Agency yes…but urgency too

Why are we missing the obvious when discussing the Manosphere?

What lies behind the growth of the ‘Manosphere’? This phenomenon  has been vividly portrayed in a recent film by Louis Theroux. At its mildest, this shows influencers telling young men that things are rigged against them, counselling them to abandon hope of a 9 to 5 job, and instead make their money via narcissistic self-promotion and dubious trading practices. At its most extreme, the manosphere promotes violence against the LBGT community,  antisemitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, and the claim that while women should be faithful to one partner men should be free to have as many as they like.  

Why these prejudices? Is it a hostility to women sharpened by what is felt to be their success at men’s expense? Is it a desire to return to a world where men and women each knew their place? Or is it something else?  According to Simon van Teutem, writing in the Financial Times recently, it cannot be the underlying social attitudes of the young.

Citing evidence that across western democracies young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less, not more, conservative in their attitudes, he argues that there must be another explanation:

Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts and what remains is a simple promise. ‘You can make something of yourself. Yes the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency.’

He goes on to say that there is ‘a moment somewhere between puberty and adulthood’ , which developmental psychologists attribute to the years between 18 and 29. They describe this time as ‘emerging adulthood’ , a time when people are struggling to work out who they are and what they want. This is a time when people are exploring their identity, discovering and experimenting with relationships without yet having made strong commitments.

I can recognise this label. Yet its boundaries feel oddly rigid and artificial. The hunger for some meaningful life experiences starts much earlier than 18

Some Perspective from History

Take a look at history. The eighteenth century path to full adulthood was longer but started earlier.  A child was playing a full part in the economy by seven, and marrying, on average at 28. Life expectancy at the end of the seventeenth century was 32.

As historian John Gillis described pre-industrial attitudes:

 'What they commonly called youth was a very long transition period, lasting from the point that the very young child first became somewhat independent of its family, usually about seven or eight, to the point of complete independence at marriage, ordinarily in the mid or late twenties’

That seven year-old also had to be emotionally more independent. One in ten children died in their first year and parents defended themselves against loss by keeping their emotional distance.

John Locke tells us in 1697 that the children of the poor must work for some part of the day when they reach the age of three. The boys, according to Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost , were doing the ploughing, hedging, carting and harvesting, while the girls helped with the house, the meals, and the making of butter, cheese, bread and beer, looked after the cattle and took the fruit to market.

The major step towards independence for the child of the seventeenth century came at around 12. By this age, two-thirds had left home and were engaged either as apprentices to a craftsman, in which case the parents would be paying the craftsman a fee, or as servants in husbandry, in which case the master would be paying the servant a junior wage as well as providing food and accommodation.

Thus, by their early teens pre-industrial children had entered a stage of semi-independence unimagined by their twentieth century equivalents. They had entered into a contract, which specified their duties and their masters'.

Meanwhile physical and sexual maturity came later for the pre-industrial youth. In Norway, where the records go back further than anywhere else, the age of menarche has come down from 17 in 1850 to around 13 today. One mid-sixteenth century encyclopaedia suggests that full physical prowess was not reached until the late twenties All the things that we associate with adult identity - marriage, full economic independence and full physical maturity - came in the twenties, nearly a decade after the child had first left  home and begun to feel the need to be self-reliant.

The Implications for now

A commonsense response to these changes would be to recognise that becoming an adult is a lengthy process, composed of many dimensions, on which society needs to make a start much earlier – at least as early as 12.

We need to give young males (and not only young males) a sense of agency, but it is hopeless to start at the age of 16. By this stage 100,000 young people are joining the ranks of the NEET (not in education, employment or training). Many have come away from school wrongly concluding that their poor academic performance leaves them without much prospect of success.

Starting around 13 we owe it to every young person to give them experiences outside the academic curriculum that help them to discover where their potential lies and feel wanted by the society they are growing up in.  

There are many organisations - our own among them -  doing this on a modest scale. The recent revision to OFSTED inspection criteria requiring schools to show what they are doing to enhance life skills is a foot in the door. Yet there are a million NEETS.

So of course the young men amongst them will be lacking a sense of agency, and at the mercy of the Manosphere’s snake oil salesmen. We are currently denying them, while still at school, effective opportunities to make a difference, to feel needed, to become confident in presenting themselves; to work in teams; to discover the attributes that they have that an exam-dominated curriculum will not reveal. We owe it to them to open the door to meaningful experiences while still at school. For, if this sense of self can be unlocked before age 15, there is still the chance for those feeling rejected and unmotivated by the curriculum to make the connection and commit to routes of study that will fir with their abilities.

Take Kevin. Kevin was at high risk of exclusion from school because of his challenging and violent behaviour, poor attendance and poor attainment levels. One year after his participation in our Project Can Do, Kevin’s attendance and attainment had drastically improved. He has now completed his GSCE’s and is studying for his A-Levels. He is the first member of his family to finish secondary school. The school confirmed that Project Can Do played a significant role in his transformation.

I remember watching my children learning to crawl. At first they were frustrated, but eventually succeeded in heaving themselves across the carpet. Then they had the confidence to head for the stairs! Babies face a series of hurdles, and gain confidence as they master each one. But what about adolescents in and after secondary school? In spite of recent exam reforms, it still seems to me that we carry secondary school children around for five years, then suddenly drop them and say  'Now walk'.

We do not make them aware from of 12of their own responsibility for their own progress. Apart from those most able academically, for whom  exams may be the spur, we do not offer them challenges of increasing complexity, from which they  could derive confidence and competence. How are they to find out what they are  good at? How are they to gain the confidence to go through the equivalent of crawling, the then running? How are they to see wider horizons and  face tougher tests?

Tackle this and a sense of agency can follow. Ignore it, and the number of NEETs will continue to grow and so will the influence of the Manosphere.   

Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company. Tomorrow’s Company has initiated the Can Do programme which enables 13-15 year-olds while in school to discover their potential. The Tomorrow’s Enterprise Foundation is now being created to take this work forward on a larger scale. The historical background to this piece can be found in  Something to Prove Author: MARK GOYDER Source: RSA Journal, Vol. 136, No. 5381 (April 1988), pp. 308-320