CHARLA SMITH & KOPANO RATELE

“It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change” (bell hooks 2004: xvii).

In our previous article titled “Violence Against Boys and Men” we argued that the fight against Gender Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) would benefit from paying attention not only to violence against women and girls, but also to the violence wrought on boys and men. We laid out the reasons why we think it remains difficult to simultaneously talk about men’s violence against men and boys and men’s violence against women and girls. This difficulty cuts across ideological positions, left or right, a feminist or a men’s rights advocate, from nongovernmental organisations or government. Even so, in a society awash with trauma, an approach to violence which excludes men and boys as victims of violence exposes an uncaring attitude towards boys and men that we, as a society, surely do not hold.

We are concerned that, we also said, the apparent lack of empathy (or indeed real disregard) for the traumas in men’s childhoods and adult lives might be one of the sources of men’s violence against women and girls. We are aware that to contend that the indifference toward the physical violence, and as a result psychological trauma, boys and men experience may be related to men’s violence against women and girls is a potentially inflammatory argument to make. This is especially so given the increase in violence emanating from the so-called “manosphere” – meaning various online groups of disgruntled men in forums spewing misogynistic hatred towards women and championing a particular form of entitled masculinity.

Beside the groupings of men’s rights activists, Men Going Their Own Way, and pick-up artists, another well-known iteration of such gathering of men are the so-called incels, shorthand for “involuntary celibates”. Some men who identify as incels claim to be unwanted and unloved by women. At the extreme end, these men can be so disgruntled that they have gone on killing sprees to teach women a lesson. Examples of these are the cases of Elliot Rodger who wrote a manifesto before killing six people, injuring fourteen others, and killing himself in Isla Vista, California, United States of America, in 2014, and Alek Minassian, then 25, who killed 11 people when he drove into them on a busy sidewalk in 2018 in Toronto, Canada, 2018, apparently because he was frustrated and angered by the fact that women would not have sex with him and therefore became radicalised by manospherian forums.

We should be extremely cautious, then, not to make an argument that in any way supports an incel logic that says women deserve the violence wrought on them as a result of not having sex with or loving these men enough or at all. (For an excellent analysis of this logic see Laura Bates Men Who Hate Women: The Extremism Nobody is Talking About). However, we can surely say that boys who are not cared for and about, who receive the message that they do not matter at all, and who never learn to care about others, are more likely to become violent than boys who receive a different message about their loved and loving place in the world. Our (un)/caring attitudes towards and for boys surely does have an impact on the men that they will become.

Adoptive parents prefer girls

A troubling, true story about adoption in South Africa reveals that as a society we are perhaps indeed becoming uncaring, and careless, about our boys and men. A couple, let’s call them Mr and Mrs X, approached an adoption agency to enquire about adopting a child, after being told that they themselves could not have any children. They wanted to know how long it would take before they would be approved as parents by the notoriously strict adoption process. They were told by a woman at the agency that if they wanted a girl, they would wait for a very long time, since girls were in high demand. However, if they wanted a boy, they could be parents very soon, because adoptive parents do not want boys anymore.

This heartbreaking story is surprising to us because it shows a drastic deviation from, for instance, the clear preference shown for boys during China’s One-Child Policy (1980-2015), where boys were chosen in such disproportionate numbers that the Chinese population is still struggling with the after-effects of a skewed sex ratio as a result of gender-based abortions and abandonments. The reason for the son preference in this context was that boys inherit the family name and property, and are responsible for looking after the elderly parents. However, at the time, the preference for sons did not seem unusual. Boys were valued and valuable. In contrast, the preference in America today is the opposite, and adopting girls is the more common choice. A possible explanation for America’s girl preference is that girls are perceived by the public to be less aggressive, easier to care for and more submissive.

In contexts where boys are regarded as more trouble and girls easier, these gendered stereotypes may be wrapped up with and influence societal attitudes towards boys and their wellbeing. The stereotypes and attitudes influence who to care for and how. Societal indifference or aversion towards boys and young men carries potentially negative repercussions not only for these social groups, but for wider society.

The message that boys are trouble is undoubtedly common due to high levels of violence and crime mostly committed by men. Violence is indeed closely associated with men as perpetrators and (this is an important distinction) violence is closely associated with masculinity in general. To be more specific, in many places around the world that have been structured by white supremacist ideas such as America, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, it is young Black men (or so-called men of colour) and masculinity who are associated with violence. Although the stereotype of violent men and masculinity is obviously not the full story, it is one young males tend to hear most often about themselves from an early age. As a story about the self, once it is internalised, it can be hard for a person to throw out.   

Blueprints for caring for boys and men

It is surely obvious, trite even, to say that to know men and boys only in relation to the violence that some men perpetrate against women, girls, men and boys, is to only partially and inadequately know them. Yet it seems that our public discourse in places like South Africa and the United States is primarily interested only in this one aspect of men and masculinities. Social media, newspapers, political speeches, statistics, seem to focus primarily on this problem with men and masculinities. It seems that relative to some men building bridges or their inspiring achievements, our attention is drawn to men behaving badly. Positive representations of men and boys are comparatively scarcer. It seems to be appropriate to ask: do men even know what we want from them, besides not to be violent? Several of the points we are making were made by the African American cultural and feminist theorist bell hooks, with whom we introduce this short essay, across several books and essays. A particularly instructive observation that she made in the book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, a text we wholeheartedly recommend, is this disarmingly obvious but crucial one:

“Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving.”

It seems that in 2026, this call for blueprints of who men can, and indeed should, aspire to be are still sorely lacking in South Africa as they are in other parts of the world. Some scholars have paid attention to such caring, and broadly positive masculinities, and some popular culture products have offered us glimpses of the type of blueprint that bell hooks encourages us to develop. Still, by far the loudest message continues to be that men are a problem, masculinity is toxic, and boys are already being blamed for having a power they do not yet, and might never, possess.

hooks warned that in a climate where mainly negative portrayals of men are prevalent, it would be almost impossible for women to express any other feeling than that “men are hopeless”. She urged women to speak the truth about how they think about men. At the time, her concern was that women could not be honest about the fact that they sometimes wished their male relations away, and that this wish caused them anguish. Today it seems plausible that women would feel more freedom to express adverse attitudes towards men, especially in the wake of #MeToo and its culmination in #MenAreTrash. The freedom to trash men, as it were, has resulted in a proliferation of negative portrayals of men and a seemingly unrestrained acceptance of, well, trashing them. This has led many boys and men to seek assurances from the aforementioned manospherian online forums that celebrate a masculinity that is maligned, but that feels useful, essential even, to them.

Shouldn’t we, as a society, instead of leaving our boys and men to find their sense of belonging and purpose online, rather aim to influence what types of models/blueprints of masculinity men aspire to, by engaging with boys, from a young age, about care – how to care for others – and also assure them that they are cared for? Boys need to be included and involved in the conversations we have with girls, about relationships, family, friendships – this is where the basic understanding of, and education about relationality, care and emotionality takes place. We exclude boys and men from these care-full conversations at our own peril. We should not be indifferent to boys and men, nor turn away from male needs – just as we should not turn away from women and girls’ needs. Caring about the fate of men is simply humane. Women and men need to be more concerned about our boys and men if we hope they will learn to love the way we want and need them to.