Not a crisis, but a choice: Masculinity with compassion

By Jack Conneely – April 2025

There are things we teach young boys. Some are loud, unmistakable - “man up,” “don’t cry,” “be strong.” Others arrive quieter - a shoulder turned, a conversation cut short, a joke that lands too hard and lingers too long . By the time boys become men, we have often learnt that what’s expected of us is not fullness, but performance. Not feeling, but control.

We speak often now of masculinity as though it were a crisis, but this framing - this reliance on shame, on erasure - has failed us. Because masculinity, as lived by most boys and men, is not a monolith, but rather a varied experience with diverse realities. If we want to understand how boys become men in ways that harm themselves and others, we must begin not with condemnation, but with curiosity. We must stop asking who to blame and start asking what we’ve built.

Masculinity is not inherently toxic. But certain expectations of it are - expectations that reward distance over intimacy, hardness over grace, dominance over decency. If we are committed to dismantling the conditions that sustain rape culture and gender-based violence, we must reckon with an uncomfortable truth: pushing boys to the margins will not bring us closer to lasting equality. Change will not come through alienation, but through collective reckoning - through bringing everyone, especially those most shaped by the system, into the work of transformation.

When Everyone’s Invited enters schools, this is described in simple terms: Gender inequality affects us all. If we are to move forward, we must teach about a different masculinity - one that does not demand the abandonment of self, but the expansion of it. One built not on power over others, but on care for them. It is not erasure we’re after, but rather it is transformation.

The quiet violence of being a boy

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

bell hooks, The Will To Change: Men and Masculinities

There is a moment in every boy’s life when he learns that pain is something to be buried. It is not a grand lesson, but rather a subtle correction. bell hooks knew this well - she saw the way boys are taught to cauterise their wounds rather than tend to them. This is how the world tells boys they are disposable. It is also how they are primed to rage.

But rage is not the only path. There is another way - one rooted in radical empathy, in the belief that masculinity does not have to be a performance of dominance but a practice of self-discovery, care, and love. hooks understood that the answer was not to demand that men reject masculinity altogether, but to invite them to transform it.

“Feminist masculinity offers men a way to reconnect with selfhood, uncovering the essential goodness of maleness, and allow everybody, men and women, the glory of loving manhood.”

The illusion of power

What hooks saw - what many refuse to acknowledge - is that masculinity itself is not the problem. It is patriarchy’s version of masculinity, the one that disallows tenderness, equates dominance with worth, and renders emotions other than anger suspect.

The crisis of masculinity is not that it has been eroded, but that it has been co-opted, distorted into a cage.

Masculinity is not a static truth but a socially constructed ideal, one that enforces power through dominance over other men and over women. The dominant archetype of masculinity is neither neutral nor inevitable, it is a deliberate structure that upholds patriarchy by coercing men into conformity. Stray too far, and you risk ostracisation, ridicule, or violence. Stay within its boundaries, and you are promised status, security, and the illusion of control.

And so boys grow up with a quiet jealousy, a resentment they do not always have the words for.

“Little boys are the only males in our culture who are allowed to be fully, wholly in touch with their feelings - they are allowed moments when they can express, without shame, their desire to be loved.”

But that window is brief. Boys learn quickly that those desires must be repressed, hidden beneath layers of silence. If masculinity, as they have been taught, is rigid, then anything outside of it feels like a threat. hooks wrote that “hatred of women can lead to acts of domination that hurt, wound, and destroy, but there is no constructive power here.” And yet, many young men - feeling powerless in their own right - turn to misogyny as a way to reclaim an identity they believe is slipping from their grasp.

Beyond “Toxic Masculinity”

The term toxic masculinity was meant to critique behaviours, not boys. But in practice, especially in classrooms and workshops, its impact can often be counterproductive. When boys hear that their very way of being is "toxic," they shut down. Not because they don’t want to change - but because they no longer believe they’re capable or trusted.

The Everyone’s Invited Primary School Investigation 2025 revealed this tension starkly. Through the thousands of testimonies we receive and interviews with teachers across the UK and IReland,, we have found that boys often internalised a quiet shame - they felt accused, confused, and excluded from conversations about gender equality. Girls, too, reported discomfort with the way discussions seemed to widen the gap between them and boys, rather than foster mutual understanding. These are not the outcomes of healthy dialogue, these are the consequences of a language that pathologises rather than educates.

This is not a call to excuse harm. It is a call to speak in a way that can be heard. If we want young men to unlearn, we must first ensure they feel seen.

The radicalisation of young men is not a mystery

It is a pattern. First, the alienation - from themselves, from their feelings, from a society that has failed to give them the tools to understand either. Then, the hunger - for meaning, for belonging, for someone to tell them they matter. And finally, the answer, so neatly packaged: here is your pain, here is who caused it, here is how you fight back. It is easy to condemn the boys who fall for it. Harder to ask what we have done to make them so ready to listen.

If we truly want change, we must create spaces where men can grieve what has been taken from them - where they can hope for something better.

hooks reminds us:

“There is a creative, life-sustaining, life-enhancing place for the masculine in a non-dominator culture.”

This is not about erasing masculinity. It is about allowing it to be something expansive. Something whole.

“When a man’s emotional capacity to mourn is arrested, he is likely to be frozen in time and unable to complete the process of growing up. Men need to mourn the old self and create the space for a new self to be born if they are to change and be wholly transformed.”

And the most radical truth is this: masculinity is not fixed. It never has been. We do not have to inherit the limitations imposed upon us. We do not have to accept the false promise that domination is the only route to selfhood. We can choose - actively, deliberately what kind of men we want to be.

Not a crisis, but a choice

This is not a crisis of masculinity. It is a crisis of imagination. And imagination is a choice.

We must choose to imagine boyhood and manhood not as threats to be contained, but as lives to be nurtured. We must invite boys into the work of gender justice not as suspects, but as allies - because when we do, they show up. They care. They want to be part of something better.

bell hooks wrote that:

“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”

Reimagining masculinity is an act of love - a love that holds men accountable not with cruelty but with clarity. A love that tells boys: you are not the enemy, and you do not have to do this alone. The future of masculinity is not a battle to be won but a path to be walked together. Only by choosing empathy over division can we hope to build a world where each and every one of us can thrive

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