Three Masculinity Trends of 2022 & What We’re Doing About It

8 years doesn’t sound like a lot. 

But when you break it down — 2,920 days dedicated to supporting men and boys is nothing to sniff at. 

And if you ask me, it’s time well spent. 

So as Next Gen Men marks its eighth birthday on November 18th, as NGM’s Executive Director, and one of its co-founders, I offer some thoughts on how the way we see, act and think about masculinity have been changing since our 7th birthday – and where I see NGM sailing into our 9th.

Fighting the Virtual Virus

You are reading this on…the internet. The pandemic forced many of us to work on…the internet. Our youth went to school on…the internet. People meet and connect on…the internet. Whether we like it or not, online is here to stay. 

Increasingly the internet is becoming the cultural touchstone of this and future generations. Those of us elder Millenials and older have to come to grips with the fact that a growing majority of our society knows nothing but a life saturated with smartphones and the internet.

With that in mind, we must be extra vigilant around what proliferates and gets amplified on the word WIDE web, just as much as what festers in the nameless, faceless corners of 4chan. Most importantly, we need to immunize our young people from the radicalization of internet figures, especially considering that a majority of American children think that being an ‘influencer’ is a desirable career – consider them influenced. 

This becomes especially concerning when internet figures like Andrew Tate, the self-described misogynist, or Jordan Peterson, the man who struggles to name a single woman he admires, get visibly amplified across platforms for millions of boys to consume their rhetoric.

These figureheads are industriously using their platform to prey on individualized negative experiences of boys and men and blowing them into systemic calamities at odds with women and feminism as the root cause, leaving men to see their ‘freedom from oppression’ in direct opposition to the shared liberation of everyone.

What is the most effective way to stop the spread of these radicalized ideas? Giving boys mentorship and the space for self-exploration and supportive friendships. If the boys we’re working with are any indicator – it’s working.

Pandemic or not, youth will be online, so NGM Boys Club continues to strive to be the ‘safest place for boys and nonbinary youth on the internet’ (as written by one of our participants) where they can see and support each other in all their uniqueness. 

We continue to invite educators and their students into these conversations through our now annual Future of Masculinity Summit hosted on Discord and Zoom, showing that we can (91% of participants felt safe attending) and, more importantly, should (94% of participants said they’d be interested in joining future conversations), have these conversations over time and space.

Highlighting that it’s not just an issue in our locker room, our classroom, or our clique – but that there’s a movement of boys and young men seeking to find their role and voice in issues like #MeToo, feminism and cancel culture.

When it’s too late to prevent the spread, we, alongside our partners from FearIsNotLove and the BlueRock Project, provide support and comprehensive resources to men through Men &. Men & is also celebrating a milestone in its first year of providing online resources for men struggling with substances, anger, separation, and/or isolation as we lose far too many to the implosion of their relationships and/or deaths of despair each year.

Allyship Is Not Enough

2022 marked the devasting fall of a 50-year-old protected right – that being access to abortion upheld via Roe v. Wade. You may wonder what American politics has to do with a Canadian nonprofit organization, but from where I sit, it’s everything.

Heck, the recent American midterm elections prove my point. Without young unmarried women turning out to vote in astounding numbers, the Senate may not have remained Democrat, and any hope of codifying abortion measures into various state constitutions would have been gone. 

To me, these voting patterns signal that men are not showing up as the allies we profess ourselves to be. Something recently echoed in a Harvard Business Review article entitled Men Are Worse Allies Than They Think. 

Graph via. Harvard Business Review

Continuously, gender equity and gender justice issues are led by women, trans, and nonbinary people. It’s kind of embarrassing to see just how absent men are, if I’m honest.

My new keynote, Beyond Male Allies, dives into this shortcoming and instead positions men as stakeholders rather than allies. Highlighting how patriarchy may benefit men at large but harms many men (dare I say most) individually in many ways demonstrates that men have skin in the game. Looking at gender-based issues with this lens shows that there is a role for men in anti-patriarchal efforts beyond benevolent allyship or passively benefitting from others’ efforts to shift the status quo.

Yet, at each session, I get the question ‘as a partner to a man…’ or ‘as a mother to a boy…’ – it’s clear to me that women are showing up for us – what will it take to show up for ourselves?

A big assist in individual inspiration arrived in the form of the new Canadian documentary on masculinities: Boys Will Be…Themselves. We’re not saying it’s about NGM…but it has lots of NGM! Jonathon and I shared our learnings & unlearnings, Veronika served as the lead researcher for the production, and we threw not one but four birthday parties across Canada to screen the documentary.

Supporting Systemic Transformation

The very cultural fabric of Canada seems to have been rocked by a scandal plaguing what amounts to a national religion – hockey. We don’t need to run you through the details (they straight up had a hidden fund to settle sexual assault allegations – c’mon!), but suffice to say the national sporting organization is losing the forest for the trees by focusing on hockey operations rather than the damage caused to, and by, their players.

We need to be hard on systems and soft on people. So much of the discourse is aimed at the players themselves, and yes, ultimately, they are the ones who caused the harm – but they are also products of their environment. Who gets to set the tone of these locker rooms year-over-year? Coaches and administrators, of course. These stewards shepherd hundreds, if not thousands, of young men through their programs with the hope of creating top-notch athletes. But what about top-notch human beings?

The Hockey Canada news broke in May 2022. This was the straw that broke many people’s backs when it came to ‘safe sport.’ Not to say we told you so, but we told you so…in last year’s birthday post. I talked about how we partnered with the Coaching Association of Canada to accredit our Raising Next Gen Men course because I know the power of locker rooms for better or worse.

At a bare minimum, coaches need to take the time to think critically about the impact of gender & masculinity on young men's social and emotional development – on top of how their speed, skills, strength, and smarts can impact the game in winning ways.

Further, we’ve evolved our youth programming. In the ‘before times,’ NGM used to be an after-school program provider (which is difficult to fund, but that’s a convo for another time), but we realized that we were essentially running in place on a treadmill because every school had a new crop of 7th & 8th graders that could stand to benefit from some role modelling.

Solution? Help the helpers.

We have the distinct privilege of having the most engaged, most committed, and most spectacular educators reaching out to us because they have a deep desire to know and support the boys in their classrooms. This led to a cohort of 51 educators across Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and California making up our inaugural Next Gen Mentors professional development program to prevent suicide and violence, increase engagement and performance, and transform troublemakers into change-makers — while saving time, energy and burnout.

With these embedded educators, we can move beyond the individual, interpersonal transformation of our 15-boy after-school cohorts and towards institutional transformation. Positive masculinities, mental well-being, healthy relationships, and gender equity are imbued in the classroom, punitive (restorative) practices, counselling, and all aspects of education.

These are the trends that stand out the most to me from the year passed. But if I’ve learned anything over the last couple of years, these things come in waves, and we need to ride them.

Next week, I look ahead to the issues cresting on the horizon, but for now, I’m cracking a beer and saying cheers – we fricking made it to eight! 🍻

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