\n<\/p>\n
The prime minister said it was a \u201creally hard watch\u201d, while a British police force said it should be a \u201cwake-up call for parents\u201d. The Netflix drama Adolescence \u2013 which tells the story of a 13-year-old boy arrested for killing a female classmate \u2013 was hailed from the school gates to the Houses of Parliament for shedding a spotlight on the toxic influence of the manosphere.<\/p>\n
But the national conversation did not end with the final episode of the much-discussed drama. A series of high-profile campaigns, conversations, policy shifts and research have resulted in a sense that 2025 has been the year of the boy.<\/p>\n
At the start of the year the former England football manager Gareth Southgate warned about the dangers of \u201ccallous, manipulative and toxic influencers\u201d, while Lost Boys, a study from the Centre for Social Justice, argued that \u201cboys [were] being left behind\u201d from educational attainment to mental health.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Adolescence drew widespread praise for its portrayal of a 13-year-old boy being radicalised online.<\/span> Photograph: AP<\/p>\n In June was the first ever \u201cDad strike\u201d, when fathers gathered in London and Edinburgh to protest at pitifully poor paternity leave provision in the UK. By November, the government had produced the first ever Men\u2019s Health Strategy for England, a month later its Violence Against Women and Girls strategy focused on preventing misogynistic behaviour in boys.<\/p>\n Warnings about toxic masculinity have been stark. But after a year in which debate about men and boys moved from the fringes of the internet to the mainstream, experts and policy-makers are urging progressive figures to focus less on toxicity and more on positive role models.<\/p>\n Among them is a collection of Labour MPs who in March started organising via a ballooning WhatsApp group and have now formed a formal parliamentary group \u2013 the Labour group for men and boys.<\/p>\n One member, Natalie Fleet, the MP for Bolsover, spent her allotted time at an International Men\u2019s Day debate in parliament speaking about the amazing men in her community \u2013 including her husband, an \u201cactual hero\u201d whom she met aged 16, and helped raise her first child and is now reducing his hours to help look after their grandchildren.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cThese are men in our communities doing the right thing, who we need to find and amplify, and that\u2019s what we can do through this group.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Natalie Fleet, the MP for Bolsolver, says there \u2018are men in our communities doing the right thing, who we need to find and amplify\u2019.<\/span> Photograph: Alicia Canter\/The Guardian<\/p>\n In 2025, the influence of misogynistic figures such as Andrew Tate showed little sign of abating \u2013 despite facing charges, which he denies, in multiple jurisdictions. Tate travelled to the US and cemented his role as a leading figure in Trumpworld. A poll earlier this year found that a fifth of UK males aged 16 to 29 who had heard of Tate had a positive view of him.<\/p>\n But other organisations have parked their tanks on Tate\u2019s lawn. Movember and Equimundo launched the Young Men and Media Collective in October, which funds influencers to deliver a different kind of masculine message.<\/p>\n \u201cPolicymakers have woken up to the fact that, particularly online, young men are being harmed and their health is suffering by the content they\u2019re seeing,\u201d said Amy O\u2019Connor, policy lead at the charity. \u201cIt\u2019s all very well criticising online content, but what are we doing to give our young men an alternative?\u201d<\/p>\n The phrase \u201cmen\u2019s rights\u201d comes with \u201ca whole bunch of really unpleasant connotations\u201d, said Adam Thompson, MP for Erewash, but there\u2019s also a recognition that from educational attainment to suicide rates, boys and men, as much as girls and women, need targeted policy. \u201cI\u2019m a strong believer that the patriarchy is harmful to both men and women,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a zero-sum game.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s right that public discourse is focusing on boys, argues Joeli Brearley, the founder of the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed. The lack of debate about the challenges boys face led her to launch this year a podcast, To Be a Boy,which she hosts with the fatherhood champion Elliott Rae.<\/p>\n Brearley urges caution, however. The rise of the far right, a surge in support for Reform UK and the prospect of baked-in sexism in increasingly pervasive AI tools have left her worried.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are having these really fruitful conversations about boys, but I\u2019m also seeing a sea change in the way women talk about their experiences online,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s as if you can\u2019t have both \u2013 we\u2019re not allowed now to talk about the fact that women are still experiencing specific challenges because we\u2019re now saying that men have it hard.\u201d<\/p>\n The desire to combat a spike in more traditional \u2013 and regressive \u2013 masculine ideals is also rising exponentially, said George Gabriel, the co-founder of The Dad Shift. \u201cThe challenge is real. But I think we can acknowledge that while the situation is dire, we can also have some optimism that we are starting to find a path forward. That\u2019s where we find ourselves at the end of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The prime minister said it was a \u201creally hard watch\u201d, while a British police force said it should be a \u201cwake-up call for parents\u201d. The Netflix drama Adolescence \u2013 which tells the story of a 13-year-old boy arrested for killing a female classmate \u2013 was hailed from the school gates to the Houses of Parliament<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[9205,2866,17420,1329,1569],"class_list":{"0":"post-39523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-adolescence","9":"tag-boy","10":"tag-manosphere","11":"tag-men","12":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}