In a recent BBC documentary, former England men’s football manager Gareth Southgate explored the challenges facing young men in Britain, including low school attainment, declining employment opportunities, low self-esteem and poor mental health. The positive masculinity Southgate promotes focuses on ambition to achieve, emotional openness, resilience and learning from setbacks, advocating for the role of positive male role models.

But there is a part of boys’ lives where low expectations cause the most lasting damage and where the consequences fall hardest on girls and women as well as on boys themselves. That part is intimate relationships. Too often sex education misses the deeper opportunity to examine the messages about male-female relationships young men absorb – be tough, don’t show emotion, pursue sex as conquest.

Southgate’s documentary, Gareth Southgate: Changing the Game for Young Men, didn’t cover relationships with girls or sex education explicitly. Boys told him that they feel like they’re seen as a problem. “There’s a bad stigma around young men – it’s obviously not good,” one said. And a teacher in the documentary outlined that boys shouldn’t be made to feel responsible for the harms that may have been done by the men who came before them.

The good news is that many boys don’t support versions of masculinity that can cause harm to women or others. In my ongoing research many young men aspire to support women’s rights and many describe masculinity in terms of respect and responsibility towards........

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