Boys, we are told, are in crisis. They carry knives, they drop out of school, they get fewer qualifications, they take their own lives. The news is filled by the likes of Kyle Clifford, Nicholas Prosper and Axel Rudakubana, and the violence and misogyny they were exposed to before committing appalling murders. The Netflix hit Adolescence, about a 13-year-old arrested for the murder of a girl who had mocked him, is added to the mix and so naturally, some men have decided the fix is a ‘Minister for Men and Boys’.
As my daughter (aged 9) pointed out this morning, they’ve already got the Prime Minister. Parliamentary statistics show they have 59% of MPs, 70% of government posts, and lead 70% of debates. Any woman who has sat waiting for a man to finish wanging on will be unsurprised to learn that male MPs use an average of 10,000 words per debate compared to women’s 9,000, because of course they do.
But that didn’t stop Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Institute going on the Today programme this morning to share his opinion, included in a report he has co-authored for the government, that the root of the crisis can be fixed by a Cabinet post and a “dedicated education strategy” because “boys start falling behind in infant school… by the time you get to post-graduate study, only 36% of UK-domiciled post-graduates are men”.
Except education strategy is developed by men who author government reports, enforced by a civil service where 52% of senior roles are held by men, and enacted by the 62% of secondary school headteachers who are men. If education is letting men down, perhaps it’s time to put someone else in charge. But it’s not all bad. In teaching – as in every job – men may enter with fewer qualifications, but get promoted quicker, and earn more per hour than women. Please, lads, share some of your crisis with the rest of us.
Despite this, men are more likely to take their own lives as adults. They also commit more murders, and are more likely to abuse alcohol. But women are more likely to attempt suicide, which might lead you to wonder if the stats could be explained by the fact men are more violent, and better at killing in general. And most men and boys do not do these things. They do not carry knives, do not harm themselves or others, do not murder a girl who rejects them.
The central premise of Adolescence is that it can happen, and does, and the grown-ups struggle to understand why. The last generation of men to be regularly beaten as children have got the message not to beat their own; but they’ve no idea what to do instead. They’re incapable of talking to their sons, and physical contact, even in moments of extreme emotion, is limited to a manly pat on the shoulder. Even the Detective Inspector, the one dad to actually connect with his son, manages it only after the boy demanded to be heard as part of a murder investigation. Had his son not intruded into his work, they might never have talked at all.
Some viewers think that if it can happen to this family, it can happen to anyone. Some greater, evil force must be at work, if violence and murder are entering middle-class, suburban homes. But that entirely misses the point: it doesn’t happen to everyone. This dad who mows the lawn even on his birthday has terrifying outbursts of rage. His wife and daughter look on, powerless, as he explodes at a shed, at vandals, at all the things he can’t control. A man belted as a kid who feels he’s still getting belted, and occasionally belts right back. No wonder the son designates dad the “appropriate adult” for police interviews – he takes his cue from him.
The domestic situation reflects that of millions of nice, it-couldn’t-happen-here homes, semi-detached families in semi-detached houses, trying to keep the peace rather than point out the elephant in the room. “It’s not our fault,” say the parents who had no idea what their son did online or where he went at night, who saw him on his computer at 1am and just asked him nicely to put the light out, and were surprised he acted up at school. “But it’s okay to say we could have done more.” Well yes. You could have parented better.
But then, so could we all. Adolescence shows teenaged girls suffering from the same, disconnected parenting from grown-ups who work all the hours to buy all the things, while their youngsters walk around boiling with fury and lust and self-loathing. There is not even a government pamphlet made available for parents on how to raise children. Pregnant mums are told about contractions, partners are told to hold their hands, and no-one ever points out that having a baby is the easiest part of being a parent, with painkilling drugs liberally supplied to get you over the worst of it. It’s only when your child comes home with a bullying problem, or a story about race hate in the school playground, or a passing misogynistic remark from a male teacher, that parents realise there is a whole new hellscape opening up beneath their feet. And you no longer get opium or a team of medics to help.
For Andrew Tate, the problem is women, not his own moronic narcissism. In Adolescence, it’s the belief that 80% of girls only fancy 10% of boys, and everyone else is an incel, a bonkers idea entirely disproven by the number of unfanciables we’re not running out of. For people who demand a Minister for Men, the problem is the same as for all the rest: women have too much. It’s women’s fault that men feel bad.
But if the family in Adolescence were on a sink estate, the parents would get the blame. The wife would be downtrodden and the husband would be on an ASBO. What happened to the son would be an inevitable failure of parenting, and a family abandoned to its dysfunction by the state. When the same thing happens in a “nice” house an entirely different conclusion is reached.
Men’s issues with violence, lust and pornography are as they have always been, the same as women’s problems are nothing new, even if it is accelerated by social media. Nothing has got significantly worse for men in the last half century of increasing women’s rights, and statistics show nations with more traditional patriarchal societies – South Africa, Russia, Mongolia, Belarus – have far higher male suicide rates than many countries in western Europe. Putting men in charge does not seem to be helping men as much as men expect that it should. So what should we do?
What’s changed in my lifetime is that girls are taught they can be anything they want to be. Boys are taught the opposite – that there is a model sort of man, a “good dad”, a perfect form of masculinity, which they must attain if they are to be happy. Mums and dads alike are transmitting a mangled message from their childhoods, and if anyone’s in crisis, it’s the “appropriate adults” who have never been properly taught how to do the job. Perhaps we should try asking the children, for once.
