What About Men?

on why I think matrescence is part of the solution for young men and boys

I was out in the garden yesterday, shovelling gravel. There has been a pile of about 7 tonnes of the stuff sitting in our driveway for nearly a year now and it has been driving me mad. So I’ve set myself the task of nibbling away at it. Eight wheelbarrows a day until it is all gone, spread out over our drive. I’ve been treating it like a mini workout and also a little listening time. I set my youngest up on his bike on the lane, and am sure to ooh and ahh as he appears every few minutes, splashing through his favourite puddle. I sync up my headphones and get shovelling. I’ve been listening to Caitlin Moran’s What About Men for most of my shovelling, and it has given me much food for thought.

I’ve been thinking about the messages that boys and young men are being given from a very early age, the lack of opportunities to learn how to talk about what they are feeling, the lack of permission to show their feelings at all. The need to be sporty, be funny, ‘banter’. How these ways of communicating are great social lubricants, but they do not equip young men for talking about how they feel, or what is going on in their interior world. How there are plenty of role models on social media, in tv shows, in movies, in music for young women growing up that are body positive, emotionally and sexually literate, nerdy, sporty, not sporty, whatever you want really (although I would argue that mothering is one of the last unexplored frontiers of feminism), but when it comes to similar roles models for young men, there is virtually nothing. Nothing that explores the problems of young men, but in a positive way, leaving them feel they are seen as bad, or toxic or in the wrong. And then, for want of any other place to go, these men end up morphing into that stereotyped form (cue Jordan B Peterson and Andrew Tate).

Moran goes into great detail about many aspects of ‘the manosphere’, including their conversations, bodies, clothes, their cock and balls, porn, friendships… and why, perhaps, they are failing this generation of boys and young men. But what has stuck with me the most, since I heard her talk at an event launching the book a few weeks ago, is the point that

the patriarchy is screwing over men just as hard as it is screwing over women.

It is something I have been thinking about for some time now; about how this system we are living in, that serves only a few very very wealthy middle aged white men, is screwing US ALL over. Not just mothers, not just women. ALL of us.

In the audience the evening I listened to Moran speak a woman stood up and asked why was it our problem as women that boys and men were struggling? Indeed Moran herself speaks (hilariously!) about how reluctant she was for many years to take on the subject of men in a book  - ‘I’m Team Tits. Up the women! God bless them – but let the men sort themselves out.’ (p. 5) But as time moved on and she was asked over and over whether she had any advice for teenage boys, and her own teenage daughters started coming home with stories and questions of their own, she started, as she writes ‘to care very much.’ Cue writing of What About Men?

Why am I sharing all of this? Well, firstly because it feels important. When I shared on social media that I had been to see Moran speak a number of mothers contacted me to tell me how lost and angry their own sons were, with their teachers and female students telling them all about girl power, whilst telling them that ‘boy power’ was bad. I’ve an eleven year old son, and I can see how easily he could become lost and disenfranchised as he steps into puberty, and I am not sure how I am going to help or guide him.

And secondly I’m sharing this because it touches on something I have believed for a long, long time –

that exploring our matrescence as mothers is much bigger and more powerful than simply supporting us individually to thrive in our mothering.

I believe it also has the potential to be a template for how other disenfranchised, unsupported groups can find a way to thrive. At the Vancouver Peace Summit in 2010 the Dalai Lama stated that it was his belief that the world would be saved by Western women. Yes, this means female leaders and changemakers on the world stage, but it equally means mothers and those who mother and the skill sets - the emotional literacy, the patience, the fierceness and new/other perspective on the world that we develop in our mothering. These are the skills and tools and gifts our young men need. This is the validation and sense of belonging they need, and evolving as best we can as mothers is also evolving as best we can for our sons, and for all of those, men, women, boys and girls, who are suffering under this B.S. capitalist, patriarchal machine.