[This article was first published in April 2023 on my website]
If we get to boys early enough, we can reprogramme their gender and make them “fluid”. We should do this because they prevent women and girls from enjoying more equality and are dangerous.
This comes from Global Boyhood Initiative (GBI), which piloted a curriculum for children aged seven to 11 at two London schools and plans to roll it out nationally. It’s in partnership with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s organisation Archewell and podcast Archetypes.
GBI’s report The State Of UK Boys in 2022: Understanding and Transforming Gender in the Lives of UK Boys begins with: “…gender is not tied to sex organs, hormones or biological traits — indeed, many scholars question whether ‘biological’ attributes exist independently of the society that gives them meaning.”
It says families can be gender “factories” by “enacting gender roles and identities” because parents can gender their children before they are born. It describes schools as the setting for “the process of (re)producing gender identities, masculinity cultures and heteronormativity and of sustaining gendered violence”.
Is more radical intersectionality really what children and their parents need? More interference from the state in their private lives? More picking away at whatever’s left of the solid ground that used to be childhood? Absolutely, say the authors.
They include two UCL sociologists: Sara Bragg runs a social justice MA and Jessica Ringrose runs something called the Feminist Educational Engagement Lab. Another author, David Bartlett, writes in a blog for Lifting Limits, the educational group that ran GBI’s pilot:
“How boys and men behave makes an enormous difference to the lives of girls and women, and individuals of all gender identities, in all areas of their lives. From sexual harassment and gender-based violence, to the gender pay gap and relationship breakdown, the attitudes and behaviour of boys and men are hugely influential. So we need to raise a generation of boys who are able to build and sustain healthy, respectful, caring relationships with people of all genders, and not be influenced by restrictive gender stereotypes.”
Can you see how he frames boys negatively? What about boys being inherently good, worthwhile, or deserving empathy and support for their own sake? Apparently they are a handy punch bag to produce a socially engineered outcome. He blames men and boys for sexual harassment, gender-based violence, the gender pay gap and relationship breakdown. We can quickly dispatch his faulty picture with some facts (most references here are thanks to TheTinMen):
Gender-based violence
- 52m women and 50m men are victims of all domestic violence
- 40m women and 29m men are victims of severe domestic violence
(National Intimate Partner Sexual Violence Survey 2016/2017, CDC, US Government) - 0.2% of US men are arrested for violent crime annually
(Department of Justice, FBI and US Census Bureau, 2019) - 172 males and 16 females were murdered on British streets in 2022 (nearly 11 times more males)
- Studies show street robbers in the UK and US report feeling more comfortable targeting men than women
Gender pay gap
Relationship breakdown
The emperor has no clothes. Boys have no responsibility to girls or anyone else to change. No one, other than perhaps their parents, has the right to interfere with their identity. Even if it were desirable, there is no evidence that reprogramming masculinity is possible. On the contrary, we have millennia of evidence demonstrating that males have deep instinctual drives to:
- fight and win
- master their emotions
- provide and protect
(Martin Seager, 2019)
This is constant across time. It’s what boys aspire to in their clunky way and they deserve to have it recognised and honoured for the budding pro-social force it is. If there is a problem here, it is not in masculine instincts, it is in the suffering that boys experience as a result of the lack of initiation and mentoring available, as seen in the especially poor life outcomes for fatherless boys. They need skilful support from experienced men to make the passage from irresponsibility to responsibility. They should not be defanged, but instead shown how to befriend their instincts, temper themselves and find purpose.
The GBI report brushes this huge concern away by making it about females and “non-dominant boys”:
“A further response to the ‘boy problem’ attributes it to the absence of ‘positive male role models’ and ‘father figures’, leading to recruitment drives for men teachers (Brownhill, Warin and Wemersson, 2015). These position men as rescuers and frame women, communities of colour and non-heteronormative families as in deficit. They also frame women as inadequate to parent and teach boys, especially in boys’ teenage years (Martino and Rezai-Rashti, 2012). But the evidence does not support this position.
“Researchers have questioned the benefits of placing the onus on practitioners and teachers to assume a fathering role when they are employed to work with children in a professional capacity (Cushman, 2005, 2008). Cushman notes that the presence of a father figure may not always be beneficial, especially when boys’ experiences may have involved abuse or neglect, and challenges the stereotypical perceptions of what men as ‘role models’ are expected to provide (in many cases, qualities that align with hegemonic and patriarchal masculinities).
“All these prevent a necessary focus and emphasis on girls’ as well as some other non-dominant boys’ needs within educational settings (Ringrose, 2007, 2013) and, hence, constrain our capacity for developing gender-just and equal research and policy.” (Page 30, my emphasis.)
This is politics and ideology above empathy and care. One of the report’s authors, Idil Cambazoglu, displays the words “Istanbul Convention Saves Lives” on her Twitter profile. This Council of Europe treaty mirrors the ideological zeal of GBI and gives you an idea of the coming onslaught of social engineering and its harmful effects:
- Article 3 says gender is socially constructed
- Definition of the violence covered in the Convention: “Gender based violence against women shall mean violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately.” (This does not cover most of the violence experienced by women as very little is “directed against a woman because she is a woman”.)
- Article 12: “Parties shall take the necessary measures to promote changes in the social and cultural patterns of behaviour of women and men with a view to eradicating prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices which are based on ….. stereotyped roles for women and men.” This could be interpreted as removing the concept of ‘mother’ and ‘father’
- Article 14 says these ideas should be taught to all pupils in education
- Article 18. General Obligations: the concepts contained in the Convention must be applied in future UK laws.
Meanwhile, boys are struggling on many fronts and need more support. Here are some examples:
Circumcision
Male circumcision remains a lawful practice in the UK despite it being risky and causing trauma, psychological and sexual problems
School exclusion
The permanent exclusion rate for boys was over three times higher than that for girls (0.15% vs 0.04%) in 2016/17
The fixed period exclusion rate was almost three times higher (6.91% vs 2.53%) (Department for Education)
Achievement in school
Boys lag behind girls at every stage of education
Access to higher education
Over 55% of undergraduates are female
Portrayal in advertising
The person portrayed as the ‘idiot’ is almost always a man. The sensible person (who bought the product) is usually a woman
Losing Dad
90% of parents not living with their children are male, affecting boys more severely
(Find more information in the A Boy Today report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Men and Boys.)
Global Boyhood Initiative says it “promotes gender equity by fostering positive masculinity in boys and men”, yet it attacks traditional masculinity, saying it’s harmful to boys. Unfortunately, there is a tradition in academia of disparaging males. A notorious recent example was the American Psychological Association’s 2019 guidelines on therapy for men and boys, with guidelines 1 and 3 describing masculinity as a social construct and the supposed influence of patriarchy on mental health.
Christopher Ferguson, professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida and a fellow of the APA, wrote a peer-reviewed assessment of the guidelines, which he called “an assault on traditional men and boys”. He told Newsweek:
“What I found was a mess. Far from there being a slam dunk link between traditional masculinity and negative mental health or behavioral [sic] outcomes, the evidence was inconsistent and, across the board, methodologically very weak. The authors of the guidelines are uniformly focused on the social construction of gender, ignoring biological inputs to both sex and gender identity.
“But even worse in my opinion, the APA’s report is clearly disparaging of traditional men and their families, linking traditional, masculine values to an entire suite of negative mental and physical health outcomes — with no real scientific rationale. Indeed, it was politics that motivated these conclusions. The guidelines were written from a radical, intersectional perspective.”
John Barry, former chair of the Male Psychology Section and one of the authors of a new British Psychological Society briefing paper on practising therapy with men, says: “Increasingly over the past few decades, men’s mental health has been misunderstood or overlooked to an unacceptable degree. It is to the benefit of everyone in society to be able to properly understand men’s mental health problems — how they manifest, what causes them, how they might be prevented etc — and learn how to treat them effectively.”
Here are three quotes from the BPS briefing paper that I’d like the authors of The State Of UK Boys in 2002 report to reflect on and respond to.
- “Therapy for men and boys, as for any demographic, should be based on empathy and respect for the identity of the client within the human spectrum.”
- “Evidence-based approaches should be used where possible. Where this is not possible, approaches that are unlikely to cause harm to the patient should be used. Ideological approaches should be avoided. The controversy surrounding the ‘patriarchy theory’ of men’s mental health, and questionable constructions of masculinity which include negative traits (Mahalik et al.,2003), indicate that it is not popular with the general public, who are of course the potential clients of psychologists.”
- “Terminology that puts masculinity in a negative light, such as toxic masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, should be discouraged. Even if these terms are intended to describe specific behaviours, they almost inevitably imply that all men are dysfunctional in some way. The term ‘masculinities’ can also be problematic because it implies that masculinity is socially fluid without any core biological contribution. It is more helpful to understand masculinity as the result of interactions between social, biological and evolutionary forces (Barry & Owens, 2019).”
Finally, to drive the juxtaposition between sense and nonsense home I hope, I’ll leave you with this from page 32 of the GBI report. Sorry.
“An intersectional perspective is critical to enlarge the range of masculinities available to boys and to strengthen diverse boys’ capacity to resist and desist from distinct forms of social pressures. A complex approach that goes beyond individualised methods, such as the approaches often mobilised for bullying, can help boys challenge hierarchies that distort, suppress and harm themselves and others. It can also help build commonalities: what young people have in common rather than only how they are different.”
