If we don’t teach young people about sex and relationships, the internet will.
Recent conversations about the rise of online spaces like the manosphere have raised an important question about where young boys and men are learning about sex and relationships. With lots of young people feeling failed by their sex education in schools, it makes sense that they are turning to online influencers and porn sites to fill in the gaps. But what are these online spaces teaching our young people?
While there has been an improvement in sex education in recent years and we have seen an increase in schools taking the subject more seriously, significant gaps are still present. Schools are still focusing on biology or reproduction and neglecting conversations about consent, communication and rejection. Schools are also still using teachers that specialise in other subjects and rush through SexEd lessons because they don’t feel comfortable teaching it. This oversight leaves young people without the tools they need to navigate sex and relationships.
When formal education falls short, young people are left looking for the answers elsewhere. This leaves boys and young men vulnerable to the manipulation techniques we see being used increasingly by the key figures within the manosphere. They are exposed to content framed as “dating advice” which quickly turns to ideology. There they are finding messaging that teaches misogyny, violence and negative gender norms.
For many young boys and men, porn becomes a frequent source for “sex education” however, porn is designed as entertainment not education. It often shows harmful power imbalances, unrealistic bodies and fails to show healthy communication or boundaries. Yet young people are consuming this as facts and taking it into their real world experiences.
When young people develop their education through these sources, they build unrealistic expectations of sex and relationships. They find boundaries more difficult to navigate and rejection unjust. Suddenly the messaging they are absorbing from online influencer’s tided to the manosphere relates to them and they begin to believe what they are absorbing. It is not simply harmful content, rather a lack of essential guidance navigating emotional experiences.
A lot of boys and young men are also developing their emotional education online using platforms like Instagram and Ticktock. Through these platforms they are finding “influencers” like Andrew Tate and HStickytocky who are teaching them they need to be an “alpha male” to attract a female partner. That men are entitled to multiple partners while women should stay loyal to just one and that things like depression and anxiety don’t exist. They are also pushing outdated, negative gender norms like that women want to stay at home and men should be an assertive bread winner. These influencers, like Andrew Tate, often have a long list of criminal convictions relating to gender based violence or are selling “get rich quick” schemes that take their followers money with no return. They hide behind this visage that they want to help their followers and will be able to if they listen to their advice, while not doing anything to actually support them.
While much of this discussion revolves around boys and young men, the impact extends much further. These messages are building behaviours that are being taken into real world relationships and situations. Since the rise in Ideologies such as the manosphere and influencers like Andrew Tate, we have seen an increase in domestic violence cases and violence against women. We have also seen these ideologies reach our hospitals, police forces and governments.
If we want to support young people and prevent them from turning to these online sources as a form of sex education, we need to change how we see the curriculum. Schools need to be acknowledging the harmful content online and supporting young people in developing critical thinking skills. They need to be challenging behaviour that emulates these ideologies and provide more through sex education to their students. RSHE can no longer focus on biology or reproduction and shouldn’t be being taught by teachers with basic sexed training who specialise in other subjects. We need to be teaching consent, boundaries, healthy relationships, pleasure and online safety. Most importantly we need to be creating environment’s that students feel safe and comfortable to engage with these kinds of topics in.
The rise of online spaces offering harmful guidance to boys and young men does not happen in isolation. It is a reflection of failures within formal sex education and a wider gap in how we approach talking to our young people about relationships and sex. If we do not provide our young people with through education and support, they will continue to turn to online answers allowing for these harmful messages to grow.