If you judged modern boyhood from the headlines, you’d think we were broken – radicalised, misogynistic, angry. But as a teenage boy myself, I don’t see a generation of lost boys around me. I see young men trying to make sense of a world that seems apathetic to our voices.

I’d be the first to admit that there are serious issues facing young men my age – I’ve experienced some of them first-hand. Between the ages of 12 and 14, I was drawn into harmful online communities promising me money, meaning and manhood. Muscular, wealthy men, parading through Dubai draped in designer labels and flanked by beautiful women flooded my feed. They said there was no excuse for the rest of us not to be in their position too, and offered what they claimed was a blueprint to get us there. Misogyny was rife in these communities, as was political extremism.

I want these issues to be called out – and I’m glad they’re being actively discussed in the media. In fact, reading nuanced discussion in the press which confronted these spaces’ problematic aspects helped me escape the handcuffs binding me to these “role models”. It made me consider how they were profiting from polarisation and insecurity.

Yet I strongly believe we need to reframe how we talk about these issues: not as innately evil flaws in the young male demographic, but as an expression of uncertainty.

Last week, I was sitting on the bus home from school, avoiding my mock GCSE revision by scrolling through TikTok (in fairness, short-form content is slightly more engaging than Macbeth quotation flashcards). A video appeared on my feed surrounding a gender-related debate, and the creator – a young woman not much older than myself – used the term “toxic masculinity”.

For those who are unfamiliar, toxic masculinity has become a catch-all term for exaggerated, negative forms of masculinity that can put pressure on men and boys to behave in certain ways. These issues are certainly real, and I didn’t disagree with the creator’s point.

However, it did make me pause and reflect. I........

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