An out-of-work football manager has dropped a fresh batch of stone tablets and the House of Commons has found a workaround for Netflix’s password-sharing restrictions, so, under the twin waves of Adolescence and Sir Gareth Southgate, we have enthusiastically recommenced our national hunt for that promising superman: “the positive male role model”. How long have we been chasing that hopeful silhouette now? Long enough by now to realise, I think, that he’s not just elusive – he’s a chimera.
He is also, really, a squeamish innuendo. Southgate has no balm for the boiling shame of your porn consumption. When a large man forcing you off the pavement leaves you livid with impotent rage for hours, visualising that you were actually Marcus Rashford vaulting a slide tackle is no good. Sam Fender’s new album, Idris Elba’s new documentary and Stormzy’s new McDonald’s meal might constitute a delightful night in, but they are no salve for rage of male youth.
Sometimes it feels our roster of upstanding nominees are offering to help young men with problems other than the ones they actually have. We know they will provide sincere, comprehending eye contact as they ask the boys how they really are. But were those boys to answer in all sincerity, the role model would shake their hand, wash their own and politely excuse themselves.
If we really want to help young men, a little more stomach is needed. Punk-rock penman Lester Bangs said the key ingredients of music were grossness, youth and naivety. If you know too much, if you’re copying someone, or even if you’re just too plain competent, something is lost. The best tunes are a “hideous racket”, original, primitive, and unsavoury. The same is the language of youth. “When you’re a kid,” Bangs writes “you need stuff like that.” Hearing young men means stripping back some decency – indeed, embracing a little indecency.
And we need not panic. The edge makes for better TV, but most young men inhabit the wedge. They are shopping around their algorithms for ways to be, but contact with the digital subterrain does not lead to instant radicalisation. And if you are willing to suffer the noise, you can engage. The racket of the young male mind has a simple bassline. To think about pubescent men you should think about sex, because that’s what they’re thinking about, all the time.
No one would deny that even mild maladjustment can spiral alarmingly. But we already knew that reactionary intersexual attitudes sprout from a frustrated mental melee. Almost a century ago, in Marriage and Morals, Bertrand Russell wrote that the two main causes of such an outlook are “jealousy and sexual fatigue”. And for today’s young men, can’t we all see, new tech gadgetry has only inflamed those two old sores.
Regarding the murky morass of jealousy, dating apps have quantified the male dating struggle into cold, pitiless data. Behold the melancholy Sankey Chart of one male Tinder-holic who FOI’d his account. A lusty army of “likes sent” sets out hopefully on the far left, only to dwindle horrifyingly to a miserable few by “received reply”, then succumbs to the void after the last heroic straggler perishes at “first date”. Single female friends just aren’t threatened by quite the same pit of unwantedness that male ones are. The facts are: men swipe on 60 per cent of women, women swipe on 5 per cent of men. That’s pretty sombre for the hombre.
As for fatigue, video porn has globally blunted and bamboozled the virility of young men. This magazine’s archives contain Martin Amis being surprised at 24 that magazines can “actually sex you up”, like real humans can. I was literally half that age when: “You haven’t seen PornHub? We’re going to the shed!” Per the internet page “Your Brain on Porn”, every single study of young male sexuality since 2010 has confirmed historic erectile disfunction and low libido. This reality – glut and starvation all at once – is the starting point for our lost boys. It’s not a desert the positive male role model ever treads.
No doubt, our eager search for the man of the moment is fuelled by the best intentions. Aware we have issued so many “do nots” to the young men lately, we want to make things up with some encouraging “dos”. But it doesn’t work like that. While it is thoughtful to bring a solution when you point out a problem, the solution has to work. Otherwise you load the burden of an impossible ask. Absent of a good solution, you might better reach balance by cooling the criticism. The “positive male role model” is not better than nothing.
Should some Einstein of the ephebi crack the perfect intervention, we can try that. Meanwhile, though, you are going to have to let young men explore. That means them doing stupid things. That means them watching YouTube videos of people you disapprove of. Because remember the first rule of repression: the repressed goes underground and returns in some gruesome mutation. Hoover prohibited alcohol and spawned bootlegging. Our boys are swigging moonshine, and we are trying to tempt them back with kiddie bottles of purple Fruit Shoot. It’ll take harder stuff than that, a franker brew.
If you don’t like what fungus has bloomed in the dank, ask who was blocking the light. The positive male role model is the shadow under which the manosphere continues to spore. If you really want to talk to young men, it’s time for something fresher.
[See also: Teenage boys talk masculinity]
Content from our partners
