The obsession with ‘toxic masculinity’ shows no sign of abating. As reported this weekend, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has warned of ‘the misogyny increasingly gripping our schools’.
In response to this threat, the government is to issue guidance for teachers to look out for signs in the classroom of ‘incel culture’ stemming from the ‘manosphere’. Teachers of pupils aged over 14 are to be told to look for clues that boys were being drawn into aggressive misogyny, behaviour that could lead to violence and sexual abuse. They are to be on guard for rhetoric indicating teenage boys are being radicalised into ‘hating women’.
A preferable route would be to stop teaching boys to hate themselves in the first place. This is the source of so much discontent among teenage boys, the reason why so many are becoming dysfunctional to begin with, and the reason why many take refuge in the manosphere.
A good first step would be to cease the narrative of ‘toxic masculinity’. Teenage boys are fed a relentless diet which implies that men and masculinity are the problem. A report from the Family Education Trust (FET) in September showed that a third of schools teach pupils about ‘toxic masculinity’. In one school’s teaching materials on the subject, the FET found that children are told that while masculinity ‘in and itself is not necessarily a harmful thing’ certain masculine traits can be ‘problematic’. The FET concluded that current teaching presents the idea that ‘men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society’.
In our current anti-male climate, even the term ‘toxic masculinity’ seems redundant, a tautology even. Masculinity by itself is perceived as ‘problematic’, to use that weasel word. Competition, fortitude, stoicism, individuality: all such traits are frowned upon in a society that sees co-operation, fragility, empathy and compassion as more important. Society at large reinforces this message, with books such Caitlin Moran’s What About Men?, from last year, seeking to liberate the reader from all the ‘rules’ about ‘what a man should be’ and all that ‘swagger’ and ‘the stiff upper lip’ stuff.
Men have become the new Second Sex, the new inferior, imperfect human template. ‘Traditional gendered roles’ are scorned because these roles are regarded as outdated and pathological. A boy displaying classic male teenage behaviour, such as boisterousness or competitiveness, or even taciturnity and unsociability, is regarded as a boy with problems, rather than a boy just being a boy.
Many have argued for some time that the problem of dysfunctional behaviour of boys begins in the classroom. In March last year, Mark Brooks, a co-founder of the UK-based Men and Boys Coalition, said that schools should shoulder part of the blame for the popularity of Andrew Tate, following a survey found that almost a third of young men think society does not care about them. ‘Boys don’t feel that schools are listening to them or taking the problems they face seriously enough’, he said.
The manosphere and the allure of poisonous types such as Tate is indeed a problem. But it is as much a symptom as a cause. Many boys, some without fathers or father figures, and raised in a culture that fails to impart positive masculine values, seek a haven where they aren’t constantly derided merely on behalf of their sex. It is in this forum where they learn instead the worst, old-fashioned masculine values: aggression and misogyny.
The manosphere is awash with resentful and nasty ‘incels’, involuntary men and boys who believe they will have never have sex with women due to their own looks and social standing. But alongside their misogyny and bitterness, and consistent with these themes, are narratives of self-loathing, worthlessness and talk of suicide. The manosphere has emerged as a refuge for a culture that deprecates men and masculinity.
There is nothing wrong with teaching boys to be tough and resilient. Girls should be taught to be the same. To blame ‘toxic masculinity’ is not only misleading, it perpetuates the problem it seeks to address. The longer masculinity is treated as a problem in itself, the longer boys will fail to develop into strong, proud and self-reliant men and degenerate instead into nasty resentful individuals who hate women and hate themselves.
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