of the overprivileged midlife variety.
Gareth Southgate, the former England football player and manager, delivered the prestigious Richard Dimbleby Lecture, named for the late BBC grandee. He used the opportunity to express his concern that “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers” have become the most prominent role models for boys and young men, leading to a crisis in mental health. He pointed to the malign influence of social media and online gaming, gambling and pornography.
“Young men are suffering,” Southgate said. “They are feeling isolated. They are grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society.”
Influencers, Southgate said, “willingly trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or dominance, never showing emotion, and that the world—including women—is against them”.
(Andrew Tate is the most famous of these, but there are thousands of them, including some of the most powerful men in the world: the men who own the social media companies, not just those who use them.)
The day before Southgate’s remarks were released, Jack Thorne, the co-writer, with the actor Stephen Graham, of the grimly compelling new Netflix drama Adolescence, published a piece in The Guardian about the experience of researching that show, which is about a teenage boy, Jamie, who murders a teenage girl, Katie, under the influence of online “incel” culture and the so-called “manosphere”.
Thorne said that, had he been a teenage boy now, rather than in the 1990s, he would not have been immune to the messages that helped push Jamie towards his tragic act.
“I knew almost immediately,” Thorne wrote, “that if I was an isolated kid, I would find answers as to why I felt a bit lost. One of the central ideas—that 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men—would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod. The path then becomes: what do you do to upset that equation? How do you manipulate and harm in order to reset a female-dominated world that works against you? If you believe one part of the logic, the other half becomes conducive.
“Jamie is not a simple product of the ‘manosphere’. He is a product of parents that didn’t see, a school that couldn’t care and a brain that didn’t stop him. Put 3,000 kids in the same situation and they wouldn’t do what he did. Yet spend any time on forums on 4chan or Reddit, spend any time on most social media platforms and you end up, quite quickly, in some dark spaces. Parents can try to regulate this, schools can stop mobile phone access but more needs to be done. There should be government support because the ideas being expressed are dangerous in the wrong hands and young brains aren’t equipped to cope with them.”
The problem diagnosed by Southgate and Thorne, in other words, is, to a great extent, one of unfettered access to technology, and the content it publishes and promotes.
Thorne thinks the Government should legislate to limit children’s exposure to social media and the internet—or to deny them access completely. As the father of a 15-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy, I agree with him. Stricter regulations for tech companies, with fines for those who allow under 16s to have accounts, as in Australia? Absolutely. Good idea.
But kids are ingenious. They will find a way. Prohibition never works. And what about 17-year-olds, 18-year-olds? Are they not susceptible to the appeal of the manosphere?
In a parallel universe, perhaps, we would ban anyone under 16 from owning a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop. In the real world, we must accept that the open sewer of social media is not going to close any time soon. And kids are going to swim in it, whether we want them to or not.
Gareth Southgate talks about the need for men to “role model” the values of strength through “character” rather than “status”. He wants boys and young men to be able to see that successful masculinity is generous, compassionate, selfless. “The way you treat others is more important than how much money you make.”
It’s easy to agree with this sort of thing, harder to practise it. The first thing us older men could do would be to make it clear, at Southgate’s suggestion, that we do not respect other men because they are rich or powerful, because they drive fast cars and wear fancy watches and disrespect women.
We do not support the toxic pussy-grabber in the White House, or the rancid Musk or the appalling Zuckerberg. (Best way not to support those two goons? Don’t post on X or Instagram.) And we reject the misogyny of the manosphere.
The first thing I could do is to stop dismissing the crisis in masculinity as media scaremongering. It’s real, and it’s dangerous. And it’s important that men like Southgate and Thorne keep reminding us of this fact.
