Woman's Hour - Listener phone in: Boys - what's it's like to be one in 2024?

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

On today's Woman's Hour phone-in we ask what it's like to be a boy in 2024 and how society is shaping our future men. On Monday we spoke to Catherine Carr about her Radio 4 series About the Boys. She spoke to boys up and down the country about how they felt about subjects like sex and consent, masculinity, friendship, life online and education and she found out that boys were experiencing confusing and often troubling messages about their role in society. She joins us, along with Richard Reeves, the President of the American Institute for Boys and Men to take your calls about boys.Please get in touch with your experiences and thoughts about boys; from bringing them up to being one.The phone lines open at 0800 on Friday 3 May. Call us on 03700 100 444 or you can text the programme - the number is 84844. Texts will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media we're @BBCWomansHour. And you can email us through our website.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer Laura Northedge Studio Manager: Bob Nettles

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning and welcome to Friday's Woman's Hour. We're doing things a bit differently today. We are going to be hearing from you. The next hour is a phone-in dedicated to the subject of boys. This morning I want to know your experience of being a boy, bringing up boys, how we're shaping the next generation of lads,

the pressures they face, the impact of social media, how much time they spend online, who their role models are. Maybe your son had a challenging time fitting in. Maybe they don't quite fit the mould of what society thinks of as masculine. What is masculinity anyway? And what society thinks of as masculine. What is masculinity anyway? And what does all of this mean for girls? And are you a parent who has both boys and girls? Just sit and have a little think for a minute. Do you treat them differently? Think how society might have conditioned you or not. To help us unpack some of your questions

and really get into the subject, I'm joined by Catherine Carr, a mother of sons, who's made a brilliant Radio 4 series called About the Boys, which you can hear on BBC Sounds. And joining us from the US is Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. And most importantly, we're going to be joined by you this morning. We want to hear all of your thoughts and boys, the challenges and the joy of bringing up our future men.

The phone-in number is 03700 100 444. That's 03700 100 444. You can also continue to text the programme. It's 84844. If you decide to send me an email, you can do so by going to our website. Catherine, Richard, before I come to you, I think we should go straight to the calls and speak to Emily. Morning, Emily. Morning. Hi.

Lovely to have you on Woman's Hour. You've got twin boys. I do. Yes. Tell me about your experience of bringing them up. Well, firstly, before I had boys, before I had children myself, I've been a nanny for 30-something years. So I've looked after lots of children. And I definitely think that boys and girls play differently, interact differently, are just different. And I know that's not necessarily what people want to hear. But I definitely see, you know, different toys being used by different sexes my boys are

very boy and they present very boy out in public you know bashing things climbing things you know all that kind of stuff at home one of my boys is a lot less boy and he's very aware even at a very young age um that it's not what's expected of him in society and it certainly hasn't come from me so he likes kind of purple unicorns and he's asked for a unicorn do they cover and a few months ago i was tidying his room before friends were coming over and i he knew that friends were coming over and i found he had hidden some of his soft toys, his purple unicorn soft toys and all that kind of stuff. He had hidden them under some cushions so that the other boys wouldn't see. How old are they, Emily?

They are eight, going on 25. So two eight-year-olds both present as quite, like you said, boy-y when they're out, technical term. But at home you see them being very different. So one of them has already absorbed some kind of social code. Yes, absolutely. And it definitely hasn't come from me because I bought them. I mean, they were, you know, one and a half years old walking down the road with those little fold-away buggies that we see, you know, they've had I've bought them Russian dolls I've bought them dolls I've bought

them bricks I've bought them trucks but so they've had a really you know right wide variety of toys and because of my job I've you know bought home old toys that you know not getting used so I've had loads of different toys in the house and they've cooked they've cleaned but they've also climbed trees so they do everything but one of them's hiding an aspect of himself so as their mum as their mum what how do you feel about what's happening and what you're witnessing okay so I feel bittersweet about it because on the one hand I think well I can support him and let him have what he wants and do what he wants. And if that's what he likes, then great. But I think also it's amazing and I'm quite kind of in awe of him at how emotionally intelligent he is.

Because we tend to think of men as not emotionally intelligent, right? We tend to think of them as just kind of soggy and kind of you know caveman-y and I think wow you're you're intelligent enough to know this so I can support you through that and let you have we're all complex we're not no one's just one person are they we all have different sides to us and I think maybe if more people would let their boys experience these things, we might have better quality men in the future. Emily, thank you very much for your call and sharing that story with us. 03700 100 444, it's a phone in, we're talking about boys. I'm going to come to Richard and Catherine,

who are joining me for the entire programme. Richard, I'm going to come to you first. I mean, Emily's touched on quite a few things there but before we get into what she said i'd like you to sort of discuss and tell us a bit about what this generation growing up in 2024 are having to deal with that's different to what came before because we are in new territory aren't we yeah thank you uh and it's a great start i think from from emily uh so i'd like yeah we'll come back to that, I hope. But yeah, I think that a lot of boys and young men now, so I've raised boys, mine are all in their 20s now, and I raised them both in the UK and in the US. And I think there are some things a little bit different for them. One is some of the presumptions that they would kind of be ahead, right, in school or work have quite rightly been challenged.

And so there's this sense of like a much greater equality thank goodness but i think there's also a question mark around like well when is it good to be a boy when is it not you know is masculinity a thing or not when should i think emily touched on this when should i express it when should i not and i think there's a bit of a danger now that we're a bit clearer with a lot of our boys and young men about what they should not do you know know, how they should not be, rather than what they should do, rather than what they should be. And if that leaves a lot of them struggling, more than usual, like it's always a struggle. But I think that's left many of them sort of oscillating, perhaps, between sort of versions, which is like, well, masculinity is just bad and toxic. And so the

more boy-y boy you are to adopt that term which i will now be adopting going forward that's bad um but but you know that's bad uh or like you're not you're supposed to be become some sort of hyper hyper masculine figure uh big muscly guy which is kind of retrograde and so somewhere between being you know super reactionary and basically you know aive girl, if I can put it that way, a lot of boys find themselves a little bit lost and a little bit unsure how to be in the world. And that creates a huge opportunity, I think, for figures online and a sense of drift and uncertainty, which we're seeing in many boys. Catherine, you're the mother of sons and you've made this documentary speaking to lots of young men up and down the country how are they affected

by modern life and what do you think are the big big thing issues facing this generation? I think it's so interesting what Richard said I think he hit the nail on the head and what I found in the series is and this came from some of the conversations I had with my sons as well, that they felt sort of in trouble and bad before they'd even started growing up. So they had these messages about don't behave like this. Men in the past have been like this and that is bad and you're a boy and you're going to grow to be a man. So don't do this. But they didn't really have a sense of themselves being men and having privilege at that age. So they were a little bit confused, like they're being told that they've got all of this privilege and all of these things and they should behave in this way because of that. But they were 10 and they were in a classroom with 10 year old girls and they found that really difficult to compute.

And when I went around the country for the series talking to these teenagers, there was very definitely a sense of, well, I don't know where really to look if there are role models lacking around me for all sorts of different and acceptable ways to express whatever it means to be a man. And I think Richard's right. A lot of them then talk about what's portrayed online, and they had a very clear sense that there was this impossible list of things they were supposed to achieve. Tall, good looking, strong, entrepreneurial, good with the girls, strong jawline, strong hairline. Jawline is a big thing. Mums of boys listening will probably know this. And I thought that's a very narrow, but also very difficult list of things to achieve. And yeah, I don't know what other people phoning in might say, but that was what the boys told me.

Well we'll find out and we're going to speak to someone in just a moment but before I do I'm just going to come to some of the messages that are coming in you can keep texting 84844. Gemma says as a teacher many boys over the years have told me that they don't really like football they just feel they have to go along with it in order to fit in. They've also said that football culture drags them into fights and makes them unhappy. It's 2024 and boys still don't feel socially safe to be themselves and follow genuine interests and are told off by adults for liking things that are, in adverted commas, for girls. Let's speak to our next caller who'd like to remain anonymous. Good morning.

Oh, hello. I've raised three boys and two girls, so I've experienced both. Excellent. So how old are they now? Are they grown up? From late 20s through to the youngest one, 14. So what would you like to say? What's your take, having done both? I feel like society has a very one-dimensional view of men. And so, therefore, I think young men really lack role models from my own experience of boys growing up who've looked for role models and come across people

like Andrew Tate and it can create quite a toxic misogynist sort of view of women. And also the early access through internet and social media to things like pornography gives a very twisted view of relationships that isn't real, that's very much through a very toxic sort of male gaze of violence towards women. So as their mum then, as the mum of three boys, how did you navigate through that? Because they're grown up now, aren't they?

Yeah, I wouldn't say that I navigated through it. Obviously, I've been there to support them and point to things, etc. But my experience is that they're very vulnerable. Because they're men, a lot is expected of them to be strong and to be um all these things that men are supposed to be but at the end of the day until they're 25 they're psychologically emotionally vulnerable just the same as the of the girl is so i've had um experience of you know university trips where um a son was drug robbed um and woke up on the beach at three o'clock in the morning and it was on a university trip but you know lots of things you know stolen his phone wallet um and things like the Andrew Tate experience that was grown out of and replaced that

with a group of mentors in America in a men's group which was Reformed Baptist. So that's channeled now to a very positive masculinity that has a very positive relationship. And that's one of your sons you're talking about. So how did you deal with that when he was going through that? Did you talk to him about it? Did you ask him?

What was your thought on why that was happening? I did talk to him at the time and supported him 100%. But at the end of the day, he had to go to a very dark place and come home. And he reformed himself through searching. Yeah. I'm going to bring Richard in on this. More positive support. Yeah. Richard.

Yeah, well, I think, first of all, that identifies something that you alluded to, Anita, in the intro, which is this. There's a world online now. So it's not like the only place that boys are going to go is in the real world. They are going to go online as well. I have to sort of recommend Catherine's series as well. I think just as a way of there's too many conversations where it's people like us talking about these boys rather than the boys themselves being given voice. And I think her series just honestly does a magnificent job of doing that. So I want to thank her for her work.

And I think we're in this very difficult moment now where to come back to this original term from Emily about being boy-y and girl-y, where I think we're trying to strike this very difficult new balance where we're trying to say, look, it's okay as a boy to have some things that are, quote, girl-y, right? And I can certainly remember some of that from my own upbringing but equally you've got to make sure that they don't feel bad for things that are more boy more associated with being a boy and and to have that balance because

on average boys are going to do a few more boy things than girly things or more boys are going to be a bit more boy right i'm using this term quite quite precisely now i think and but and that's okay as well what we have to do is not police the boundaries in in the way that we have in the past in either direction and just relax a little bit lean back allow that there are some differences on the average between girls and boys without one being better than the other and without without coming down hard on them you know for one or the other and i think it's really difficult to recognize we've made real progress on this and we're in danger now i think in some places of actually cracking down on boy behavior among boys rather

than girly behavior among girls and then probably in other places where we're still doing the traditional thing of cracking down on girly behavior among boys rather than girly behavior among girls. And then probably in other places where we're still doing the traditional thing of cracking down on girly behavior among boys, rather than just letting them flourish as who they are. And so it's a difficult balance we're trying to strike now. And I think that's the difficulty that many boys and men are finding themselves in. It's like, is it okay to do traditionally male things? Is that still okay?

As long as I don't get defined by it. And I think the thing here is struggling towards is a world that's equal without being androgynous and that's an incredibly difficult place for us to try and land but I think it's where we are trying to land now. Catherine? I think that's so interesting a lot of the boys that I spoke to they had this kind of inside outside thing going on yeah so if you oh, how do you think people view you? So some year 10s I spoke to in Rochdale, lovely boys said, you know, our teacher told us that she saw some boys going down the street.

They had their hoods up and she was, quote-unquote, quite terrified until they took their hoods down and she realised they were really nice lads from the school that she taught at. And another 13-year-old in Keighley I spoke to said, you know, boys are considered rude disgusting this that this whole list of negative adjectives and then he sort of paused and said they don't think that we're soft inside it's all not true it's just really hard to open up as a boy so there is this kind of how we're perceived and whether our boyish behavior is perceived automatically negatively and whether we're given the chance to talk about our feelings and say all the things that we think and feel that might differ day to day let alone boy to boy.

Another thing that was brought up in that conversation with the caller there was role models but and Andrew Tate's name came up so we and we talked we've talked about this a lot on Woman's Hour what is happening let's just get an overview of why some young men are turning to these so-called role models who are pumping out quite a misogynistic view of women and the world generally. Richard? Yeah, I think what's happening is that there's a question to be answered. There's a vacuum around this question of how should I be, right? And again, this has happened very fast.

It's happened in a generation. Boys are searching for answers. And increasingly in this modern world, they're going to look online. And for all that great list of attributes that Catherine mentioned earlier, including the jawline, which has had men all over the country rushing to the mirror. I blame Desperate Dan. She's right, of course, is that it is at least clear and they're very definitive about it and they say be like this be like me be like a b c d it's uh and if you're relatively young and you're

impressionable that's that's desperately what you're after so but i think what's happened is that too many too many of our institutions don't have enough men in them like a third of our primary schools don't have a single male teacher now in the UK. We're seeing a massive decline in the share of men in classrooms, in communities generally. And I think the best answer to someone like Andrew Tate or these other online reactionary figures isn't another online figure. I don't think you can beat them online. I think it's a real man. I think it's dads being involved in their kids' lives. I think it's neighbours. I think it's community leaders. I think it's teachers. I think it's dads being involved in their kids lives i think it's neighbors i think it's community leaders i think it's teachers i think it's scandalous that we're not doing more

to attract more men into the education profession or addressing the problems of boys in education more generally and so i actually think that there's a bit of a call really to men who might be listening to this too which is that actually there's a boy in your life who could probably benefit from very quickly and then we'll go to a caller. Yeah, I did talk to Professor Martin Robb from the Open University, who's researched role models for years, and then beautifully spoke to a lovely boy in Carmarthen

who hadn't read Martin Robb's research, maybe not unsurprisingly, and came out with a very eloquent explanation that your ideas of masculinity might be informed by simply where you live and who's around you. And I thought, well, there. I'm just going to read a couple of more messages because we've got lots of texts coming in on this as well i'm a single mum of a nearly four-year-old bringing up my son on my own my son likes

swords and climbing and bashing things and also his blue elsa dress books and being kind and sharing i lie awake thinking of what it means for him to be a mixed race boy growing up in a rough part of southeast london with no father around but i'm doing my best means for him to be a mixed race boy growing up in a rough part of southeast London with no father around. But I'm doing my best to raise him to be emotionally aware and to be himself. Let's go to the phone lines and speak to Emma. Morning, Emma. Welcome to Woman's Hour. Good morning. What would you like to say this morning? point that I want to make is just a little story of my son's experience of having gone through a

very difficult acute period of mental distress from when he was about 13 he had been the most bonny cheerful I mean he just seemed to have a constant grin on his face until he got to about 13 and then suddenly this cloud descended and whilst you know the kind of tropes about kevin the teenager just woke up one day and was all moody i was like is this is this just very normal or is this something else and then over the course of a few months i started to sadly notice uh signs on his arms so i realized that we weren't dealing with something that was within the sort of normal paradigms of you know teenage moods this was something much more acute and he then started to very slowly like just word by word started opening up about the fact that he was experiencing

gender dysphoria and then I'm trying to remember what came first, whether he started making clothing choices that were more female-presenting, and he would start talking to me a bit more about it. So what I then felt is that I was walking a tightrope of trying to affirm what he was feeling and not sweep it under the carpet and be aware of the fact that this could be the unfolding

of a trans woman, whilst at the same time holding it lightly and trying to consider that this is a very difficult, turbulent, hormonal time for boys and wondering if perhaps this was just something

that was going to pass over and pass through um i also was very aware of the fact that anywhere i turned i felt like i would stumble into a culture war i would stumble into a very highly charged political subject and i didn't want to speak out of turn i didn't want to offend anyone um but didn't feel i also was was able to to speak from a very honest point of view that i just as a mother all i wanted was for him to feel happy again absolutely be happy and seeing him hating his body that he was in was so painful um so yeah but there is a but we are now two years down the line and just through no

particular magic wand and you know i have i have i was very unattached to the outcomes of what was going to happen uh he he is now identifying very much as a boy he is into sort of skateboarding and sound systems and um we have you know the clouds has lifted and i would say that you know aside from the normal gcse stresses and strains i now have a very bonnie um upbeat young lad who is looking forward to his future you know whatever way that kind of turns out but it was without doubt 18 months of the most exquisitely excruciating pain that a mother can go through i can only imagine in that stress and and you've you've explained it so well and also um it sounds like you uh dealt with it in a very good way emma um but from what from the way you've described it

and what you've said i'm interested to know a bit more about how you felt that you couldn't talk to anyone about it because it's such a culturally charged topic, anything around sexuality and gender identity. So you did, did you feel there was anywhere you could go to discuss this? I don't think I really pursued formal support. I'm very lucky that in our sort of, we alternatively educate our children. So with our alternative education community, there's a huge amount of peer parental support. So the other parents who were aware of us and our family and what we were going through were amazing support for me. And we were just held with love and understanding and I knew at any moment that it got too much I could just pitch up at one of my friends house and have a big fat cry

and drink tea and eat biscuits and that he would be held with absolute compassion no matter where he went no matter what he was wearing or if he had eyeliner on that day, or whether he could hardly even look up and hold eye contact with an adult, he would be held by this peer support group that we're lucky enough to be part of. Catherine, that's all you can do, really, isn't it? I mean, what a lovely mum. Yeah, brilliant mum what I found, we didn't go near questions of gender in that way, because it didn't come from the boys that I got permission to talk to, I guess, in some ways. But what's interesting is that even when I spoke to the experts when I was preparing to make the series, there was a kind of reticence, if you like, about some of the conversations people scared to talk even about boys or about men because they felt like people were going to sort of say oh well what do you think feminism's gone too far then it's like no of course not and we think if we help boys to be better boys or happier boys it

will help girls to be happier girls and better girls but there did seem to be this division and one boy I spoke to and it's in one of the, said it doesn't have to be a war against girls against boys. It could be girls and boys against the problems. And I love that. Yes. I'm going to bring in Rosalind here. Morning, Rosalind. Good morning. Tell us what you'd like to say. Share your story. Since I had my son, so he's now 24, and I became very curious about how we don't, particularly in, I can only speak for being English, being born in England, and how we just seem not to talk about sexuality, and particularly as he was growing into a young man, masculinity and what that meant.

I tried as a woman to be, and as a mother, to be as open and age-appropriate, obviously, about sex as I could be. Unfortunately, I was split from his father from when my son was little. So although we did shared care his father was sort of very old school very buttoned up not able to speak about these you know complex issues and I felt that yeah I still feel that often this is something that's really missed in our culture.

Where are the men having these conversations? You've brought up a really good point, Rosalind, and I'm going to bring it to Richard and Catherine, because Catherine, in your series, not surprisingly, porn is discussed a lot. And we've talked about it a lot on Woman's Hour. Yeah, we talked about porn. We talked about sex. we talked about consent, we talked about false allegation, we talked about, as one boy said, knowing what to do and where everything is, please could someone tell me?

He felt like institutions had failed him, parents had failed him, teachers had failed him. I mean, his reasoning was, so all that's left is porn, which I kind of push back on, because I think he could maybe find other things on Google. But there is a point there. And I grew up up in Holland and when I talk to my boys I sort of have to do a almost like a Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost like be inhabited by the spirit of a very straightforward Scandinavian slash Dutch or German woman where I talk without shame very openly and set the

boundaries for them and of course they hate it but of course it means they know that I will do that if they want to. And I felt like the teaching that I saw at a school in Hertfordshire from Brooks Advisory and down in Devon from a gentleman called Benjamin Dunks was world-class. It was open, it was safe. The boys, as you'll hear in the series, they felt free enough to question how long sex should last, what their face should look like, how to pleasure a woman, you know, where to find out about women's genitals and what to do. And where are they getting the information from at the minute?

Well, and they would argue that they look at porn. I would argue that that's not necessarily that educational for those sorts of questions. But it does give them, and they acknowledged it, a strange idea about sex. And then the sweet and sort of sad thing was they knew it wasn't real, but they worried that the people they were going to meet and maybe start a relationship with didn't know it wasn't real. So they were stuck in this double think. I'm glad Rosalind has brought this up, Richard, because it's a huge, important area that I'm sure lots of parents, all parents, think about.

Yeah, and the interesting thing is that now you are seeing, as Catherine says, boys are worried they will be held up to the standards in porn, which is, of course, a historic and legitimate concern that women have had around it. And it's quite clear now that porn should be a central part of any good sex ed programme. It's ubiquitous. There's no question that it's going to be encountered. And it's also an opportunity to kind of realize that, again, at the average, you're going to see differences between boys and girls.

I mean, anybody that doesn't think there are any differences at all based in biology between boys and girls hasn't looked at the data on porn and who's consuming it and why. And so if we if we're serious about this question about healthy masculinity and helping boys to become good men then sex and the expression of sexual desire and where it's appropriate where it's good is important and boys need to learn boys and men need to learn not only what not to do which we've gotten very good at but also what's good and what's great because it's a messy business right so we need to do better at helping them very quickly Catherine because there's loads

of people I want to get on air I would also say we need to talk to girls about how to without shame ask for what they want and what they like during sex it's a it's always both absolutely it's always both it's not zero sum as Catherine said yeah it's not zero I Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. Sally, very good morning. Sally in Birmingham.

Oh, a deep sigh. Come on, let's explain. Good morning. Hello. Good morning hello good morning good morning i'm sorry is that beck hello hello there hello good morning um yes is that sally good morning sally carry on yes i did yes yes absolutely sally carry on it is indeed good morning yes um yeah so i'm the head teacher of a very small alternate school based in birmingham and we have quite a few kids come to us who have maybe struggled in the very large schools that exist here so we're mainly secondary um and this is kind of a safe space for them because it's very very small and we found that um quite recently over let's say the last year we've really had to do an awful lot of work with boys and girls

on what we can only term as toxic masculinity um i've i've heard people talk about andrew tate um and uh this this idea that uh boys should be boys and uh we we've had some of them turn around and say well i would never let my sister leave the house and trying to explain that that that's such a difficult thing isn't it because the the the want to protect your family members is one thing but to to allow a girl the freedom to kind of wear what she wants or walk down the street also has to be something that is considered and that's increasingly raised its head for us um i i think it's hard it's so hard nowadays social media is everywhere you can't escape it um and and it's so quick and 20 seconds of watching and and that's what it is and these oh boys will be boys i just i i can't understand those to be excuses or reasons so what do you say then sally what does that actually mean so what

do you say to your pupils trying to raise I've heard the words so Sally you're you're a head to you're a head teacher so and you and you and you this is very to see yeah yes sorry carry on yeah what do you say to them Sally well we we try and we try and educate them from, I guess, from a female perspective because we're quite female centric. And we also have them talk to the men that we have on staff. I really appreciated the role models. I think that's so important. Some of our boys that go and play football really look up to their football coach.

He's a really positive role model for them um and that's that's i mean that's that's about the limit of what we can do as a school or an institution is really just hammer home the education and keep trying to educate and reason and inform um and i somebody used the word kind i think that's one of our biggest remits um is is to have them grow up to be kind to themselves to each other to girls yeah and kind might sound like such a um oh dear they're so scared that it sounds like i'm getting a horrible word but oh oh you're such a pussy some of the language and if that if anyone was offended by that word i just apologize and he'll your behalf. But I think if we can try to raise them. I'm so sorry, yes, it's a horrible word.

But if you've got anything to do with boys, it's important that you've heard that word. You might hear that kind of language, of course. And you no doubt have heard it because you're a head teacher in a school. Sally, thank you very much for your call, Sally. I'm going to bring in another caller here who'd like to remain anonymous. Good morning. Hello. And you have a three-year-old and a six-year-old, both boys? Yeah, I've got little boys.

Tell me what you'd like to say. What's your concern? Or not? Well, I guess I'm said they're obviously like miles away from smartphones and Google at the moment. And I'm in a happy little bubble, except I'm not because I can see what's coming down the track. It's very scary um but also I kind of I'm becoming more and more aware and I'm learning of things and I was really startled so I was at a conference to do my work uh a few weeks back and um maybe I should have put two and two together on this because you know it's quite obvious but I was quite shocked to learn it's you know we assume

that boys are going online and looking for Andrew Tate because I've heard about him or looking for incel stuff or steroids or porn but actually what's happening quite a lot of the time I've learned is that boys innocently will go online and google things about self-esteem confidence anxiety because they're obviously emotionally intelligent and aware enough to go i'm suffering from these things and i want to find help and then these wretched algorithms are sending them to places like andrew tate and and in-cell stuff and steroids and, you know. And so, you know, they're not starting out looking for this toxic stuff. They're starting out looking for help and being sent to these places. And I guess, you know, can we expect the tech companies to change?

I don't know. How are you going to protect, for want of a better word, your little lads? It's like I think to get political for a second I think that our governments and not just the UK government governments everywhere are just so behind the drag. They just need to speed up and figure out how to fix this

but also I think what we need to do with our kids. I mean I'm always trying to talk to my kids about their feelings and get them to tell me when they're struggling or when they're struggling or when they're sad when they cross whatever um but talk about the good stuff as well but at the moment it's easy because they're still little and i'm mum so they come to me for protection i don't know how i don't know if i'm going to be able to succeed in that in like five ten years time but obviously i'm just

going to keep trying and i think we do just have to keep letting them know that whatever they're feeling they can talk about it and that we're a safe space and that there are no there are no limits to what they can what they can express in terms of their feeling and then so so they feel safe enough to come and talk to you about anything um thank you very much for your call uh john in shropshire good morning hello i'm just over the border actually oh you're very close go on then because there's three different borders let's just get specific where which uh county are you in i'm in wales you're in all right okay you're over the border border all right um so you're a primary school teacher i was um and yeah the incident that um

i brought to mind this morning was um had a new boy starting in the class, and I was very busy, and I just asked one of my best kids to sort of give him a bit of a lowdown because I couldn't give him a bit of a lowdown on where things were and everything. So I said, oh, Kevin, can you help this lad? He's just starting today, and can you show him everything and introduce him to a few of your friends? And he had quite a loud voice, so I was walking out of the classroom to do whatever I had to do,

and I heard this lad said, the new lad said, oh, what's Mr. Keane like? And I was obviously hoping that he'd say, oh, Mr. Keane's brilliant. But he said, Mr. Keane's brilliant uh but he he said uh Mr Keane's um very good at sport but he always seems to treat the girls better than the boys

what was your reaction to that I was a bit shocked and I thought about it obviously um I didn't go back to him and ask him what he was on about because I'd overheard a conversation which was private but eventually I sort of thought about it and um I'd been told by the head teacher that she couldn't change the um the sporting arrangements because it was it was um boys did this and the girls did that and so the only way of getting the girls to do football and cricket went during an inspection was to do it after school because she wasn't willing to upset the female sports teacher who always did netball with the girls. So

I was constantly encouraging these girls to come along to the practices after school and they did come to the practices after school during Ofsted and I got outstanding. Yeah. You've brought up a really good point. So much without encouraging the boys to the same extent.

So maybe you had a point. Well, it's yeah. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because, John, you've brought up a really good point, which is what we can't forget, Catherine and Richard, is that, you know, women are still fighting for equality. We're not there yet. So we've got to redress the balance. You've got to encourage the girls. We've got to get them playing cricket and football and everything we discuss on women's hour but at the same time we can't leave the boys behind

right but that's so the test is can we do two things at once here can we can we recognize there's still a bunch more stuff to do for women and girls in a number of places especially in kind of senior leadership etc and in and in the world of work but also recognize that there are many areas now like education some aspects of mental health where we should be paying attention to the boys and to do so in a way that doesn't that falls between somehow pathologizing any aspect that's kind of girly yeah or that's boy so we i just wanted to say like we heard from i think it was sally saying look we've got this problem of toxic masculinity even though we teach in a female centric way. We teach from a female perspective, etc.

And I fear what happens is that if you get the balance wrong, we actually push boys towards some of these reactionary figures. But this is the interesting thing. Why is it that they're being pushed? Why is it that they, what are we doing wrong where they can't see the picture as it is? And that's, go on Catherine. Well, the boys I spoke to, you know, they might not know when they're 12 or 13, the historical context of a sort of long time when girls didn't have the opportunities, weren't encouraged, you know, to be leaders, to go into STEM, to do all of these things. They don't particularly know that because children who are younger tend to live quite in the present.

And so I think for them it felt baffling. You know, they were like another assembly on women in STEM. I can't, you know, why? They couldn't understand that it is going some way towards addressing the balance. But I also think there's another thing going on, which is girls are being brilliantly encouraged to take on whatever role they want to take on perfect but maybe at the same time we're not allowing boys their full expression as well so perhaps you don't want to be a footballer or a rugby player whatever whatever it is boy you things maybe you'd like to get into something

that might be considered more traditionally feminine so is there that little piece of work going on at the same time I want so we've been talking lots about role models, and I want to bring in Howard Richards, who's the deputy manager and lead mentor at the Coventry Boys and Girls Club. Good morning, Howard. Welcome to Woman's Hour. You are on the front line. You are working with young men. Give us a picture of what's going on and who their role models are. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing this for around 15 years now. In the cities, doing community outreach.

I'm in around sort of eight schools per week. And we also work alongside the youth services. So we get offenders that might be on small charges or major charges. And our aim is to sort of, know get them to think differently to think positive to see opportunities um i'd like to know about you though howard what got you into this line of work who were your role models um so i was a young carer um my mum had had a stroke so anywhere from sort of the age of 14 up until 21 um i didn't have any father figure in my life so um my my my friendships which wasn't the best at the time was sort of the people that i was getting sort of my love from i

should say um fortunately i was volunteering um for work experience and i got talking to this chap on the till point um and he basically offered to mentor me and up until my age now of 33 he still mentors me so he's my biggest role model and that was a complete stranger how important is it for young men to have positive role models and mentors if you don't in your everyday life it's vital um every day is a learning day um i i was once a student because i didn't have father figure around where i could be in a classroom and i couldn't make eye contact with any male teachers in the room because i felt somewhat emotionally incarcerated i felt hurt i felt i cannot trust other males um and that that barrier took around 10 years to break down to the point where i could

make eye contact so i could trust that i could cry that i could be able to be loved and it really is still learning now even on the on my journey and where did you get you said it took you 10 years, and how did you grow in that 10 years? Is that because you found somebody to mentor you, somebody you could trust? Yeah, so we started off with more or less a conversation, Mark and his partner,

and we decided that I wanted to start creating music. So I started doing poetry, I was obsessed with Benjamin Zephaniah, so he found a skill that he could see that I was to start creating music. So I started doing poetry. I was obsessed with Benjamin Zephaniah. He found a skill that he could see that I was good at. And then that got into singing. And he took his time out to really get me some shows. I got some gigs. And through finding sort of mutual ground and mutual talent,

10 years' worth allowed me to do festivals, perform at open mics. Incredible. Yeah, and it blossomed from there. And you're working with young men now, so what are the pressures that the boys face today? A lot of pressures in the class. Some of the topics you've spoke about yourself there

in terms of consent, you know, what does consent look like? Masculinity, father figures. And one of the things we're finding is, as young boys, when we see mums, mums are like superheroes. They're like the Avengers. They have so many different capes. And from the age of sort of 15, we identify that mum's slowly losing some of her capes now.

And now I need to be sort of the man of the house. So for some of these young people, you know, what is the man of the house? You know, what is setting up? And so some of the questions we get asked can range from, you know, he spoke about sex, to drug and alcohol abuse, to spending too much time on social media. I still feel like we are still facing the backlash of lockdown

because there's so much more that is coming out now. We're facing it, mentors, different challenges. Richard? Yeah, the evidence is really clear that backs all the social science, backs every word that Howard just said, which is that actually when it comes to boys and young men, we need to be doing more show, not tell. It's not about telling them how to be a man.

We don't need a curriculum for masculinity. What we need to do is just for them to have positive role models in their lives and have that discussion about it as well. And look, that's why dads really matter. And we live in a world now where half the kids in the UK are born outside marriage. A lot of those parents are cohabiting.

But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that doesn't mean that dads matter. Dads hugely matter. But also, as Howard's story, I think, shows brilliantly, and others do too, other men, you know, neighbours, community leaders, teachers. I think it's a bit of a tragedy that as more boys have perhaps not had a father figure in their lives, they've also been less likely to have a male teacher in their lives. And so that's been, I think, an unfortunate parallel trend. And so it's like the solution to some of the online reactionary figures and to these questions is I think it's kind of real men.

And I think this is why a lot of this work has to be led by men. And you do see more men like Howard stepping up to this challenge and seeing that they have a hugely important role to play in boys' lives. Catherine? Yeah, the research that I looked at from the Open University did show, and I would encourage women in their capes out there, that mums can often be and are identified by boys as good role models. And I would also say the word curriculum sparked in me the work that's being done in Ulster University taking boys seriously and by the head teacher Mr Eadie that I met in Rochdale that showed that the way to get boys to do better at school for example and to look at their behaviour is to listen to them see them and try and understand them like you would any person. Let's go back to the phone lines I want to talk to Toby. Morning Toby you're 20. Hiya. Hello thanks for getting in touch and what would you like to say

on this? I'll just say that I think through school I've just seen a lot of friends progressively go towards the Andrew Tate kind of side of things and the way I see it I think it's because they're coming to teenage years dealing with a lot of different anxieties and haven't got a direct thing to deal with these that shows them how to deal with these anxieties and these like figures give them a direct answer about like uh like just straight up how to deal with women's stuff and it's not a good answer it's a horrible answer but it's a direct answer to the questions going on in their head and it's just quite sad seeing them progressively go towards these nasty views that just happen to a lot of my friends. So what kinds of conversations do you have around it

when you're with your mates? It's always, like, it started progressively getting worse. So, like, they'll say, oh, I like some of the things Andrew Tate says, but I don't like him as a person. And slowly and slowly they start, like, repeating certain things you hear him say. And just, like, it's often, oh but I don't like him as a person. And slowly and slowly they start repeating certain things you hear him say. And it's often, I don't trust women, I don't trust them to go out by themselves and those kind of ideas.

And do you feel the same? Have you been drawn to him? No, never. I've always thought it was very horrible. So why do you think you're different to your friends? I think I just found influences in other aspects of life I just never really was drawn to that I mean it's not everyone it's just certain people who have gone on to that side of social media and found that. So what makes you different what are those other influences in your life? I love just running and general exercising and that's always been enough for me to deal with certain anxieties of my life. Running's very good. I'm a big advocate.

What about role models? We've been talking about role models. Who would you say your role models are? In terms of internet influences, instead of like Andrew Tate, I've always been a fan of Andrew Huberman, who's quite popular with a lot of young people nowadays. He's a neuroscience podcaster and he's quite popular on the internet nowadays. And what about in real life? Teachers, my dad, brother,

my family in general. So you've got a good family network, supportive. Toby, thank you very much for your call. Invaluable to hear from a young person and a young man as well. Let's speak to Ben. Ben, you're a father. You've got two teenagers. Hi, yes, that's right uh tell us about your experience what would you like to say um i uh i i stayed at home with my kids while um they were growing up and my wife went to work i

worked part-time from home i was very um worried that i would get it all wrong um but i didn't really know what i was doing and i felt like um because i was raised all wrong and that I didn't really know what I was doing and I felt like um because I was raised by two women that I didn't have the role models around me to tell me how to how to do it and parenting obviously is hard enough as it is and I feel like um I think I've always been open with them and I feel like um that they have had a balanced view of how a man should behave if if if at all a man is a man like that and uh i feel like um that they're okay now because of having someone around them who was saying not defining things for them all the time and saying you know this is how you must behave you know and this is uh what being a man is and no you don't

have to join a football team and no you don't have to dress in a certain way those things it's interesting because we've just been talking about how important it is for men to have male role models but you had two female role models and you sound very well rounded to me i think it had its problems you know it's difficult growing up i'm 51 now so it's difficult to grow up in an era where it's not like it is at the moment. And I think I was certainly more guarded. My parents were very brave. And their main focus was, in a sense, from reading letters and things, that they were wanting to kind of shape their own man, if you like,

and try and make – they didn't have positive male role models in their lives growing up particularly. And so for me, it was very important to try and get it right for my boys. But at the same time, I really didn't have anything to go on. Well, it sounds like your mum's did a good job, Ben. She has, and they both passed away,

but they would um they'd be very proud of the boys definitely i'm very proud of you i'm sure ben thank you very much for your call sam good morning good morning and what would you like to say i was just i'd like to say about my journey with feminism and discovering feminism i i am 32 now and i had i grew up in a council estate down in Cornwall. I think there was a lot of violence, a lot of very masculine identities around very traditional gender roles. And when I went to university and when I was around 21, 22, discovered feminism myself. And it really opened up a huge amount of the world to me and opened up a full kind of range of emotions. There's been a lot of talk about men

and young boys essentially especially having very singular kind of emotions. They are these they feel sad, they feel angry, that's it without any kind of rich complexity to that and I think that people have a tendency to think that feminism is just for women but for me it helped me discover what being a man means and what engaging with a full range of emotions mean how did you discover it um i was studying anthropology and i'd come across the anthropology of gender and it was an area that really interested me and then i kind of focused more specifically on the study of masculinity because i saw so much of my growing up and you know issues of addiction issues of violence issues of

very negative cycles of poverty and reflecting and leading to more violence and leading to very self-destructive um characteristics which i think define toxic masculinity in in such a way and the the oldest note that i have saved my phone which phone, which I've kept since then, talks about how patriarchal masculinity and toxic masculinity teaches men to be half human. We have to shrink the sensitive side and the feminine sides of ourselves. And in doing so, we also have to try and present ourselves to be stronger than we feel and and by engaging with that and by ensuring that i engage with the sensitive side of myself i feel like i am such a better person sam sam people around sam i'm calling you sam the enlightened uh richard i'm going to bring you in on this yeah so what's uh what sam and the others are speaking to i think is what katherine spoke about earlier which is

we've expanded these ideas of femininity and what women can and should do. I'm not saying we've got to got to where we need to be. We haven't had such an expansive view about masculinity, but we have to do that in a way that doesn't sort of pathologize masculinity itself. Yeah, we have to be very careful not to define positive masculinity as basically femininity and to say that men are just kind of defective women who need to be kind of fixed and made more like women or the other way around and i just think the other thing to say here is that we're talking about this is a very cultural conversation right now but back to the point that katherine made about people and boys feeling seen and heard actually i think that's a cultural issue too. So we have huge education gaps, for example. Boys are way behind in the education system.

The House of Commons Education Committee just launched an inquiry for the first time ever into boys' problems in education. Now, that might not be a thing that a 12-year-old boy is excited about right now, but it does send a signal, I think, that people in positions of authority are starting to think,

actually, we can do some stuff for boys and make them feel seen and heard as well as continuing to do stuff for women and girls. Catherine? Yeah, and I did visit a school where, and I'll shout him out again, Mr. Reedy did a project as part linked to the government to the attainment gap project. And he managed to close the attainment gap at his school. And the way he did it wasn't, I thought, by more PE, novels about football. I mean, that's very stereotypical. I'm not that silly,

but I thought there would be a sort of male curriculum. And he said, no, it's about relationships, relationships, relationships, relationships. And the boys attested to it. If they felt that they were trusted, understood, and sort of loved really by their teachers for who they were, when they got into scrapes and into trouble, they could go and talk about it.

And I would say throughout the series I was totally heartened by the boys I met this phone in might sound a bit negative no no they were really smart they were just wonderful and the thing that I felt that they were being more failed than they were failing and so big up the youth clubs big up the Mr Edie's big up the projects that allow them to express themselves fully what was wonderful listening to your series is it felt like those teenage boys had a safe space to express themselves. And I thought, oh, for the first time, we're hearing what they're actually feeling and thinking and how confused they are themselves.

Yeah. And one expert I spoke to in New York, not far from where Richard is, wrote a book about friendship and friends of hers quipped and said, oh, that'll be a short book. Completely contrary to that. And the same with me. People said, oh, are you sure you're going to be able to get them to speak? I couldn't get them to stop speaking. Yeah, and one of them was very good at maths as well. Howard, are you still with me? Oh, Howard's gone. I'm going to come to Kirsty for the last caller.

Morning, Kirsty. Good morning. Tell us about your experience. What would you like to say? Well, I just, I mean, I just wanted to echo, I feel really heartened by what I've heard today as well. It's amazing to hear so many young boys talking so openly and young men talking about their feelings because that's what I've been interested in. I've got two children. My eldest is a daughter who she's very forthright and not afraid to share her thoughts.

And she does a lot of things that might be thought of as stereotypically male and that's been very um much easier for her to manage than my youngest who is um he's just i mean he's just naturally a more sensitive and quiet and um well i mean he he displays a lot of things that i think we would call traditionally feminine traits. And I think it's been it's definitely been harder for me as a parent to unpick all the learning that I had about what boys and girls should be like. Exactly. Yes. And to see them all as real humans. But it's so great to hear these conversations because the damage I think that we do to boys by denying them the access to their feelings a lot of people talking about that

is actually harming women and girls as well as harming the boys and the men. Kirsty, you are getting strong nods from both Richard and Catherine here. Thank you very much for your call. What a brilliant call to end on this morning that actually even as parents you have to challenge yourself

about the conditioning that you've been put under by living in the society where we think that certain things are feminine and certain things are masculine surely we're all on a spectrum uh katherine richard thank you so much for joining me it's been a really interesting hour i'm just going to end with uh one of your messages uh thanks to all of you who took part in the program sorry if i couldn't get to your message today. There's been so many of them. My grandson is the youngest of three children and has two older sisters. His middle sister plays football and the family support women's football teams. The other day he asked his mum why only girls play football. Just shows he's a product of his environment. Thank you for that, Kate. Join me tomorrow at 4pm for Weekend Woman's Hour.

That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. I'm Helen Lewis, and I have a question. What links family WhatsApp dramas? I flounced off after someone made a particularly ignorant comment. Russian state propaganda. It's a very good platform for spreading all this pro-Putin position. And a woman who married an AI. 100% I would never go back to humans ever, ever again. No idea? Well, they're all examples of how instant messaging has changed the world. Find out more by joining me for my new BBC Radio 4 series, Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat.

Subscribe to Helen Lewis Has Left the chat on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.