Raising men who don't harm women We know how to raise men who don’t harm women, so why are there still problems? We asked author Steve Biddulph The world of manhood is a very divided place right now. There are two whole different kinds of man in co-existence. Most contemporary men, and most teenage boys thankfully, are caring and ethical. They like and value the women and girls in their lives, and treat them with empathy and respect.
TABLER MAGAZINE * Summer 2021
Steve Biddulph is the author of Raising Boys, The New Manhood, and the upcoming Fully Human – a new way of using your mind.
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Shortly after the publication of the last issue of Tabler, a police officer was formally charged with the murder of Sarah Everard. The subsequent and rightful outcry and public discussion about violence against women is a subject we felt was imperative to cover – particularly in a publication with an entirely male audience. After significant debate regarding the best way forward, we decided to approach bestselling author, Steve Biddulph for his thoughts, advice and opinion on the subject.
But coexisting with this, and present all around us, is a dark shadow masculinity. Dangerous and predatory men still abound in our culture, in sufficient numbers to make it grimly unsafe to be a girl or a woman. Recently the UK and Australia have been galvanised by some horrible crimes against women, and perhaps even worse, accounts from hundreds of schoolgirls and young women about how aggressive and predatory young people’s experience of love has become. Young women are coming into doctors with actual and sometimes lasting injuries, tearful and feeling betrayed by boys they thought they knew and could trust. Pornography has been blamed, probably rightly, for miseducating our kids about how lovemaking works, and the simple fact that tenderness and boundaries really matter for relationships to go well. But even the fact that some boys and men actually want to rape women is horrible for any parent to contemplate.
We can’t solve this by exhortation, or finger wagging. We have to ask what practical and evidence-based methods – in our families, in schools – can change this terrible state of affairs. We must picture a small new-born boy lying in his cot asleep, and ask ourself, what is going to decide whether they will grow up to be a predator or a loving and respectful man. The answer is a sequence of developmental stages which are fraught but entirely manageable if we apply what we know. Firstly, a baby boy has to be treated with tenderness. Boys’ neurological development has been shown by scientists such as UCLA’s Allan Schore to be hampered by their slower development, making them prone to separation anxiety and damaged attachment, and in many ways not suited to the modern world where we hurry and stress ourselves. Empathy is a quality that has to be experienced in order to become a part of us. We learn little by little to be tender and keep our hearts open, so that we can feel for others and never want to harm them. Damaged men come disproportionately from both ends of the socio-economic scale: the poor and stressed victims of an unfair society, and the overprivileged but time-poor who tend to not spend a lot of time with their children.
