Male privilege. Toxic masculinity. Smash the patriarchy. A thousand dumb slogans have shaped our debate about the respective lot of men and women for the past decade or more. But this past week, the agreed-upon narrative – that essentially nothing has changed since Victoria was on the throne; that women remain as stifled and disenfranchised as ever, while men continue to lord it over them – has begun to collide with reality.
While we were all arguing over Adolescence and Andrew Tate, a report compiled by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has quietly laid waste to the prevailing orthodoxy. Lost Boys: State of the Nation makes brutally clear that a lot of young British men have very little privilege to check. Males lag behind females at every stage of education, from nursery to university – in higher education, women now outnumber men by three to two. That gender pay gap you’ve heard so much about? It’s now been reversed among the young, with women out-earning men. Young men are much more likely to be unemployed, too. To those who have been paying attention, none of this will come as a surprise. But rarely has it been spelled out in such compendious, stark and irrefutable detail.
Of course, a big part of the picture here is the history-making strides made by women in education and the workforce. If, as victim-feminists have so often told us, young women still have the deck stacked so mercilessly against them, young women certainly haven’t got the memo. But these emerging gaps aren’t just about historical wrongs being righted – a new equilibrium being reached. Going by the report, this shift has at least as much to do with men falling backwards as it does women pushing ahead. Since the pandemic, for one thing, the number of men aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training has increased by 40 per cent, compared with seven per cent for women.
The chattering classes have long struggled to compute such facts. It upsets the hierarchy of victimhood. It grates against the notion that men are only ever the oppressors, the beneficiaries of ‘structural sexism’. To talk about the challenges faced by young men and boys will often see you smeared as anti-women, or some crybaby men’s rights activist – desperate to insist that men are the real victims, thwarted by the girls. Wokeness, it seems, is a zero-sum game. You couldn’t possibly care about, say, the barriers to re-entering the workforce women experience after having children and the barriers many young men face to finding gainful employment at all.
This has always struck me as bizarre. Not least because many of the struggles many young men face today have little to do with their sex and everything to do with their social class. Indeed, when we talk about the issues confronting men and boys, we’re usually talking about working-class men and boys. Just as it is ridiculous to pretend that women in boardrooms and women in call centres share identical challenges and interests, so it is also ridiculous to suggest that the prospects of an unemployed 21-year-old lad, yet to break out from his council-estate boxroom, is intimately connected with those of a Russell Group Hooray Henry, slogging away at grad-scheme applications.
While young women are pulling ahead of young men even among university graduates, the so-called lost boys are really to be found among the poor and working class. Over recent decades, radical shifts in society and the economy have corroded many of the old certainties working-class men once relied upon. Manufacturing, agriculture and construction – industries that used to provide secure, decently paid jobs to young men who weren’t destined for, or couldn’t afford to go to, university – have withered on the vine. In 1970, the CSJ notes, these sectors collectively made up more than 40 per cent of UK GDP. By 2023, this stood at just 16 per cent. Fatherlessness has also exploded among lower-income groups. ‘One of the most stark inequalities in Britain’, Fraser Nelson notes, ‘is the unequal distribution of fathers: 95 per cent there for those at the top, 60 per cent absent for those at the bottom.’ And while this can be tragic for boys and girls alike, it is particularly perilous for boys growing up in neighbourhoods where trouble isn’t hard to come by. Indeed, a full three-quarters of children in custody report having an absent father.
Just as class explains many of these problems, it also explains the blindness to them. While the media and politics have become more superficially ‘diverse’ in recent years, working-class ‘representation’ – if we must use the r-word – has actually gone in the other direction. And so, those charged with discussing and addressing the issues confronting working-class people are more detached from them than in decades past, when a less thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party brought manual workers into parliament and local newspapers, long since disappeared, offered a trade to bright kids who lacked the connections and expensive educations that have now become all but obligatory in mediaworld.
This ‘crisis’ among men and boys, then, is another symptom of the neglect of the working classes. Of the indifference to the decay of blue-collar communities, and the industries that once sustained them. Of the total capture of almost every institution, even those explicitly founded to represent workers’ interests (I’m looking at you, Labour), by the metropolitan middle classes. As class politics has given way to identity politics, the lives of ordinary men – and women – have become ever more inscrutable to those in positions of power and influence. There’s a lesson in this, perhaps, for the few who might be lured by the mirror-image victimhood of the ‘manosphere’. Identitarianism – whether of the left-wing or right-wing variety – is forever a deadend.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
