Britain’s lost boys Sonia Sodha

[WarriorN]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/09/jobless-isolated-fed-misogynistic-porn-where-is-the-love-for-britains-lost-boys?CMP=ShareiOSAppp_Other

I do agree but feel it's men who need to step up here

Boys either want to be women or are turning to Tate et al neither of which is ultimately good for women and girls. Victoria Smith has been saying similar recently.

If you're not into sport there's so few decent role models or movements for boys. From experience they go off track at a very young age too.

Emphatically, men need to be fully prepared to discuss and strategise this. And then to act.

One of the greatest dangers is that so many perceive that there are few incentives for being model fathers, partners, citizens etc.

The boys will be boys permissive environment that tolerates egregious behaviour gives them little reason to respect boundaries or admire the moral compass of others.

Unfortunately many boys do admire the 'moral compass' of other men. Other men whose moral compass does not encompass people who diverge from what they consider reasonable.

Sure men have a role - but women need to stop excusing, and therefore encouraging, their son's bad behaviour too. "Gentle parenting" has probably contributed to this.

There was backlash against whatever gains the women's movement made in the 70s and 80s, and we have discussed here the role of the wall-to-wall pink/princess/butterfly/glitter fad in re-girly-ing girls.

The opposite happened for boys, as they were pushed more and more into not-pink/not-princess/not-butterfly/not-glitter boy-ness. Boys just can't be expected to sit still. Boys just don't like reading. Boys just this, boys just that... and then surprise surprise boys do worse at school, which is full of girly stuff like sitting still, and books.

And any boy who doesn't like pink glittery things can't really be a proper boy in this polarised gender universe, can he? and a girl who doesn't like the girly stuff? We all know where that led...

There are common values that are not exclusively feminine or masculine but human and humane, and it looks like the 'lost boys' didn't get a chance to acquire them in a society which re-enforced the rats and snails and puppy-dogs' tails stereotypes to boys as strongly as it re-enforced the sugar and spice stereotypes to little girls.

One result is the 'lost boys' Sonia Sodha writes about; another is the 'transing' of children who don't fit the rats and snails/sugar and spice stereotypes.

General lifestyle and societal factors are also at play. Sedentary lifestyles, indoor living, UPFs, BPAs, antibiotics, soil depletion, screens, community fragmentation, poverty, austerity, loss of libraries, sports facilities, school cutbacks, loss of community structures like social groups, churches ...

I also think boys and men need their own spaces, like Scouts and Men's Sheds - but these have been forced to open to women, too.

Steve Biddulph talked about boys needing 'uncle' figures - men who are not their fathers - to help coach and role model for them.

Of course, covid has had a huge impact on current generation, too. More social isolation.

I think in general, there's been a switch from 'just cope' to 'poor dear can't be expected to cope' in child-raising/life in general.

Now, I'd say that how my father was raised, where if you weren't able to do something you were just forgotten (or worse, punished) also wasn't right, but in my mind, encouraging resilience is a million times better than leading young people to expect the world to bend around you.

This relates to boys because for whatever reason, a lot of the male half of society have struggled to keep up with change, and they resent it. Where girl's worlds have expanded - being allowed to work and make choices for themselves, boys see their world as being more restricted, because the women aren't doing what they're told/stepping back to allow the men to go first. And rather than be resilient, figure out a way to exist in that world, they just blame the women for changing.

ARe there plenty of men who have come along with us? Yeah, loads, but there's also still an awful lot of unconscious bias all the way through to outright hatred at a bloke's 'birthright' being taken away because a woman can earn their own money now, and doesn't have to stay with an abusive arsehole.

"but it is striking how little we know about what might work in improving boys’ outcomes."

We do know one major thing. 65.4% of boys got a grade 4 or above in English Language GCSE last summer in England compared to 77.1% of girls. That's a massive difference, in comparison it's 72.2% for boys in maths compared to 71.8% of girls.

If you don't get a grade 4 in English (or maths), in the first instance you have to resit in college. It can restrict the college courses you get onto and sixth forms you can get into, so 1/3 of boys have their opportunities reduced quite heavily at 16 compared to 1/4 of girls.

This lack of ability with English feeds into all their other subjects. Where subjects rely heavily on essays, boys do much worse than girls than on subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Business, Economics where there are more calculations and data analysis.

What would be a single key factor in improving general ability with English? Reading.

So when people talk about the education system 'suiting girls more than boys', they mean 'suits people who read' and girls read more than boys.

All excellent comments; I do have much time to discuss.

Working in send obviously I do know that the reading is important and also how challenging it can be for some youngsters, and it's usually boys

One thing we really do have an extreme lack of is good OT provision for early years and primary education. Reading is linked to visual discrimination skills, and then thereafter motivation/ interest etc

*dont

So much is embedded in the early years. Stereotyping etc too.

And hardly ever any male nursery teachers.

Boys got on fine for generations with mostly female teachers in primary school.

It may be an old-fashioned idea that little children are usually cared for, and taught, by women rather than men, but it seems to have worked OK for boys in the past and kept children safe.

Did they though? Or were there just more jobs and options available for men who had poor literacy skills?

There are now far fewer well paid jobs manual jobs that can only reasonably be done by men.

They still exist - I don't think many women are competing with men for jobs as labourers on building sites - but whole industries have more ore less vanished.

However, that isn't feminisation, it's mechanisation.

Editing to add: Actually, thinking about it, labourers aren't well paid.

Part of me wonders if boys/men don’t like the new reality of life - that they are now supposed to step up and share everything including housework, parenting and paid work. Life is tough and boring and about doing stuff for other people - something women have known for ever.

@noblegiraffe Partly this I'm sure. My own step father was functionally illiterate, born in the early 1940s but was a 'country lad', worked on farms, for the forestry commission, etc and later drove hgv wagons. By the time he retired, he struggled with even driving for a living with tacos, paperwork, etc.

But were there really fewer abusive men in the years when a man could leave school with few qualifications and get a well paid, prestigious manual job?

I don’t think so. We all knew who the battered families were and there was no hint of outside involvement. Unless for the Church who said that it was your duty to not resist. Even against a backdrop of hospitalisation and actual death.

All school-leavers need transferable 'soft' skills to survive - even the boys! So it's not doing them any favours to say that the curriculum is biased in favour of girls, because 'boys don't like reading'.

Gosh, as I write that, I realise that it used to be felt that it wasn't worthwhile teaching girls how to read and write, because they wouldn't need it, and also their brains might explode or their wombs drop out if they were over-taxed with difficult things like literacy🙄
We can't win. A woman's place is in the wrong.

Misogyny and sexism has always been a problem and i do think that fewer opportunities to start vocational courses earlier could be a factor for some boys, but the internet is adding fuel to the fire.

boys are more likely to be gamers and spend time on line. That's also far more interesting than reading.

Tate knew what he was doing when he started grooming young men and boys via his emails and courses

My comp in the 90s was in a rural area and had vocational qualifications for agriculture that many of the local farmers children did (girls too but it was mostly boys)

By the 2000s they'd all gone and it was a specialist IT school.

I said it wasn't that the curriculum suits girls, it's that it suits people who read.

There is nothing wrong with an education curriculum that suits people who read.

What we need is boys reading more. How?

I just hope the very reasonable concern over boys' academic struggles and social alienation aren't used to legitimise the penalization of girls. It's only the last few decades that the education system has changed to allow female students to flourish instead of artificially downgrading them (the old 11+ system had quotas I believe) or disadvantaging them by using one-size- fits-all exam-based qualifications (O levels). I've always felt GCSE courses should be evenly split between exam and coursework to give all types of learners a fair chance.

However, it's so easy for those with a misogynistic agenda (obviously I don't mean the wonderful Sonia Sodha) to point at the success of women and girls as the reason for male failure and discontent without ever examining how men could do things differently to help themselves and the next generation.

Absolutely not

That's victim blaming too.

Boys need to be allowed to be boys. They need fresh air, exercise, competition, independence, a dad at home to teach them whar it means to be a man. Not cooped up on gaming consoles getting overweight and without any strong guidance. I’m sorry but I do believe boys and girls are different and need different things. I have kids of both sexes and despite raising them exactly the same, same toys, I can see their differences.