Well, the sun is shining today and everyone seems to be talking about gender based violence, incel culture, and ‘What to do about young men today?’ as Gareth Southgate’s inspiring Richard Dimbleby lecture and the impressive Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’ brilliantly raises the nation’s desire to address this deep and urgent issue.
I listened to Stephen Jardine’s Radio Scotland phone in this morning about ‘What to do about teenage boys’ and thought it was fantastic to hear so many people wanting to share their thoughts. All the contributors had great points to make.
I have two points. One is that it’s not just teenagers. We shouldn’t put all the responsibility on teenagers to change. Our whole culture needs to address gender-based violence and online misogyny. As grown-ups and as citizens we need to create space and time to understand what is happening and how we are contributing to it. We need to challenge the power of big tech. We need to change laws. We need to invest in creating healthy communities at ground level.
My second point is that the manosphere produces amazingly effective propaganda. It promotes a violently misogynistic world view or ideology. It normalises that ideology, makes it entertaining, often funny and emotionally consoling. We need to be creative and use creativity to tell compelling, funny and healing stories about what it means to be a healthy and happy man.
I’ve been working on ‘Many Good Men’, an interactive drama written with different groups of young people about the radicalisation of masculinity and incel culture for three years now. Many Good Men is about two football players who witness an incel shooting and how, when they try to set up a campaign to address the issue, get radicalised themselves by the content they find in the ‘manosphere’. We produced it at Hearts Football club in February 2024, then in Bucharest in November 2024 and we’re currently trying very hard to raise the funding to tour Scotland with it in 2026.
You can watch a 3 minute film about Many Good Men here.
One of the questions on the phone-in was “Should the Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’ be watched in Schools?” And yes, it’s a brilliantly told story that could help young people to engage with the seriousness of the issue. I want to say also that my experience of talking with young people about misogynistic content online from influencers, to the targeting of young men by porn platforms, is that attacking this conversation head-on often doesn’t work. If someone is already influenced by this content they really struggle to hear challenges about it and to think about it critically. That is the power of propaganda.
However, when we use art-based interventions as we did with Many Good Men you can ask the same questions but in a safer space of creativity and storytelling. Ask, “What if there was a young man who felt like they wanted to kill themselves because they believe they will never have sex or a romantic relationship.” Or ask, “What if there was a young man who fantasized about killing or raping a girl who didn’t want to go out with them.”
Why would they feel like that? Who might they be? What does their ordinary day look like? Who are the people they love and who love them? What has happened in their lives that makes them vulnerable to content that promotes hating and blaming women?
If you take the conversation away from people’s personal experience, so they don’t have to talk about themselves directly, at least to start with, and imagine another person, a fictional character, then you can explore more safely and bravely all the reasons why some young men find themselves in such dark places of self-hated and fear and why those feelings are then turned into hatred for others because of their gender, race or sexuality.
Many Good Men tells the story of the radicalisation of two young men, so that the audience can then step into the drama and try to change the outcome for those characters. It is so powerful to come together as a community to address this issue. To listen to each other and try to explore how to make a difference. There are no easy solutions, but I 100% believe from the work we’ve done over the past 3 years that there are solutions that we can find together.
We’re going to release a short film about the process of making Many Good Men soon, and it will come with a pack for teachers providing guidance about how to use the film and a wide variety of creative processes to address the issues of how to be a healthy and happy man. If you would like to support us in any way please get in touch. contact@civicdigits.com