I HAVE watched the conversation about men drift further and further from reality over the past few decades. Every few months another TV programme pops up educating the lazy public that boys and men are heading in the wrong direction and need to be fixed. The latest in a long list of insults to all men is Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. I know exactly what will happen next. The clips will spread across social media. Teachers will mention it in class. People will repeat the same talking points at work, and men and boys will wake up in the morning with the auto-shame that the media worked so hard to inflict upon them, ready to be forgiven.
Similarly, social conditioning which loudly teaches men to remain silent has been building for generations and the results are a general acceptance that men are something to be forgiven. Other men use intellect to fight back at the narrative but sadly, you won’t see many of those because their social media accounts have been banned or deleted.
As an example of this badly worded, uneducated attack on good men and boys, I present Isabelle Younane, Head of External Affairs at Women’s Aid. She made a comment about the Manosphere documentary: ‘Misogyny is at the core of all violence against women and girls, and it is only by eradicating these archaic and damaging beliefs that we can hope to build a society where women and children are safe.’
It sounds neat. It fits comfortably into the narrative many people already believe. The trouble is that it oversimplifies something that is far messier in real life. The reality is, first, that only a minority of relationships are affected – an estimated 2.2million females – and the second is that 1.5million males experienced domestic abuse in the last year. That’s a prevalence rate of approximately 9.1 per cent of females and 6.5 per cent of males.
In other words violence in relationships is rare. Nor can itbe reduced to a simple hatred of the opposite sex; misogyny in the case of women. People lash out for many reasons: insecurities, control, alcohol, unresolved trauma and lack of self-esteem to name but a few. None of those factors neatly translates into a blanket hatred of women. But for women’s domestic violence and safety funding and political purposes, it ticks all the right boxes.
It also quietly erases from the picture the men that the figures above from the Office for National Statistics show are victims too. A third of victims of crimes of domestic violence in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025 were men (and these are only the men that report the abuse). That is not a trivial minority.
So where are the documentaries on the ‘Womanosphere’? Where are the school classes on misandry? Where’s the balance?
Norah Vincent, an American journalist and self-described feminist curious to understand men’s lives from the inside, spent 18 months living as a man named Ned, joining male-only spaces, therapy groups, and dating while presenting as male. She was shocked and profoundly saddened by what she discovered. Men, she found, live under a ‘burden of suspicion’, constantly assumed to be dangerous, while any display of vulnerability is punished or mocked. She described the social invisibility men face as an ‘averted gaze’ and observed that ‘every man’s armour is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he is naked and insecure and hoping you will not see’.
Other quotes from her book Self-made man: My year disguised as a man are:
‘Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don’t have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else.’
‘I really like being a woman . . . I like it more now because I think it’s more of a privilege.’
‘There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.’
So we end up in a strange place. A third of reported victims are male, yet the public conversation rarely acknowledges them. Instead weproduce more documentaries about toxic masculinity and their dangerous online communities. Yet we avoid addressing cultural and religious mistreatment of women prevalent in Islamic communities for fear of social or legal sanction.
Of course some men behave appallingly but they are not the norm, and it does no one any good to pretend they are. But it has never been difficult for me to surround myself with men who would be the first to hold other men accountable for bad behaviour because that’s generally what good men do: we keep each other in check. Can we get a funded documentary on that?
What frustrates me is how easily people absorb the narrative. A programme airs, a few headlines follow and suddenly everyone has an opinion about the ‘crisis of masculinity’. Very few stop to question whether the picture they are being shown is complete, where the information came from, who gathered the information or what their agenda is.
That imbalance matters. Stories shape perception. Lessons that many boys encounter which are framed around titles such as ‘Toxic masculinity and online influencers’, ‘Misogyny and sexism awareness’ or ‘Respectful relationships’.
When the public repeatedly sees men framed as a social danger, it becomes accepted truth.
I would like to see something different for once. A programme that shows the men who build communities instead of tearing them down. A conversation that acknowledges the grandfathers, fathers, sons and brothers holding families together, supported by good women who do not blindly accept every narrative placed in front of them.
I do not want a culture that ignores abuse against women. No reasonable person wants that. But fairness should not be controversial either. If a third of victims are male, then male victims deserve recognition, support and a place in the national conversation. More importantly, ordinary boys deserve to grow up without feeling as though they are constantly under suspicion.
