What do we do with the boys?
Andrew Tate, a lost generation and fear
I am at a Catholic all-boys school about to speak at their assembly. The atmosphere is tense, and I’m trying to figure out why.
A number of the classrooms overlook the Brisbane River, and one of the eating areas backs right up to it. Catholic Education is sitting on some gold-plated real estate Australia-wide.
I swear teenagers have gotten bigger. Most of the senior boys tower a foot above me and have an intimidating muscular width. It is easy to forget they’re only a few years out of childhood.
I try to dismiss my growing sense of unease as just early-morning sleepiness. But in the assembly that follows, it only grows. The school leadership is male, dressed in suits, and stern. A few phrases stand out as mantras that are repeated as school values.
‘We are growing into gentlemen.’
‘We are setting you up for success.’
When it’s my turn to speak, I approach the podium and look at a few hundred teenage boys ranging from year four to year twelve. A few of my standard jokes fall into silence. They’re not comic genius, but they usually get a giggle. Without planning to, I edit out jokes and beats that have been a stock standard part of my school speeches for over a decade. Too vulnerable. Too cheeky.
In the days afterwards, I realised how much fear is a part of a boy’s education—that unsteady transformation from boy to man. The ten-year-olds are small, funny, loose-limbed, and wild. The seventeen-year-olds are sullen giants.
How must it feel for those ten-year-old boys to realise they are feared suddenly? To feel the change in teachers as they morph from caregivers to prison guards? Teachers who feel what I felt - that fear of the crowd turning on you and the certain knowledge that you wouldn’t stand a chance against them. If they move against you, you’re fucked.
I write this on the 9th of May, 2024. Just yesterday, a woman was stabbed in a gym carpark in Sydney. It was the result of an ongoing domestic violence event.
Domestic violence is at a crisis point. More women are dying at the hands of men than ever before.
After the assembly, I delivered three workshops in the lush school library. They asked me to inspire the boys and get them excited about writing.
In the first workshop, I’m left alone with the boys. A couple of loose units up the back are exercising disruption and defiance. Neurodivergence down the front appears to have no support. In the second row, a gaunt, slightly effeminate young man looks out the window most of the time. He is heart-breakingly sad.
In one of the activities, I make a character with them. The seemingly ‘random’ bunch of character traits they shout at me draw a clear picture:
A six-year-old boy who is realising he has a disability. He has a drunk father.
The Justice system is frustrated by the lack of meaningful state and federal reform in the DV crisis. The question of educating young boys is at a similar crisis point.
Toxic masculinity has found its latest role model in Andrew Tate, who is having a disturbing effect on young boys. It’s enough that teachers are quitting teaching entirely, fed up with facing a wall of misogyny in teenage boys. It only fuels the teacher crisis shortage nationally. The number of students refusing to attend school is also at record levels.
Second workshop.
A teacher attends this one. She is younger than thirty and doesn’t smile once for the entire lesson. She grips a cardigan tightly around her stomach. She is well-intentioned, but I find it challenging to get the lesson going because she shuts down most of the boy’s ideas. They want characters who are violent and have issues with mental illness - themes that are universally interesting to teenagers everywhere.
But the teacher shuts them down. They are too dark, too silly, too immature. After the lesson finishes, she apologizes to me for their behaviour. Out of the three workshops, they were the best behaved.
I create a character with them, too. They shout out a list of random character traits.
A farmer with deep substance abuse issues is frightened he won’t be able to live up to the legacy of his problematic father.
One would think the education crisis would be enough to stir the federal and state parties into some meaningful policy reform, particularly in a state election year. Education has traditionally been a pillar of the contemporary Labor Party.
However, the newly crowned and unpopular Premier Steve Miles has responded to commercial news networks, not the sector itself.
Youth crime is on the rise. Two-thirds of the perpetrators are boys. It’s more than just vandalism and garden-gnome theft. There are stabbings, assaults and robberies. Fresh footage emerges every night on commercial prime-time news. Working-class parents and pensioners sitting down for dinner are convinced their streets aren’t safe.
Premier Miles announces that the government's youth justice principles will remove ‘detention as a last resort’. He makes the rounds on the networks to promote it.
They need to know there are consequences.
We need to set them up for success.
We need more gentlemen.
The justice and education system widely criticise the announcement as a case of Miles being severely tone-deaf to the complexities of the issues at play.
Third workshop. I’m pooped.
I am quietly thrilled by the teacher, who smiles and bops along with the workshop. The boys are engaged and doing the exercises. But my voice is straining to get over the top of them. I sense I’m losing control.
I feel a veneer flash away from me, and I realise I am yelling at them.
‘I feel like you think you’re being sophisticated with your disrespectful attitude,’ I say, and the class goes silent. ‘But it’s rude and obnoxious, and I’ve had it all day. I’m sick of it.’
I hate myself for shitting on the energy. But I didn’t know what else to do.
‘No, I’m glad you did it,’ the teacher reassures me afterwards. ‘And it’s validating for us to hear from someone outside the school to come in and confirm - yeah, they are little shits.’
I feel like she’s missed the point. Maybe I have, too.
They make a character:
A sixteen year old with divorced parents. He never sees his drunk Dad. He drinks too much himself.
I’ve based an entire career writing about masculinity - and, to a certain extent, defending it. But right now, I’m more blue about it than ever. Society has lost the thread of how to care for young boys and make them young men. It is easy to blame their character. That somehow, the entire generation is fucked.
I disagree. Almost every system available to them is crumbling. Their fathers are equally clueless, suffering their own mental health and isolation crisis. Radical reform is needed in justice and education.
The burly young man brushing seven feet tall is just as surprised and scared of his own body as you are. He is alienated and has been bathed in a culture that demands repression of his most precious humanity: the ability to feel, to be vulnerable, to express and explore his own inner world.
He is, in his psyche, a ten-year-old boy, looking up and out, yearning and crying out to belong, belong, belong.
He is on his knees and begging. Please see me. Please.
Did this piece strike a chord? Leave a comment on your reflections and thoughts.
You might also check out this piece about working in schools with teenagers who genuinely believe the world is ending. Or this piece about the murder that took place in my neighbourhood at the hands of some teenagers.
As a drama teacher in a GPS boys school in the mid-1990s, I asked my Year 10s to pick any topic for us to do some Boal stuff on (how stupid of me), of course, they wanted to interrogate porn. So we did the some tableaux work on what images they thought showed the best and the worst of it (there were a few caveats of course). I was surprised by just how naïve their images were, how "page 3 boob-shot" the ideas were, right out of Benny Hill from the 1970s. In the discussion after, we reflected and here they were genuinely engaged, for perhaps the first time, purely because of the absence of women in their images, made them feel a bit vulnerable. Women became the topic, all of the sudden, and how they navigated themselves with the women in their lives - particularly their mothers (remember, we started this off by interrogating porn!) The conversation eventually came around to one lad stating that he wanted to protect his little sisters, but that his mother kept reminding him how much he looked like his Dad (they were clearly bitterly divorced, Dad lived in China but paid the school fees), that he was too tall, too good looking, too dangerous to protect his little sisters. It was heart-breakingly honest and the other boys all nodded in understanding. These lads will all be in their early 40s now, having their own children and divorces, repeating the tropes laid down by their parents. The arts really are a portal for young people to explore and critically evaluate the things that never get spoken about. They must have this to increase empathy and corroboration with each other. Good on you Dave for going there, it is a way more complex situation that the age old "boy problem" narratives that have ALWAYS been at the heart of Anglo-Celtic histories.
Loved this, a juicy read as always. I loved Janet's story. It made me remember teenagers and kids are societies own jester tricksters, reflecting the happenings. And, like tricksters they are most drawn to the hot spots where there is the most energy, because that's the most fun place to play in. Like in Janet’s story they go towards porn because - what a red hot spot of energy to ping off, also so much fun and hilarious stuff to play out! it is obscene, and through the door obscenity you easily land in grotesque comedy. This is a wonderful skill that those young Bouffons hold, but they don’t get to flex the muscle of power play, or grotesque play much because they have to be cool, and it’s easier to be cool and mean than cool and playful. Such pressure! To make a decision about who you are. When there's not a space to play with that and test out different sides of yourself. And then things get played out in private. If you don't play it, it will play you. They also want agency and something about that Andrew Ta(in)te shows them they can have agency through misogyny.
I also wonder what is being unsaid in the education setting and so said in another space. Which I guess also asks the question, is school a place of community or … something else. If you're at a private school you have all their ethics and religious bulshit to navigate and roll your eyes at. Speaking specifically about private schools: the uniforms! So weird! Cosplaying as boring adults, as finance bro’s, as army men, as women who only ever wear dresses and skirts. At my high school there were no pants options! Wtf! That’s obviously a while ago now but pretty sure they still ain’t selling trousers. I would have loved to rock a trouser. I don’t know, I’m definitely a ~take all the children out into the ocean and the bush~ kind of person. I think a missing character may be the ‘us’ of the equation. Which you can see brought out in Janet’s story. I don’t think there is an abundance of the role model of the ‘us’ in society. I think everyone is really aching for connection and wilderness. Here I go being bush girl again, but the phone's dude! Pauline Boss coined a term 'ambiguous loss', naming the feeling of a loved one not being emotionally there anymore. Good old Esther Perel then contextualised that phenomenon to explain what happens when someone looks at their phone when you're talking to them/connecting with them. I keep coming back to the question, how do we be here together. Very interested in this topic as I have two Niblings who are big internet hunni's. Praise be to all the teachers being role models for honest communication and playfulness. HMMM thoughts thoughts thoughts, thank you Dave for writing this!