The first time my daughter was pushed down by a boy, she was three. He left her bleeding in the dirt and didn’t apologise. ‘Sorry,’ his mother said, ‘he’s a boy.’ I brushed it off, brushed my kid off. Then it happened again. I lost count of how many times boys hurt girls or other boys on the playground. Nearly always the reaction of the mum was a smile and shrug. ‘Boys!’ As in, what can you do?
I can’t help but wonder about a connection between the way we raise boys and rising rates of domestic violence against women. Last year, 74 women were killed by their male intimate partners in Australia. Femicide Watch puts that number at 96 so far this year.
Meanwhile, much is being made about the current male crisis. In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that girls are ‘out-performing boys in nearly every HSC subject’. In the U.S. The New York Times tells us that ‘Declining male enrolment has led many colleges to adopt an unofficial policy: affirmative action for men’ to ensure colleges have male students. They’re struggling socially, too — more than one in four men under thirty have ‘no close social connections’ according to the Survey Centre on American Life.
Of the nine people that kill themselves every day in Australia, seven are men.
When men are in trouble, women are, too. In the UK, the BBC reports a ‘37 per cent increase in the number of violent crimes against women between 2018 and 2023’.
A recent Australian report found that women who make more money than their male partners are more likely to experience physical and sexual violence. We also know that social isolation and financial stress lead to an increased risk of violence against women.
In his book Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves explains that boys are doing worse in school and not graduating college/university at the same rate as women. They’re moving out of home later than their female counterparts and experiencing what Reeves calls ‘male drift’.
When I look for positive male role models in our community, I see people like Tim Winton, who tells us that there is a ‘great native tenderness in children. In boys as much as in girls. But so often,’ Winton writes, ‘I see boys having the tenderness shamed out of them.’
Enter influencer Andrew Tate.
Tate’s comments have been viewed more than 12 billion times. Although he’s now facing fresh charges of human trafficking and sex with a minor in Romania, Tate remains popular. In angry self-help style videos, he talks of muscles and Maseratis and advocates male dominance. When asked about crying on his recent release from detention, he got defensive. ‘I don’t cry,’ he said, ‘I did have tears run down my face.’
‘Hey man, that’s crying,’ the interviewer pointed out.
‘I didn’t sit and do the act of crying. My eyes leaked.’
When you think about it, it’s easy to see where Tate comes from. It hurts more to lose than it feels good to win — psychologists call this cognitive bias ‘loss aversion’. While men have had the upper hand for all of human history, and in many ways still do, changes have been dramatic over the last few decades. Men can no longer get ahead simply by existing as male. They’ve lost status. Meanwhile, women are surging ahead on all fronts. We even have more friends.
Reeves suggests that without positive male role models — only 28 per cent of Australian teachers are men — influencers like Andrew Tate are filling a gap. We know from Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments from 60 years ago, that boys learn ‘aggressive styles of behaviour through modelling’.
When they’re not looking at Tate, they’re looking at porn and modelling that. Choking during sex has become the norm, and not just online. A recent survey of over 4,000 Australian young adults found that 61 percent of women had been sexually strangled.
After three women were killed in Ballarat earlier this year, the community came together to organise a ‘gender violence prevention program’ for high school boys, who have been shocked to learn about statistics of violence against women. Programs like this are one way to begin tackling the current crisis.
Simon Smart, author of The End of Men? suggests that compassion can be learned and it needs to be taught to boys. For millennia we’ve been raising girls and women to be compassionate, to look after younger siblings and aging parents, to apologise over and over. We shouldn’t ask the girls to stop being compassionate; we just need the other half of the human race to join in—for their sake and for ours.
When I look for positive male role models in our community, I see people like Tim Winton, who tells us that there is a ‘great native tenderness in children. In boys as much as in girls. But so often,’ Winton writes, ‘I see boys having the tenderness shamed out of them.’ He thinks that we need to ‘notice’ boys, ‘to find them worthy of our interest.’ He says, ‘it’s men who need to step up and finally take their full share of that responsibility.’
Surely, all of us need to step up, starting with the mums on the playground. I wish I hadn’t stood silently by and watched the girls get trampled. It wasn’t good for them, and it wasn’t good for the boys. We need to teach boys to apologise when they hurt someone and applaud them when they have the courage to cry. We can’t allow this crisis to continue unabated. I just checked Femicide Watch, and in the day that I’ve been editing this piece, another woman has been killed.
Sarah Klenbort is a writer and Teaching Associate at the University of Queensland. Her work has appeared in Eureka Street, Guardian Australia, Best Australian Stories, Overland, Island, and other publications here and abroad.
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