I’m sitting with some teenage boys in a high school in Yorkshire, England. It’s cold and raining. (Did I mention England and February?). The topic of conversation, recorded for my BBC Radio 4 series “About The Boys”, is the way society sees boys. The youngest, celebrating his 13th birthday that very day, said: “People think boys are bratty, spoiled, disgusting ….”

On the recording you can hear me squeak “really?” partly incredulity but partly to make the list of horrible adjectives stop. It didn’t. “Yes”, he said, carrying on seamlessly.. “And rude as well…. But, it’s all not true. They think that we’re not soft inside and some boys, they act like they’re all hardcore or you know…. but it’s really hard to open up as a boy.”

Luckily for me, when the boys I met for the series were given a chance to open up, they did. They really did, on subjects ranging from sex and consent to friendship, masculinity, social media, porn and school.

Over the course of a few weeks, I travelled the country: visiting a dance company; a primary school; a cricket club; a youth club and a handful of schools. But what that particular (freshly minted) teenager in Keighley described, summed up the whole reason I pitched the idea for the series in the first place. I wanted to see what effect the increasingly fraught conversations about boys, men and masculinity were having on the way boys felt about themselves.

Embattled boys

Before I go any further, full disclosure: As well as being a radio reporter and presenter, I am a mum to two teenage boys of my own. They were 13 and 15 when I first suggested the idea for the series to the BBC. They are 15 and 17 now. I am also Aunty to seven nephews and godmother to a clutch of other teenage boys. I am also a feminist and a total believer in gender equity and equality. I produced BBC Radio 4’ s Woman’s Hour for years and am a firm supporter of the #MeToo and Everyone’s Invited movements, which sought to shine a light on sexual violence against women and girls. I certainly do not think that the pendulum has “swung too far” in favor of women and girls.

But conversations with my own boys, my sister (about her boys) and with friends about their boys led me to understand a strong sense of bafflement among boys, boys too young to understand ideas like male privilege or the patriarchy, about how society feels about them. One friend told me her 13 year old son had tried to give a girl in his year at school a compliment, something benign about her hair or shoes. His remark was met with outrage by her friends and he was hit with a volley of comments like “OH my God!” and “you can’t SAY that!” He was humiliated and confused and vowed never to “go there again”.

Another conversation was with the mother of an older teen. He had started having sex and talked to her about some of the realities of dating and hooking up. He said it was “quite common” among his friends to record their partners on their phones giving verbal consent before having sex. Sometimes they recorded again midway through, this time to make sure that the girl was happy to “do something different or something” and sometimes the phone was left recording the whole event… “to make sure.” Another mum said she was sure her son was “going off to university “totally virginal”, too scared to make a move at all. Another ( admittedly much younger) boy told me that if he had to sit through “another assembly [morning lecture] on girls in STEM” he would “die from boredom”. He also wondered why there weren’t assemblies for boys who fancied a career in those subjects, too.

Now as adults we know why there are fewer assemblies for boys to get into these subjects. The latest figures from The Higher Education Statistics Agency show that only 21% of engineering students in the UK are female. As grown ups we understand the historical context, the barriers to success for girls and the need for more diversity at all levels in all disciplines. As a small boy, I am not sure you understand very much of that at all. On the contrary, I think most boys are aware that girls outperform boys at every level in education.

Boys = Bad?

More troubling is the idea that the boys feel like they are somehow “bad” simply as a function of being male. At a school in Devon, one 17 year old boy said that when he entered the teen years, “me and my friends heard the phrase “kill all men” at least 5 times a day”. He was mystified. At 13, he was more into toy cars than girls and had no inkling of the #MeToo movement. He had no understanding at all about why “men” were considered intrinsically bad. But the feeling of blame and shame has stayed with him.

The idea that boys are so frightened of being accused of assault that they film consent for sex stopped me in my tracks. Not to mention the idea that sexual activity might be recorded. That filled me with dread – for all the obvious reasons and for both the boys and the girls. Many of the boys I spoke to were very keen to talk about the issue, sharing their worries about what might happen in a “he said she said situation”… where as one boy put it when summarizing the common view, “more weight would be given to the “she said” side.” Others considered what might happen if a girl consented and then “said “nah” straight after.”

These are not unfounded fears. A defense solicitor I spoke to for the series reported people openly admitting they would “rather support a liar than a potential rapist.” leading in some instances to the cancellation and cruel ostracization of boys accused (but only accused) of assault. All of this of course, amplified hugely on social media.

Beyond toxic masculinity

Which all takes me back to the start, I suppose to those teenage boys who feel judged, and who feel like they can’t open up. Those boys who hear phrases like “toxic masculinity” being bandied around, as if being male somehow equates to being toxic. As one boy said:

“In secondary school we had multiple assemblies on like, again Andrew Tate but also things like boys behavior and then also sexual assault …the boys felt like they were being like, sort of targeted a little bit …I was a bit frustrated with the way they said it but I mean, it is true a lot of it but it’s just like, is a overall is a minority of people that are doing it but they’re making it seem like it’s the whole like it’s a whole mass societal problem.”

The same boys spend time in an online world awash with pornography and strange ideas of physical perfection and male success. Another boy explained:

“On social media masculinity is expressed to you as strong, having loads of money, being really strong, being tall, and that can’t be everyone. And when you try and be like that, then girls say to you, they want an emotional person, you just don’t know what the hell man even is in today’s society.”

These are the same boys who told me they feel “let down” by the adults in their lives who sometimes offer little direction and scant information on tricky issues. It’s ironic that just after my series aired, new, more restrictive, government guidelines on sex education were published in the UK, to the consternation of many. After all, one of the overriding messages I heard from the boys I spoke to was a strong desire for more education, “about periods and what to do and where everything is”, as one put it, not less.

We need to think much more carefully about how we talk about boys and how we talk to our boys. We should give boys more opportunities to talk to themselves, and listen carefully when they open up. I want more progress towards gender equality. I also want my boys to feel good about themselves, as boys, and as men when they grow up.

Catherine Carr

Catherine Carr is an award-winning documentary maker, presenter, podcast producer and reporter with over 20 years’ experience in audio. Her work for BBC Radio 4, The World service and her own company – Pocket Productions – has taken her all over the world, talking to strangers in cities from Japan to the Mexican border and reporting on human interest stories, from child-trafficking in India to the refugee camp in Calais. Carr is the host of Where Are You Going? the creator and producer of Talking Politics and is presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Exchange. Her most recent series for the network was called About The Boys. She is the middle child of three, and created a podcast all about siblings – called Relatively – to finally get some attention. She is working on her first book based on her beloved podcast – Relatively, exploring how sibling relationships define us.