Sometimes the hardest part isn’t finding the answer. It’s finding the question.
This is a simple tool: twenty questions about masculinity, drawn one at a time. You can use it on your own, with a friend, or as the starting point for a men’s group conversation. There are no right answers. The point is the conversation it opens.
Before the questions begin, there’s an opening card: a short passage about men and boyhood, and a question to sit with before anything else gets drawn.
After that, the deck shuffles itself and deals one question at a time. Each one is an invitation, not a test. Skip any that don’t land. Sit longer with the ones that do.
“It’s like talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.”
Who was your icon of a man when you were that age — someone you watched and thought: that’s what a man looks like?
How to use it
On your own: draw a question, write about it, or just let it settle. You don’t have to do anything with it straight away.
In a group: one person draws, reads it aloud, and anyone who wants to speaks. No one has to. The facilitator can hold the space, or the group can run itself.
A note on what these questions are for
Men are often good at occupying space without taking up much room inside it. The pub, the football, the workplace: all of it runs on a version of okayness that doesn’t ask too much. These questions ask a little more than that. Not to be difficult, but because most men, given a space where it’s safe to speak, find they have more to say than they expected.
“It’s like talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.”
That’s the frame for this deck. Not a diagnosis. Not self-improvement. Just an honest look at what we were given, and what we might want to do with it now.
If anything in this brings something difficult to the surface
That’s not a bad sign. It means something is live. You might want to talk to someone: a friend, a therapist, or one of the helplines below.
Samaritans: 116 123 (free, any time, day or night) CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably): 0800 58 58 58 (5pm–midnight every day)