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.

My point about DnD/Warhammer is that it is not seen as a worthy pass time or something to be proud of.

It is held in disregard by people of all ages because it is based on an outdated stereotype.

Until people are prepared too look beyond the stereotype very little will be done.

Are parents really going to try and push their children towards DnD or towards outside games (football) etc. on this thread alone we have been told that boys are high energy and need to be outside playing football.

On various threads on MN where RPG players have been brought up as a better source of male partner, it has been shot down as those that play are seen as basement dwellers, socially award and still live with mum and dad.

The stigma is that its not seen as reading or as literature, it is seen as something for fun and not for progression.

It is only recently that some schools have started to encourage reading for fun and that you can bring in any source of reading material.

Yes for younger kids some manga is not appropriate but the question wasn't age specific.

But then another issue is that some parents don't take an interest in what their children are doing, including what they are reading.

Random thoughts...

I'm a believer in single sex schools for girls especially, but there are so many advantages for boys. It's the presence of pupils of the other sex which encourages the stereotypes, especially as the children hit puberty.
Girls in mixed sex schools are sometimes used to socialise badly behaving boys - unfair on the girl. Boys in boys only schools with lots of male teachers have their role models. Male English teachers and female physics or maths teachers challenge stereotypes.
I'd agree that "horse play" is much more of a boys' thing - this is something Carole Hooven (sp?) says, and it tallies with my admittedly limited experience. A minority of girls do like physical "fighting" games, but I suspect only in single sex schools.

We sort of have to get involved because if all the boys turn into Andrew Tates, women and girls will suffer.

I mentioned Harry Potter because they are long reads. Comics and graphic novels are not the same type of reading. For novels or even short stories concentration is required. Sentence structure is more complex. You come across new words. You have to follow storylines and character development through the words, helping to develop empathy. So what if Harry Potter novels are 20 years old? They are classics and as children we would read/have read to us novels that were older than that. And the main character is male - boys generally won't read novels unless there is a male main character.

But this whole issue is about class. White working class boys - they don't have the parents who'll search out books they'd enjoy, they're not on-line playing D&D and being called nerds, or joining the scouts. Middle class parents will mostly do ok by their kids, many working class parents would, if they were interested, find this thread describing another world.

It's these boys we need to worry most about, not the ones who don't like playing football or even those checking out Tate. These boys don't even go on line except to message their mates or girls or dealer. They're the ones who no employer has the skills and time to spend on getting them up in the mornings and into work every day. Who no one wants to waste their time on 'cause they can barely hold a conversation, who spend their days shoplifting to buy their drugs, who have no interests, or ambitions or any structure to their day. Being male is relevant but the more important factor is their class and poverty. Schools give up on them, children's services don't even get close and adult services ignore them, until they break the law.

I would suggest that ofcourse they don’t like it. They are expected to do more. More that was once “women’s work”.

Which has probably fuelled dislike and hate towards women. How dare we push this on them.

We have brought this on them.

There is nothing wrong with Harry Potter.
I just hate them.

Which areas?

Some of the boys stopped going to Scouts once girls started going. What had been an exciting 'boy's own' adventure for them became just another club.

The local men's shed now admits and is largely consisting of women. So the one place that a lot of lonely older men used to have to go and have awkward, blokeish conversation about engine parts is now just another mixed sex club, like all the other local clubs. (In fact I'd say most of the clubs are majority women, because older men particularly are often a bit rubbish at socialising. Which was the reason Men's Sheds were set up).

There are many mixed sex groups and that's great. Sometimes people just want to hang out with their own sex, and there shouldn't be a problem with it.

The local men's shed now admits and is largely consisting of women. So the one place that a lot of lonely older men used to have to go and have awkward, blokeish conversation about engine parts is now just another mixed sex club, like all the other local clubs.

😤

That sounds similar to my experience. In the 2010s at primary school it wasn't totally like that but only because teachers made sure we had some space. But I always remember on Fridays when the teachers more or less disappeared for a meeting the boys would take the opportunity to play football over the whole of the playground.
And at older school it was sometimes worse because the boys would make sexist comments, which didn't always have the desired affect on either side.
I can actually remember one lunchtime several of us marching into the boys locker rooms to make a point and the boys for the FIRST time realising that we weren't doormats just accepting their behaviour.

They're "a bit rubbish at socialising" you say. Well that's where we come in and I've never been turned away by any man at any gathering.
But OK I'm 20 and so not familiar with elderly men (or women) getting together. I'm just talking about my age and I KNOW that I and my 'galmates' want (or need) privacy or time together. Boys don't want or need. Given the chance they'd much prefer for me & my mates to be involved with them every step of the way. Which actually is good. It means they're not planning or doing (or talking about) anything sexist which ignores us.

Scouts was pressured into opening up to girls because Guides sucks by comparison.

To give a side-by-side comparison of the Scouts and Guides on camp at opposite ends of the same field in the mid-90s:

• The Scouts cooked in cookout shelters, per patrol, learning to cook on a fire pit and cooking daily. The Guides used a sort of camp range that was raised off the ground and one patrol each day on a rota cooked for the whole troop, so not cooking daily.
• The Scouts were supervised but not assisted by leaders. The Guides, the leader did most of the cooking and the "cooking" patrol were mostly washing pots and feeding the fire. And with a whole patrol tasked to that, we got in each other's way.
• The Scouts had to plan their evening meals and bring their own evening meal food. (Breakfast and lunch was supplied but they had to prep it.) The Guides had meals planned by the leaders and the food was included in the price of camp.
• The Scouts were responsible for fetching their own water each day, per patrol. The Guides had one patrol per day, on a rota, fetching water.
• The same but for emptying the latrines.
• The same, but for fetching firewood.
• The Scouts went rock climbing. The Guides went swimming.
• The Scouts built bivouacs in the woods and "slept out" one night. The Guides didn't. I was so jealous of the Scouts being allowed to build shelters.

My point is that Guides was really "hand-holdy" and not very exciting compared to Scouts and I can completely understand why girls would want the more independence-building and intense Scout experience. If Guides had offered a more Scouty experience, perhaps Scouts would still be single-sex?

No. It was in those "good old days" that women's refuges were first founded, so the need for said refuges was present back then.

I think socialisation alters the expression of anger in women (crying where men would shout) and at the same time testosterone is a potent hormone that exacerbates anger.

When I was on Danazol, I punched a hole in a door. I don't come close to behaving like that when I'm not on it.

A lot of men don't come close to your ideal dad standard. That's why there's so many single mums...

You'd prefer us to go back to the old, pre-safeguarding days? I knew boys whose parents wouldn't let them join Scouts because of the reputation the leadership had for fiddling the kids.

Boys and men need to feel they can offer something positive as male people

Learning to drive a vacuum cleaner would be something positive they can offer as male people. But that's "women's work".

One of the reasons why I didn't learn to cook until I was in my late twenties is internalised misogyny: cooking is "women's work" and I don't do "women's work" because I'm "not like the other girls", in fact I'm not really a woman but a man trapped in a woman's body (see also: gender dysphoria).

If "that's women's work" deters a woman from learning tasks that an ex-bf (who is a fabulous cook) rightly dubbed "not women's work, survival work", then it's going to deter men from learning it too.

They like the idea of survival skills, of engaging with the wild, camping, making fires, stalking, acts of physical strength ( lifting, pulling, hauling, building).

So do girls! A huge driver of my internalised misogyny is how everything targeted at girls is pretty, pink, and pathetic. All the cool stuff is labelled as being for boys.

On various threads on MN where RPG players have been brought up as a better source of male partner, it has been shot down as those that play are seen as basement dwellers, socially award and still live with mum and dad.

I think RPGers have been confused with obsessive video gamers. RPGs require you to leave the house and meet with your fellow players.

Yes, younger men are different. Many older men are very isolated, because over the course of a lifetime they often seem to lose friendships in a way that women don't.

Part of this in fact may well be that men get used to women doing the socialising and emotional load for them. Women tend to take care of the social side of things, and men can get left behind, eventually.

Women are generally adept at forming and maintaining networks of family and friends.

Men's sheds were a great way to help men form connections and friendship groups in a way that suited them.

The local men's shed now admits and is largely consisting of women. So the one place that a lot of lonely older men used to have to go and have awkward, blokeish conversation about engine parts is now just another mixed sex club, like all the other local clubs.

To be fair, our local men's shed is men only still, but, the reason another one went mixed up the road is because they liked the women coming in and bringing food and cleaning it for them.

Men only complained about women in working men's clubs (cricket clubs, rugby clubs etc) when they suggested that perhaps they could be full members, and not just invited to come along and bring food occasionally.

It was a question of funding for ours. Dependent on being 'open to all'. Fine, but it destroyed the whole point of the shed, which was to help older men.

To you... to those of us 'in the community' (I can't believe those words came out of my mouth) it's totally fine..

Now yes, there are those of us who are indeed basement dwellers. But as I said, in real life, at my game (and while I was at Uni) 6 of the 8 are happily coupled up (many with kids), one is long-term single, and one divorced - we're normal people.

The gaming club at Uni was massive and I, as a lone 18 year old girl was able to walk in and find a game to play. I was less intimidated walking in there than I was into my similarly male dominated physics lectures.

What I'm saying is, that in geek circles, there's no stigma, there's just enthusiasm. Aside from religious parents, I've never seen stigma from parents (well, maybe Warhammer, those little metal shavings are a bugger for getting everywhere) - plenty of parents drop their kids off to games workshop on a Saturday morning.

The most there is, is a lack of knowledge (which you are also displaying here, thinking these are online things)

Was the education system less feminine- targeted back in the 50s? As in, surely there were strict rules against horseplay & disobedience in lessons then? And you had to pay attention? Surely now there's more understanding of different ways of learning, not less?

Agreed. Sometimes there were legit8mate issues- eg. Guides less independent than Scouts but that could have been fixed inside. & stuff like the Garrick Club was bad bc it was a prime source of networking. But ordinary men's clubs etc should be fine. We're there ever single sex pubs tho? 😂

Back in the 50s didn’t they fiddle the eleven plus exam results so that more boys got into Grammar Schools.

Isn’t divorce and single parenthood a factor- the main resident parent is nearly always the mother.