The Boys Are Not the Enemy

Recently, my son learned that an adult’s care can have an expiry date.

When his football coach discovered that he would not be returning the following season, he banned him from training, excluded him from the final tournament and gave the top goalscorer award my son had earned to another child who had scored fifteen fewer goals.

He was not allowed to say goodbye to his teammates. His contribution to the season was diminished because he would not be useful to the club in the next one.

My son cried. I cried.

It came during what had already been a brutal year. Two people close to me had died, my grandad was desperately unwell, and an accident left me in pain and unable to operate a camera for two months. Then my Instagram account, with 57,000 followers, was hacked, taking the two biggest contracts of my life with it.

Through all of that, there had been a single positive; my son had been happy and thriving.

Two consecutive weekends took away the last positive thing I had to frame the year around.

What hurt him was not simply missing a tournament or losing a trophy presentation. He is ridiculously competitive and these things matter a lot to him. But he had learnt a harsher lesson; he had believed that somebody genuinely cared about him who it turns out, did not. He had described him not just as his coach, but also his friend. He discovered that the care was conditional, given only if his choices could be controlled. It lasted for as long as he played for the club.

It therefore meant nothing.

There are disappointments that build resilience. But there are also others that teach a child not to trust.

I submitted a fourteen-page complaint explaining what had happened and how badly it had affected my son. The coach did not acknowledge it. Instead, he made a TikTok about going to the cinema with his girlfriend. There was time to turn an ordinary evening into content, but none to send a single line to acknowledge the complaint.

During this same period he posted about Tyson Fury crying to God and speaking openly about his mental health.

Are you fucking taking the piss?

He was publicly performing empathy for the pain of a famous, rich and successful man, while refusing to acknowledge the pain he had caused a child he knew. A child left in his care. Tyson Fury’s tears had been relatable. My son’s tears, which he had caused, should have likewise made him reflect, respond, apologise and take corrective action. This is basic shit.

Causing male pain in real life while presenting yourself online as somebody who understands it, is hypocrisy at its finest.

There was time to post about male mental health. There was no time to answer the child whose mental health his own behaviour had affected.

Social media gives people somewhere to hide from conflicting information. My complaint placed a fact in front of him that did not fit the version of himself he presents online: he had hurt a child. He had hurt me. Instead of confronting it, he ignored it, posted something more flattering to his self image and returned to an online world that asked nothing difficult of him.

Online, contradictions can be edited away. A person can perform empathy, strength and emotional intelligence without having to demonstrate any of them when accountability becomes uncomfortable. The feed reflects back the version of ourselves we prefer. The people who reveal the distance between that version and our behaviour become easier to ignore. A child’s pain you caused in real life should move you more than Tyson Fury’s.

When every contradiction can be ignored or pushed out of frame, the people who mirror your shortcomings or see through you become necessary to avoid.

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The Men Boys Meet First

We spend a great deal of time worrying about the men boys find online. We should also be looking at the men they meet before they get there.

A football coach is not only teaching passing, pressing and positioning. Whether he accepts the responsibility or not, he is demonstrating what male authority looks like.

Boys watch what a man does when his decisions are challenged. They notice whether power makes him protective or petty. They learn whether causing pain leads to reflection or silence.

The internet does not begin teaching boys on an empty page. Adults have already written on it.

That is why male leaders have never been more important. Boys need men whose principles survive inconvenience: men who can be firm without being cruel, admit when they are wrong and understand that a child’s feelings do not become irrelevant simply because they are uncomfortable to deal with. Irrespective of what has happened during your childhood, when you become a man it is your responsibility to undo it, and make sure you don’t reinflict the same mistakes on the next generation.

When the men in real life fail them, boys do not stop looking for guidance. They look somewhere else.

Influencers such as Andrew Tate do not always attract boys by opening with contempt. They begin with subjects boys already care about: strength, discipline, money, rejection, confidence and purpose. Then those ordinary concerns are tied to a worldview in which empathy is weakness, women are adversaries and power means never having to answer to anybody.

Research commissioned by Ofcom found that young men can be drawn into the manosphere through humour, fitness and self-improvement content, particularly when they feel isolated or cannot find more constructive conversations about masculinity elsewhere.

The answer is not to pretend boys have no concerns until the wrong man gives those concerns a name.

It is to make sure better men, actual men, reach them first.

Individual men are not the only ones teaching boys what their place is; institutions do it too, often in the name of fairness.

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When Fairness Starts Taking Something Away

Failure is not always cruelty. Sometimes it is a determination to appear so fair that the result becomes unfair.

My son attended a football event at St George’s Park where the girls were given undeniable preferential treatment. When the boys asked why, they were told that historically girls had not been welcomed to the same extent.

That history is real. In 1921, the Football Association effectively banned women’s football from affiliated grounds, a restriction that lasted for around fifty years.

But none of the boys standing at St George’s Park imposed that ban.

History deserves to be understood and repaired. Children are not invoices on which we settle the debts of previous generations.

Treating boys as though they must now accept being placed second does not teach them equality. It teaches them that equality is another word for their exclusion. It risks creating resentment towards girls who did not ask to become the symbol of a correction.

It does girls no favours either. After generations of women fighting to be taken seriously, we should not be teaching girls that progress means being mollycoddled or automatically placed first. They deserve proper investment, excellent facilities and equal respect, not the suggestion that they require ceremonial advantages to compete or even just show up.

Equality is not the same as special treatment.

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The Women Boys Actually Know

From a young age I was always considered a bit of a tomboy. My male friends outnumber my female friends, so the opposite sex has never been an abstract political group to me.

Neither have the women they are being warned about online.

Never in my life have I been with somebody who out-earned me. That is not unusual in my circle. I know women who earn more, pay more and carry financial responsibilities that the internet still insists belong naturally to men.

After I split up with my ex-husband, he spent the next two years dragging me through court, trying to claim part of what I had worked tirelessly to build.

If I edited my life in the style of social media, I could turn that experience into a warning about men. I could declare that men are gold diggers, that husbands are only out for women’s money and that no successful woman should trust one.

But it would also be dishonest.

One man’s actions do not describe an entire sex. My experience does not become evidence against millions of people I have never met.

Yet online, women are repeatedly shown as financially dependent opportunists while men are told that their value lies in providing. We see women who never pay on dates, women whose partners fund their hair and nails, and endless conversations about how a 50/50 man just isn’t cutting it.

These people exist. The distortion is making them appear representative when they are anything but. Among British couples where both partners work, more than eight in ten divide their household expenses, most of them equally. What TikTok displays is not the reality of established relationships. It overwhelmingly shows people negotiating the dating stage, not two people who have made a genuine commitment and taken real world action to build a life together. Couples where only one person works make up less than 20% and this includes instances where the woman may be the sole breadwinner.

Financial independence is not an unfortunate side effect of feminism. It is part of freedom.

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Gender Becomes a Performance

The screen does not merely show men and women. It gives them parts to play.

The woman is a princess, a diva, a queen, or a baddie. She expects princess treatment, displays what a man has bought for her and presents dependence as proof that she is valued.

Maybe I am getting old, but I find this language childish rather than empowering.

Girls were once expected to grow out of being princesses. Now adult women use the title as a relationship requirement.

There is nothing wrong with beauty, glamour or enjoying being looked after. The problem begins when a personal preference becomes an instruction to an entire sex: a real man pays, a real man provides, a real man funds the lifestyle, and a woman who accepts less has failed to understand her worth.

The old hierarchy has returned with better lighting.

Women spent generations arguing that our value was not determined by the man who chose or financed us. Dressing financial dependence in the language of empowerment does not make it new.

Some of the stereotypes about women are being reinforced by women themselves. The same is true on the other side. Under almost any video about infidelity, women can be found writing that all men cheat.

We cannot demand that men stop reducing women to stereotypes while reducing men to one of our own.

I was brought up hearing that girls mature faster than boys. TikTok is not presenting the strongest evidence for the prosecution.

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The Feed Learns the Wound

Social media did not invent these tensions. It learned how to package and repeat them.

TikTok openly explains that its recommendations are shaped by what users watch, like, share and search for. The system notices where attention lingers and supplies more of it. It does not have to understand whether that attention came from agreement, anger, fear or disbelief.

The algorithm is not inventing men and women. It is editing them.

Every individual story may be true. The lie is in the proportion. The lie is in the comments.

A stereotype is a story that no longer has to make room for the person who contradicts it. An algorithm can make an exception feel typical without fabricating a single example.

Researchers at UCL and the University of Kent created accounts representing teenage boys with interests associated with vulnerability. Within five days, the proportion of misogynistic content recommended to those accounts rose from 13 per cent to 56 per cent.

Five days is not enough time to understand a person. It is enough time for a platform to identify a wound and build a feed around it.

The result is a generation of boys and girls arriving at one another already suspicious. They are not meeting just a person. They are meeting a collection of warnings.

Yet the same technology can still widen the frame. Technology can create connections. It can also turn the worst example of a group into its public representative. Especially if you are a teenage boy going through a vulnerable moment.

Which version succeeds depends partly on what the platforms reward. It also depends on what adults are willing to model when the phone is put down.

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What We Teach Before They Scroll

My son has grown up watching me work, earn, pay bills and get on with it. I do not resemble the dependent woman he is repeatedly warned about online.

I have watched him care deeply, cry, vocalise his emotions, recover and try again. He does not resemble the emotionless man the internet or men who never learned how to express their feelings, may one day model him.

The coach’s timeline contained Tyson Fury’s tears. His inbox contained my son’s. Only one kind of pain was convenient enough to acknowledge. But the pain he ignored was the only one he had the responsibility and power to put an end to.

That difference was not created by an algorithm. It was a choice.

Boys notice choices like that. They notice when adults post about compassion but avoid accountability. They notice when equality means moving them aside, when strength means hiding their feelings and when the people telling them to respect women speak about boys as though they are already guilty.

Then we wonder why a louder voice reaches them.

The answer is not to retreat into opposing camps of men and women, each producing evidence against the other. Girls do not need boys to be diminished in order to succeed. Boys do not need girls to be dependent in order to feel valuable. Women’s independence is not an attack on men, and boys’ vulnerability is not an inconvenience to be ignored until it becomes content.

The boys are not the enemy.