In recent years, positive male role models have been touted as a means of saving young boys from the clutches of misogynistic influencers. But can ‘good men’ really fix misogyny?
Masculinity is always in crisis, and the crisis is always new. In 1100, chronicler Oderic Vitalis railed against pointy shoes, for initiating young men into lives of effeminacy and sexual deviance. In the 1930s, George Orwell blamed the suburbs and middle-class morality. Today, it’s violent misogynist Andrew Tate and his legion of off-brand masculinity influencers.
Tate’s popularity with young boys has triggered a wave of cultural anxiety; the critically acclaimed limited series Adolescence, released in March, imagined a radicalised 13-year-old boy stabbing a female classmate to death. The question of how to help boys avoid this fate is omnipresent in British media, from slots on Question Time about how to teach boys “healthy masculinity” to Sir Gareth Southgate’s recent Dimbleby lecture for the BBC, in which he denounced “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers” who trick men and boys into believing that “success is measured by money or dominance”. The patriarchal violence is real, the misogyny is real – but will it really go away if we get rid of the pointy shoes, the suburbs, and the manfluencers?
At this point, keeping boys off the internet is an obvious non-starter. Instead, groups like Jessop Primary School Dads and Male Carers Club, and organisations like Men at Work and Progressive Masculinity Ltd have tried to offer positive alternatives, and warm and emotionally open male role models. One thing everyone seems to agree on is that dads are at the heart of this: Sarah Owen, Labour MP and chair of the Women and Equalities Committee told the BBC “for young boys, there have to be positive role models”. Conservatives are positively frothing at the mouth to blame “fatherlessness” for misogyny, from the Centre for Social Justice’s ‘Lost Boys’ report, to the mentoring charity ‘Lads Need Dads’.
Envisioning a way out of oppressive masculinity is obviously better than defending it, but the positive masculinity movement hasn’t done much envisioning
The language and details vary, but Britain’s left and right broadly agree: we need to declare war on bad masculinity, in favour of good, fatherly masculinity. ‘Toxic masculinity’ – a catchall for masculine violence, sexual entitlement and emotional repression – can be prevented through a sufficient dose of its non-destructive version, variously referred to as positive, healthy, authentic, or pro-social masculinity. It’s a comforting vision. Secure, happy, confident men and boys, who would never write “make me a sandwich” on homework for their female teachers. It’s not a new vision, though. And it hasn’t worked yet.
Can we really solve patriarchal violence with good patriarchs, who deserve their authority and always get things right? Envisioning a way out of oppressive masculinity is obviously better than defending it, but the positive masculinity movement hasn’t done much envisioning. ‘Healthy masculinity’ means both everything and nothing at the same time. Plus, some of its advocates are startlingly conservative: a recent BetterHelp ad features a man with a soothing voice being asked what ‘healthy masculinity looks like in 2025’, and telling the listener “maybe the tropes of provide and protect still hold,” clarifying that “maybe it’s less about muscles right now and maybe it’s about protecting your partner’s spirit or protecting their emotional safety.” Some are pushing back against traditional gender roles in more meaningful ways, but the language of ‘healthy masculinity’ leaves their endgame a great big mystery box. Do they want the borders of masculinity to be less policed, or do they just want to slightly expand the territory of what is acceptable for men? And where, if at all, do women fit into this?
‘Toxic masculinity’ was not a concept born of feminism. The phrase was coined, at least in print, by Shepherd Bliss, a member of the mythopoetic men’s movement – a mostly 1980s and 90s phenomenon that tried to explain why men felt like shit. Their answer: men were stuck in shallow – or toxic – masculinity, and needed to find their lost ‘deep’ or ‘heroic’ masculinity, mostly via wilderness retreats. Robert Bly, the movement’s most well-remembered leader, saw his role as complementary to feminism. He even claims in his NYT best-seller Iron John that the book had been vetted by his daughters, who saw nothing to offend women serious about liberation. This may well be true, as the book is thin on actual content. The trick it pulls is to describe common, sometimes unspoken, human experiences (sexual and relational shame, inexplicable anger, feeling defective) and then attribute them to manhood. Bly floods the reader with rich mythic imagery, drawing attention away from his conclusions, which are few, and sometimes ugly. Apolitical, centre-of-centre, and too kooky to catch on, the mythopoetic men’s movement’s main legacy was its dichotomy of ‘toxic’ and ‘heroic’ masculinity, and its explanation for the former – ‘father-hunger’.
The issues facing men and women cannot be solved separately: we cannot solve men’s struggles without giving up the demand that men be the benevolent patriarch
When Bly called young men fatherless, he was speaking sympathetically. But the term’s trajectory has been anything but, as the 90s wore on and sociologists and psychologists started using ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘father-hunger’ to blame the school-to-prison pipeline on Black families and school shootings on a lack of masculine role models. Now in the 2020s, to comment ‘fatherless behaviour’ on TikToks made by queer people, girls, women, and particularly Black and trans people has become a nasty meme. The same boys who are watching Andrew Tate, who we are told suffer from a lack of fatherly warmth, are using ‘fatherless’ as an insult. There are real needs that ‘healthy masculinity’ is trying to address – shame, fear, a lack of security and community. But they are human needs, not exclusively male needs, and the solution being offered is a cruel fantasy. What if there was a way of wielding power and authority that never crushed anyone? What if your dad never, ever, let you down?
Many people are desperate for men and boys to be saved from the clutches of violence and misogyny, but many of those same people do not want to risk the possibility of boys not becoming masculine – or, worse, not becoming men. It’s no coincidence that in a time of unprecedented public hatred directed towards trans women and girls, ‘healthy masculinity’ is back in the headlines. But even for the men who are meant to benefit, it’s a poisoned chalice. In Richard V. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men, he stumbles upon the core of the problem: Reeves approvingly quotes a headmaster who says he wants his boys to be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” This is more than a little sad; you sometimes get the sense, reading this material, that the most positive and unimpeachable thing a young man can do is die heroically. But it also shows how unclear it is what boys are supposed to be doing outside of this hypothetical shipwreck.
There are obvious problems with using softened ideas of masculine power – ‘courage’, ‘leadership’, ‘protection’ – as a way to market masculinity as good. That’s just sexism via the back door. But those are also not traits that anyone, male or otherwise, can build their whole life around. The issues facing men and women cannot be solved separately: we cannot solve men’s struggles without giving up the demand that men be the benevolent patriarch, the powerful gender, the ever-so-different counterpart of women with ever-so-different problems.