Adolescence and the Lost Truths: Why save masculinity when you could save men?

We are barely out of International Women’s History Month and everyone is talking about the crisis of masculinity, yet again. It seems there has never been a time that masculinity has not been in crisis, and ever since men have started scribbling, singing and screenwriting they have been opining about manhood and masculinity. What if the problem is not that masculinity is in crisis, but that masculinity itself is a crisis.

The recent Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’, brilliantly scripted and acted, the Dimbleby lecture by former England football captain Gareth Southgate and a recent report from the Centre for Social Justice on ‘Lost Boys’ have yet again placed discussions about falling outcomes, achievements and status for boys and men in the mainstream centre stage. An Editorial in The Guardian on modern masculinity bemoans the prevalence of toxic portrayals of a masculinity that is hollow and misogynistic.

The Centre for Social Justice argue that society does not value traditional masculine values, which it defines as “courage, resilience and competitiveness”. Nigel Farage worries that men are being told they cannot be men anymore, that they are told they should feel ashamed of doing laddish, blokey things. Across the pond, the Vice President is alarmed that young men are apparently being told they cannot be competitive, or crack a joke or a beer with their friends.

Firstly, it should be obvious to all that there is no women’s rights police force going around yanking pints out of men’s hands, popping up with bleepers to drown out their innocent banter at the pub or cancelling their sports and hobbies. Too many people have failed to notice, or choose to conveniently ignore, a key message of the influential drama ‘Adolescence’, which was the completely normalised, every day, ever present backdrop of sexism and misogyny, in schools, workplaces, and communities. Wish it were so that some secret cabal of feminists were running the world, for it would certainly not look like this if that were true.

Secondly, there is a distinct lack of nuance and critical thinking in the much-vaulted discourse on masculinities from supposedly rigorous politicians, commentators and thinktanks. This is lacking mainly because it starts from a premise which assumes there is such a thing as masculinity and that the answer to gendered problems in society, problems that affect all of us, is more and better gender, or gender done differently; rather than not at all. It is a premise that fuels the market of positive masculinity and healthy masculinity for example. Yet nobody has put forward any definition of positive or healthy masculinity that does not just describe fundamental human values necessary for all of us in community with others.

Take the recent ‘Lost Boys’ report, platforming courage, resilience and competitiveness. Is there something about these values which make them the genetic property of males only, and are there no ways that women are courageous, or resilient or competitive; is this a biological impossibility for women? Alongside this familiar, nostalgic aggrandisement of ideals for manhood, the report makes much of fatherlessness, and the statistic that boys are more likely to have a smartphone than live with their father has spread widely around all sections of the mainstream media this week.

However, the acknowledgement of statistics like this should also highlight the amount of homes and families being headed up by women; women who are raising children, caring for children, often working several jobs to provide for their families. We know from reports into the violence of poverty in the UK that women are what is called the shock absorbers of poverty, often going without meals and provisions themselves to provide for and defend their families. Research by the Young Women’s Trust in 2019, long before the Tory austerity project we are still living through was even fully perpetrated, found that half, 50%, of the young mothers under 25 years old who they polled, regularly did not eat meals in order to make sure their children were adequately fed. Are these women not courageous, are these women not resilient? What about the women who freight their children across violent borders to seek safety, like Maria Arthuer, mother of Spanish footballer Nico Williams, who dedicated his Euro2024 medal to her, thanking her for crossing deserts for him, fleeing death in rural Ghana to build a new life in Spain? What about Giselle Pelicot, Nikita Hand or Christine Blasey Ford, are these women not courageous and resilient?

There are no so-called masculine values that are not simply human values, placed on one side of an unequal dualism in order to justify and excuse a system of inequality where men as a group are superior and women constructed as inferior. This would perhaps be easier to bear if men did in fact live by the romanticised stereotypes that get platformed as standard bearers for masculinity, but unfortunately honourable, protecting and providing men appear to be in short supply, though this reality doesn’t seem to dent the power of the idea.

Women are not the cause of men’s problems, and in a world where statistically men dominate all institutions of mainstream power, it is men who could solve men’s problems if they so wished. The problems men face are mainly economic, as they are for us all, women included. Reports and research note that men worry they cannot set up a home, they cannot afford to provide for a family, they cannot secure a stable career or pursue education and training. Nor can young women, but because masculinity has been defined by work outside the home, and income, these things become attached to men in particular, and so attacks on employment or stagnant wages for example, become framed by society as attacks on men uniquely. It is not, in fact, new that poor boys and men, and Black boys and men, are subjected to the violence of poverty and marginalisation, are excluded from school, are overly scrutinised or criminalised, or are left to fend for themselves in towns that successive governments have stripped of employment, transport, education and services. If the men in power are such men’s rights activists all of a sudden, they have the power t0 change the status-quo; they choose not to, and this is the real enemy of men.