What's On The Horizon For Boys & Men?
Photo by Jonathon Reed.
This is a part two of a series of Next Gen Men’s executive director, Jake Stika, reflecting on the current and future trends that are shaping boys and men. Read part one: Three Masculinity Trends of 2022 & What We’re Doing About It
Boys on the Internet
To celebrate Next Gen Men’s eighth birthday last week, we looked back on the three trends that shaped last year’s conversations surrounding masculinity.
If you read our discussion about the internet trending to be the next generation’s biggest cultural touchstone and your biggest takeaway was that boys should spend less time online — you might be missing the point.
You are by no means alone in your thinking. Currently, the Government of Canada recommends two hours a day of screen time for youth over 12. In 2021, youth ages 13- 18 averaged eight and half hours of screen media per day — a 17% increase from just four years ago. That’s a full-time job! (Quick maths – how much do you spend between your job, scrolling, email, and entertainment…)
So youth have been spending more time online, but we adults have to be honest; we’re often being hypocrites with the amount of time we spend online, AND we’re not empowering youth to find alternatives to spending time online.
This may feel redundant from part one, but it’s worth saying: pandemic or not, boys are going to be online. We should shift from concern about the quantity of time online, to the quality of time online.
For example, recent research has found that the amount of screen time has very little, if any, impact on youth’s mental well-being. However, when researchers focus specifically on youth’s relationship with social media, rather than looking at screen time as a whole, the correlations with depression are larger and still larger when looking specifically at girls.
Among young people, boys spend the most time online. Though where and how they spend their time (YouTube, video games) may not be as immediately psychologically harmful as where girls do (Instagram, TikTok), we can see clear trends of how these online spaces and activities shape boys and how they show up in their communities in the long run.
Where girls experience body image issues and ‘fear of missing out due to the way girls are socialized to prioritize their looks and be extremely social; Boys, on the other hand, primarily spend time watching videos, which isn’t inherently negative until you consider the frequency— and inevitability—of platform algorithms suggesting radicalized content to young boys.
While the internet is clearly not blameless in worsening youth’s mental health, it is also not as crisis-inducing as some headlines would like you to believe. There are benefits and value we all see on the internet otherwise, we wouldn’t be spending so much of our time on it.
“Teens wish adults would acknowledge the ways that social media and gaming help create, deepen, and sustain valued friendships.”
With the help of our Next Gen Menbers in reaching our 120 supporter goal earlier this year, we promised to dig into this further. In the new year, we’re excited to be releasing our first-ever Status of Boys Report featuring some of the most recent data and research, along with stories from the boys we work with themselves. Much like many other things NGM does, we’re tired of talking about boys and are ever-committed to talking with boys.
So this upcoming year, we all have a role to play in listening to the youth in our lives to spend more quality time — on and offline.
Want to be the first to know more about the current status of boys? Learn more here.
Fragility Resilience
A trend I think we need to acknowledge (as much as we may want to downplay it) is this idea that there is a ‘civil war’ brewing among men around masculinity.
👀 *cue the drama*
Ok, now that I’ve got that framing out of the way. What the heck am I talking about?
It seems there is one side that wants to transcend, transform, transmute and whatever other verb you want to use to open the meaning of masculinity to include a diversity of experiences. #Broadening
On the other side, some hark back to the days of ‘real men’ and wish to ‘go back’ to a tangible and traditional role of men in their relationships, households, communities, and workplaces. #Narrowing
Then there’s everyone in the middle.
A lot of this so-called masculinity civil war has come to a head at the workplace. In our discussions in male-dominant workplaces, we’re seeing fragility on both ends of this discussion.
When we’ve led conversations around gender norms, we’ve been accused of trotting out stereotypes of men and women that no longer hold influence today (“we’ve made so much progress, this is old news!”), yet when participant groups are asked to jot down ‘what emotions are boys/men supposed to feel’ among other prompts, they ALL came to the same conclusion (boys/men = none, girls/women = all). Thereby proving our point that these norms are still ubiquitously embedded in our cultural psyche and surface with the slightest nudge.
On the other end of the spectrum, in conversations around inclusion in workspaces that are almost homogenous (seriously, one space was 98% white and 96% male), we’re met with ideas that white men are discriminated against at work because of their identities. When we move with empathy towards their fear of change, we’re confronted with masculine norms that men can’t be afraid.
What we need is more real talk and more resilience. Enter Equity Leaders.
We need to acknowledge where we’re at in our journeys and know that not everyone is or can be in the same place. We work with HQs that strive to be intersectional and antioppressive, yet their front-lines don’t know what an ally is because they’ve never needed one or wanted to be one.
We need to meet people where they’re at and offer reframes and breadcrumbs not from where we are today, but perhaps from where we were when we first embarked on our own inclusion journeys.
As an Indigenous knowledge keeper from a session I did at Simon Fraser University said “you can’t teach from a place of anger.”
Healing in Connection
No man is an island.
Though there is a lot of discussion about rugged individualism when it comes to conversations around masculinity, nobody on earth is an individual. We are all products of our environment (sorry, Libertarians). If a pandemic and a war on the opposite side of the world create ripples of illness, supply chain, and inflation that affects everyone doesn’t show us just how interconnected we are, I’m not sure what will.
However, we can zoom from the macro to the micro and realize that we’re also the product of our relationships. Our mental health and well-being, sense of worth and purpose, and even ideas of who we are and can be are often in relationship to those closest to us: parents, partners, friends, and colleagues.
In the words of Terrence Real, author of I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression:
“Traditional socialization of boys diminishes the capacity to esteem the self without going up into grandiosity or down into shame. Traditional masculinization teaches boys to replace inherent self-worth with performance-based esteem. It insists that boys disown vulnerable feelings (which could help them connect), while reinforcing their entitlement to express anger. It teaches boys to renounce their true needs in the service of achievement, and at the same time blunts their sensitivity to reading the needs of others. The damage to self that Khantzian describes can be summed up as damage in relatedness. And if disconnection from self and others creates suffering, then learning and practicing the art of reconnection can relieve it.”
As we wrap our four-city documentary screening tour of Boys Will Be…Themselves where over 400 people who showed up; I’m reminded of the power of community after not hosting in-person events in over 2.5 years. Communities don’t just coalesce out of the blue. At Next Gen Men, we’re not only committed to changing the way we see, act, and think about masculinity – we’re committed to building the WE in that sentence.
We’ve seen the power of approaching leaders and those of the ‘dominant narrative’ as people first and not just proxies of power through our Beyond Our Own Knowledge (B.O.O.K.) Club. The male leaders genuinely want a better world but don’t want to do it alone. By continuing to be one of the only spaces creating room for the ‘dumb question’, connecting leaders across roles and sectors with each other, and grappling with shifting ideas of what leadership looks like for men in the workplace, we are shifting the conversations from this is happening to me, to this is happening for me, and I have a role to play and a benefit to gain.
We want everyone to feel a part of this community, so we’re embarking on a new project with
support from the Canadian Ministry for Women and Gender Equality (WAGE) to establish a network for engaging boys & men’s practitioners. We want to help people find a caring and conscientious community, whether in the Tamil community of Toronto, Pints with the Pack in Medicine Hat, or a Men’s Shed in Edmonton. Wherever boys and men gather, work, and play in your community, we want conversations and connections to change the way we see, act, and think about masculinity to flourish.
Next Gen Men will continue to create spaces for connection, conversation, and co-creation of the future of masculinity. I hope to see you there!
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