And if we think about what we do with boys in schools, possibly the scariest thing is the world as it is today.
Half of the boys that we’ve spoken to and surveyed have said their online world is more interesting, more rewarding, and more engaging than real life.
And what that means is that’s where they start to derive their source of identity, their source of connection, their source of belonging, their feelings of being listened to and being heard—from the online world.
And why is that a problem?
Brands don’t market to teenage boys unless it’s the sneaker companies with the latest trainer drop: ‘500 pairs, $500, wear them in the queue, hope your parents are rich enough.’
But other brands have targeted female teenagers, girls, and younger women because they make purchasing decisions. Those brands get them as young girls, and when they’re women and they’re controlling the household budget, they’ll probably still be aligned to those brands. They’re much more powerful in terms of consumer spending. Therefore, they’ve been targeted a lot by all sorts of brands.
Whereas boys haven’t, and that’s left the gap.
Online influencers, forum moderators, video game streamers, who’ve spent the past 15 years honing their message to these teenage boys, working out exactly how to market to them, how to hook them in, how to pull them on a consumer journey.
Because if they’re not being marketed to, there’s a gap.
And lots of teenage boys are disenfranchised. They look at the world and, on one side, there’s this old version of masculinity that’s not really acceptable, that’s labeled as toxic, that doesn’t really feel relevant in today’s society. But there is no clear definition of what this new version of masculinity is. There’s no agreement on what it looks like, and it’s very blurred.
So many of these boys are in between. They’re in the middle. They’re in this gap between what used to be masculinity and what it’s going to be in the future.
And in that gap, when you don’t really know, you’re a bit uncomfortable, you’re a bit unsure, you’re much more likely to start searching outside of yourself for answers to what it is.
And that’s when you get pulled into communities.
These communities are away from mainstream media. They’re quite often away from typical social media. These communities are held on Telegrams and Discords and forums and all these kinds of networks and platforms that sit behind what we can see.
And once they’re in these communities, they hear people saying similar things to them—similar ages, similar interests, play the same games, are connected to the same sports people, and idolize similar influencers.
But in those communities, it’s adults who control those communities.
And those adults effectively groom those communities of young boys in a controlled way to try and get them to become consumers of the future.
This works really well because already the leaders of these communities—brands are going to them to reach teenage boys. They’re becoming the gatekeepers to the teenage boys’ attention, their perspectives, their mindsets, the way they view the world.
Obviously the other side of that is those same leaders of these communities talk about what the truth is. They become the news source. They become the belief system.
And in many of those communities sit very misogynistic, very racist, very white supremacist viewpoints because that’s always been part of those industries.
And actually these young boys have just been drip-fed all this stuff, and they believe it because this is a space where I belong, feel connected to other people, and listened to. In this space, people understand me.
And all of a sudden, this online world that’s very rewarding, very engaging, and interesting is gradually shifting the belief system without them really realizing because they feel like they’re quite empowered in these spaces, but actually they’re being disempowered bit by bit.”
“It’s so scary when you think about it because what can you do? There’s too much power. There’s a power imbalance in this world. These guys have too much power.
And when I think about it, when you’re talking about the difference between old masculinity and new masculinity, I’m like, well, what is considered to be the epitome of a man these days?
Because when I think about who are the most influential men in society at the moment, look how bloody well Andrew Tate did.
Doesn’t that terrify you, that someone like him pushing such a message like he does—he’s worshipped like a god among so many men in the world?
And doesn’t that say something about what the message really is?
If you think about it, I just think about all the most vocal, kind of prominent men out there. I think about Andrew Tate. I think about Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
These are the biggest names you could think of who have a very large voice with a large male audience. These are the first names I can think of, which is terrible if they’re the first names I could think of.
But they all have that similar sort of message that they’re trying to deliver.
Who are the other men?
Who are the other men that have such an authoritative, strong voice that are pushing a different message? That are pushing a message that isn’t wealth, sex… you know…
Who is doing something that powerful, on that scale, that is giving an alternative option to men out there?
Because I can’t even think of one.”
“Yeah, like there are some that people just highlight, like, ‘Oh, isn’t he a nice guy?’ I don’t know… I’m thinking like Keanu Reeves, take for example. Celebrities. People always highlight him as the nice guy. Look at all the things he does, and who he is with, or whatever.
But because he is the person he is, he doesn’t get up on the stage and is like…
And again, it kind of goes with that personality, right?
Those who are probably inherently good guys doing good things are usually doing so in the shadows, and they’re not having that sort of big voice.
And isn’t there always going to be that imbalance because of that?
And how do we fight that?
Because I literally can’t think of many men who are doing the opposite.”
“Yeah. I mean, I kind of look at it in numerous different ways, Sabrina.
I think firstly there is an acceptance of the way that the world is at the moment.
It wasn’t that long ago, if we thought about who were the richest, most powerful entities on this planet, it was nations.
Nations were where we fought world wars against each other and blew our people to shreds in the name of territory and protection.
Now, there’s still a lot of geopolitical conflicts out there in the world today, but the power is different.
So if you think about the 200 wealthiest entities on this planet, it wasn’t that long ago that almost all of those 200 were countries.
Now, less than 50 of those 200 richest, most powerful entities are countries.
We have individuals and organizations that are more wealthy than countries.
That’s why there’s such shifted power.
And if you think of some of the tech companies with the three trillion dollar market caps, they’re actually richer than a whole region.
There are some companies that have more value within them, apparently, than the whole of Europe put together.
It’s… yeah, I think that it’s incredibly scary.
Firstly, they hold so much data. They hold so much control. They hold vast amounts of wealth. They hold vast amounts of secrets.
Those entities are incredibly powerful.
And if one of those entities decided that they weren’t particularly happy with a government, they could pretty much shut half the world down.
If you think about how much of the world runs on AWS, and someone there decided, ‘Actually, we’re not very happy with this decision,’ they could literally switch the lights off.
Boom.
Flights, transport networks, banking, stock market—everything had just crashed.
The power that they have is incredibly scary.
But I think in that world, if you think about the wealth and the control and the power that gives entities, there are people within those entities who also have that level of control too.
Voices—there are a lot of voices.
But you think about… we’re in a place where we have a person in what I imagine, and what I’m for, probably the most powerful political position in the world.
The guy wouldn’t pass a DBS check.
So it’s like sometimes there is a level that power and wealth can actually protect you from the very things that, for a typical man on the street, would potentially stop you getting a job and leave you in deprivation and poverty.
The challenge is that when you’re struggling, you’re going to look to someone who’s offering some kind of solution.
Andrew Tate talks about the system being broken.
Donald Trump says, ‘We’ll fix America and make it great again.’
Elon Musk says DEI is a distraction and has to die.
These people are saying things that people can attach their own meaning to.
They’re all slogans. They’re all phrases.
People look at ‘Make America Great Again’ and they’ll take themselves back to a time when they thought America was great in their own eyes.
That’s really powerful because it personalizes that message.
It’s not like a political manifesto where people are reading a brief.
They’re able to put their own assignment on that.
For most people, they probably remember the great time being when they were young, had no responsibilities, were free, and the candy in the store was only a dime. It wasn’t like a dollar.
That creates this nostalgic viewpoint that doesn’t fit with reality.
And the truth is, we look at the world and there are so many men who are struggling.
So many men who are struggling.
So many men in that gap, in that in-between.
So many men who economically are not able to be the provider and the protector that they once were told and thought they needed to be.
That don’t actually feel they have a purpose and a meaning.
Where women have become more financially independent, more financially stable, more able to make autonomous decisions—that’s really important.
It’s been massively important that women over the past 50 years have had the opportunity to actually break beyond the things that held them back.
The things that used to be not legal for women.
The things that women used to have to rely on a man for.
It’s been so important that we’ve advanced that to a point where women can have choice, can have stability, and can have independence.
The truth is, at the same time, in those past 50 years, men haven’t had the space, the opportunity, or the understanding of how to evolve too.
Our role has changed.
Lots of women now don’t necessarily need a husband.
They can be more selective.
That’s probably an important thing.
But also that means that men are thinking, ‘Well, what’s my purpose?’
Because my mom and dad operated like this, but the world’s completely changed.
Actually, it’s not like that anymore.
Who do I connect to?
I think we’ve got one in five men over 50 who say they have no friends.
None.
One in five men who say they have no friends to go around and have a brew with or have a chat to.
Most men have one, two, or three.
We have very small circles.
There’s even the terminology coming out from some research just this week looking at how men are having, more than ever, to be looked after by their partner if their social network shrinks to a point where they become quite lonely and quite disconnected.
That means then their female partner is more likely to have to spend some of their emotional labor looking after this individual who’s isolated.
They’re now researching to see what impact that has because the emotional labor on women in society is still significantly more.
But there are a lot of men who… we’re very teleological beings as humans.
We need a target.
We need something to move towards.
We need meaning.
That gives us purpose.
It gives us momentum.
It gives us a feeling of being able to make a difference and know why we’re here.
I speak to a lot of men, and there’s a real lack of understanding of what is meaningful to me.
Who am I connected to?
Actually, just how do I be a man in a world where there’s so many different voices?
There’s so much confusion.
I’m getting told by people with big followings I should be like this.
Then I’m speaking to my friends, and they’re saying, ‘Well, maybe not like that.’
I’m speaking to my family, and they’re saying, ‘Well, no, you should be like this.’
I’m speaking to my partner, and they’re like, ‘Well, no, I’d love you to be like this.’
Men just… so many men just feel like they’re being pulled around and not really sure.
They just want some stability and a clearer pathway.
So if I think back to your question, those people with such big followings—there’s no way for a typical man on the street to control that because the power imbalance is so big.
Those men have platforms—massive platforms—to incite change in whatever way they decide to.
My vision is gradually gathering together a collective of men who firstly look at those boys in those communities and find a way to be as effective at marketing to those boys as those communities are.
Because we can’t say those communities are wrong.
You can’t say those communities are bad because those communities reframe people who say they’re wrong as haters.
They basically invalidate the connection and belonging they’re feeling in that group.
The best way to think about it—you’ve got a child, they love gaming, and you’re like, ‘He’s wasting all this time on this game.’
For them, the game means more than the game.
The game means speaking to my friends on my headset.
The game means getting a new avatar and a new gun for my game, or a new player on FIFA, or whatever it is.
They have more meaning than just banging the pad.
But you see it as just sitting in the room in the dark, playing in front of a screen, when really they should be outside.
But it’s the meaning behind it.
So you can’t say those communities are wrong.
You can’t criticize those people, sadly, because they work on very clever cycles where, if you’re criticizing them, you’re the problem, not them.
But to create a different pathway for these boys to see that actually, yeah, the system is broken, just as you’re being told in these groups, but actually you don’t need to follow that pathway.
You can actually look at this pathway.
So it’s presenting a different pathway for boys to become men and understand how to navigate that.
A big part of that is masculinity doesn’t need to be rigidly defined because every single one of us has masculine traits, masculine energies, including women.
It’s up to us to understand how we express that masculinity.
That’s what I’m passionate about—getting young boys to actually realize you’re never going to be told how you should be a man.
If I think back to me, I was told how to be.
Then when I got ill and had to learn to walk again and was pretty much paralyzed, and had nurses showering me and healthcare assistants feeding me, all those things I valued—independence, autonomy, physical presence, status, being able to do what I wanted, being self-sufficient—I lost all that.
I was completely reliant on other people.
It just made me think the man who I thought I was—that’s what I’d been told and conditioned to be.
It’s not who I am.
Ten years later, I’ve been able to work through some of that and realize actually I need to turn up as myself.
If I do that, I actually feel that stability.
I feel that meaning.
I actually feel so much better mentally than not really knowing who I am or trying to be someone who I’ve been told to be.
We do that with boys in schools.
We help them understand online disinformation, misogyny.
We get them to critically think about what we see because so many of them are being shilled to by fools online.
