"There are no healthy male role-models"

Then men need to do the work to find some - just as women have had to do

‘There are no healthy male role-models’ is a phrase that gets bandied around a lot. It’s been especially prevalent in the wake of Netflix’s Adolescence. A writer for a website dedicated to ‘the disadvantages faced by men and boys’ criticised Adolescence for being simultaneously too ideological and ‘pathologising masculinity’ - and also not ideological enough and failing to provide its male viewers with any ‘healthy male role models’. In online debates about why misogynistic influencers are so popular among teenage boys, it is commonplace to encounter the claim that ‘the problem is there are no healthy male role models that speak directly to the male experience in modern society’, and that therefore ‘Andrew Tate is filling a vacuum’.

I’m not going to weigh up the truth or falsity of such claims here. Instead, I’m more interested in the defeatist shrug that goes with them. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone following up such a statement as ‘there are no healthy male role-models…