A Guardian report this week shows misogynistic abuse of female teachers rising sharply. The response from the Department for Education is more guidance.
Misogyny in schools is getting worse. A union survey of 5,000 teachers found that misogynistic abuse of female staff has climbed from 17.4% in 2023 to 23.4% this year. Nearly a quarter of female teachers, in a profession that is over 70% female, report being targeted. Called “love.” Told to “calm down.” Sexualised. Mocked. One teacher had nude AI images made of her by a student. This week, The Guardian reported on the crisis, and the Department for Education responded with more guidance. That’s not going to be enough
The Department for Education’s response was to say that misogynistic views are not innate, they’re learned, and to point toward updated relationships and health education guidance. They’re not wrong that these views are learned. But they’re looking in the wrong place for where the learning happens.
The school created the problem it’s now trying to solve
I was a boy who didn’t fit in. In the 1960s, that was very clearly defined. Boys did woodwork and science, girls did cooking and needlework. I was more interested in music and art and was, quite literally, not permitted to pursue them. So I stopped trying to comply. I found my sense of belonging elsewhere, in pop culture, in rock music, in the Woodstock generation. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and a culture grounded in the language of peace and connection.
The culture boys are swimming in online today is very different from what it was. But the school experience that drives them toward it isn’t.
OFSTED, the national curriculum, and the relentless pressure of assessment-driven learning all create a culture where personal passion, creative expression, and emotional authenticity are, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, a distraction. Emotional support, where it exists at all in schools, is frequently used as a tool to return pupils to compliance with the system rather than to genuinely meet them where they are.
You can’t squeeze out everything that makes a boy feel like himself, offer him nothing real in its place, and then be surprised when someone else steps in to fill the vacuum.
The manosphere borrowed its language from us
In the 1990s I got involved in the mythopoetic men’s movement. Robert Bly had published Iron John, and something in it resonated. Men and women gathering in fields, sitting around fires, drumming, singing in four-part harmony, finding what Bly called the wild man, the deep self that modern life had buried. It wasn’t macho. It wasn’t about dominance. It was about recovering something authentic that the world kept asking you to suppress. I recognised that hunger immediately.
Later, I drifted into the business coaching and self-development world. Same language, different destination. Boundaries, accountability, inner work, potential, healing: all of it is still there, but now in service of personal success, financial freedom, and breaking through your limitations to get what you want. I never quite bought it. There was always something hollow at the centre of it. But I watched a lot of men buy it completely, and I understood why. It sounded like the real thing. It used all the same words.
What the manosphere did was take that already-drifting language and push it further still. The message became clear. The therapy world, the self-development world, the whole culture of emotional intelligence and healthy relationships, all of it has been lying to you. We’re telling you the truth. The truth being that dominance is natural, that women respect power, that your softness has been manufactured to serve someone else’s agenda.
It’s a con, but an effective one. I can see the path that leads a young man toward it, because I walked a version of that path myself. If no one’s ever offered you something genuine, the counterfeit is harder to spot.
I know what boys actually need, because I’ve seen it work
In the 1980s, I worked in a residential therapeutic community for fifty boys who had nowhere else to go. These were boys whom the system had completely failed. What they responded to wasn’t more structure, more targets, more guidance. It was space.
I remember one twelve-year-old who couldn’t manage relationships with his parents or foster carers, who sat in his seat staring out of the window each day. One day, he started drawing the tree outside the window. It was very accomplished. Then I let him take his sketchpad outside. Then to the farm, to draw the buildings and the animals. He began to engage with education for the first time in his life. By the time he was sixteen, he’d found pottery, done it entirely on his own terms, and got a GCSE in it. It was the only one he got. It was his.
That’s what genuine support for boys and men looks like. Not forcing them into a role. Not offering them a different version of the same compliance. Seeing them for who they actually are, and allowing them to develop, from the inside out, a real sense of themselves and their responsibility to the people around them.
Boys don’t need to be told to earn more, dominate more, or control more. They don’t need a better curriculum on healthy relationships delivered by a teacher who’s been given half a day of training. They need someone to sit with them in their actual experience and take it seriously.
So what now
I married at nineteen with no real model for intimacy or a relationship. I had no idea what it meant to actually be present with another person. It took years, therapy, a different kind of culture, and a great deal of my own work to begin to understand it. I was lucky. I found people and spaces that offered something real.
Most boys today aren’t finding those spaces in schools. They’re not finding them anywhere that matters. They’re finding Andrew Tate.
If we want to change what boys are learning about masculinity, we need to look honestly at what we’ve failed to offer them: creative expression, emotional authenticity, genuine belonging, and the experience of being seen as an individual rather than a compliance problem.
More guidance from the Department for Education won’t touch it. Less government pressure on schools to perform arbitrary assessment targets might begin to. Adults, parents, educators and practitioners who are willing to be genuinely present with boys rather than managing them. That’s where the real work is.
The manosphere is filling a vacuum. The question is who created it.