If you judged modern boyhood from the headlines, you’d think we were broken – radicalised, misogynistic, angry. But as a teenage boy myself, I don’t see a generation of lost boys around me. I see young men trying to make sense of a world that seems apathetic to our voices.
Between the ages of 12 and 14, I was drawn into harmful online communities promising me money, meaning and manhood. Muscular, wealthy men, parading through Dubai draped in designer labels and flanked by beautiful women flooded my feed. They said there was no excuse for the rest of us not to be in their position too, and offered what they claimed was a blueprint to get us there. Misogyny was rife in these communities, as was political extremism.
I want these issues to be called out – and I’m glad they’re being actively discussed in the media. In fact, reading nuanced discussion in the press which confronted these spaces’ problematic aspects helped me escape the handcuffs binding me to these “role models”. It made me consider how they were profiting from polarisation and insecurity.
Yet I strongly believe we need to reframe how we talk about these issues: not as innately evil flaws in the young male demographic, but as an expression of uncertainty. Last week, I saw a video using the term “toxic masculinity”. I realised how desensitised I had become to seeing those two words paired together on my feed, such that they seemed intertwined – like “fast food”, “hard work”, or “bright idea”. I could not remember the last time I saw “masculinity” appear without being coupled with “toxic”.
Can society expect anything other than uncertainty when masculinity is almost always presented as toxic? When I was engrossed in the manosphere, this type of messaging would only have alienated me further from mainstream society, driving me closer to the influencers claiming that it was biased against young men. I think the potency of the manosphere would be crushed if there were constructive alternatives for young men to engage with.
At the core of this profit-generating machine, behind the superficial lifestyles and harmful views, there sits a feature that made a younger me dive deeply into the clutch of these influencers. They make us feel listened to, heard and considered. “Andrew Tate cares. School doesn’t. You need to realise that mate,” a close friend told me. When society is not providing a listening ear, an algorithm will fill the void.
