I came of age in lad culture. How do I teach my son to do better?

Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in I ’m a father to an almost 12-year-old boy, which comes with all the joy and complexity you’d expect. He’s growing at a rate of knots. Every time I turn my back, it’s like he shoots up a few more inches. His tastes are changing too.

We can now walk past playgrounds without him tugging my shirt, and ice cream is no longer a fix-all for absolutely everything. The most recent development is that he wants to smell magnificent, and not with your bog-standard Lynx either (like in my day). His eye is on high-end fragrances. The point is, my son is growing up, becoming a young man, and starting to navigate his own way through the cat’s cradle of emotions that come with it.

His social circle is already shifting and changing too, an amorphous blob I can barely keep up with. He’s started noticing girls in a different way . Soon, it’ll be time for “the talk”. But like so many dads, I find myself constantly delaying it and battling with the right way to approach it. Lots of it I can handle. Hormonal shifts? Not a problem. His vocal range suddenly plummeting towards bass notes? Fine. But explain sex to him? How to explain all the knotty issues to someone so young and inexperienced?

How do I approach the idea of responsibility and consent in a world where some men behave so appallingly? For the last month, my social feeds have been dominated by the Cornell 7 case – where a former student has filed a lawsuit alleging she was gang-raped by seven members of a fraternity. It’s yet to reach any legal conclusion, but the lawsuit includes a cluster of messages between members of the fraternity that make for disturbing reading.

Over 50 young men in a Snapchat group , where one message allegedly announced “free p*ssy” upstairs, and another later asked: “Shop still open?” The chilling reply: “Yea”. In the wake of this, a dad in the US went viral on TikTok with a video of him discussing consent with his two young sons. More than 8 million people watched it, and under every repost you could see the same refrain, the same message echoing t hrough cyberspace: “educate your sons” .

Raise them to be better. Recommended Carrie fever is gripping teenage girls and revealing a dark truth about their lives Who is Russell Brand’s wife – the only person willing to defend him as he stands trial Yes, we need to educate our sons – but the Cornell 7 case is way bigger than a parenting issue The appalling reason victims always text their abusers You can’t argue with the sentiment. We need boys to grow into good men. It’s why Healey pledged £15m over three years for a new Misogyny Prevention Fund .

This is intended to support mentoring for young people, workplace training and public-awareness campaigns, with the main emphasis being on preventing misogynistic attitudes from taking hold. But I must confess, the slogan around Educate Your Sons frustrates me – not because it’s wrong, but because it’s too easy. I don’t believe young men in that group chat had simply never been told about consent. I don’t believe that their parents didn’t teach them right from wrong.

If only it were that simple. This is an issue that is more complex and worrying than that. This is a wider cultural issue that runs deep, a set of attitudes that can thrive even among people who’ve been taught perfectly well how to behave. open image in gallery The alleged gang rape at Cornell University has brought the issue of consent to the forefront of conversation again ( AP ) This isn’t anything new either. We’ve been grappling with male sexual entitlement for generations.

I’m 50, so I came of age during the height of lad culture . I even cut my teeth working for men’s magazines at the end of the Nineties and beginning of the Noughties. We might laugh about the elusive nature of pornography back then compared to its ubiquity now, how you might unwittingly stumble across a dirty magazine in some foliage (hedge porn). Or how sex education was a bungled teacher demonstration of putting a condom on a banana.

But I’m also very aware that I worked in numerous offices over the years where men were openly known to be predatory – where they could get away with abhorrent behaviour on account of being further up the food chain. A litany of poor man’s Weinsteins; creepy behaviour was laughed off as “a bit handsy”. A deafening silence allowed them to get away with it – you’d even find entire magazine articles dedicated to the art of “cajoling” women into bed.

I’m not going to pretend I didn’t write some stuff that I now wince at. And then, as now, as a bloke you’d frequently find yourself shackled to that most crippling of male afflictions: banter. At best this is small talk wearing clown shoes; at worst, hate speech dressed up as jokes. Consent is everything that we’re doing to make sure we’re all having a good time Justin Hancock, sex and relationships educator Not much has changed. Earlier this month, the hugely popular US comedian Shane Gillis used his SNL monologue to inform the nation that women at the gym now “dress like whores”.

Last week, the comedian Vittorio Angelone apologised for a joke he made on a podcast roast about a named woman being raped – a woman who says her own rape case is currently going through the courts. Increasingly, it feels as though we’re living in a culture shaped by the worst examples of masculinity. Men who are rewarded and revered for boasting, belittling others and seemingly doing their best to crash the planet into the sun. Men who, despite the cries of #MeToo, never quite seem to be held accountable.

Meanwhile, the manosphere is populated by influencers proclaiming that “real” men dominate those around them; they are always winning and unbothered by others, while a parade of “strongmen” on the world stage tell us that bluster, aggression and a general disregard for women won’t hold you back. They might even get you elected . That’s the world my son is about to walk into. Frankly, it’s not doing boys many favours either. The statistics will tell you that boys are at least twice as likely to die by suicide as girls.

They’re more likely to be excluded from school, more likely to be victims of violence, less likely to ask for help. Then there’s what’s waiting for them on their screens. According to a survey by the Children’s Commissioner for England, the average age at which young people first see pornography is 13, and more than a quarter of those surveyed had seen it by 11. Much of it is stumbled across by accident. Add in the group chats, the algorithm quietly deciding what teen boys should want to see next, and it’s a lot. open image in gallery Shane Gillis caused controversy with derogatory comments towards women on SNL in the US recently ( NBC/SNL ) Boys can be beneficiaries of male privilege and still be badly exposed to toxic ideas that cause so much harm.

I’ll admit, it frightens me. Like all dads, I want so much for my son. I want him to be tough enough to survive the world, but also comfortable with being vulnerable, to be both steely and sensitive. Thoughtful of others, but able to stand his ground. There’s a jungle of issues to hack through, and it’s easy to become overwhelmed, easy to get caught in a state of stasis by the sheer volume of things to unpick. So where do you even start?

In my case, I decided to start with consent. And with someone who has spent years talking to young people about exactly this. “Often, the consent conversation is literally just saying: yes means yes, no means no, and you have to seek somebody’s permission before you do something, but that’s not good enough,” says Justin Hancock, a sex and relationships educator and the author of Can We Talk About Consent? “That kind of education equates to the same kind of transaction we have whenever we go on a website and click ‘accept cookies’.”

The problem, he says, isn’t that boys haven’t been told about consent. Many of them have. It’s that what they’ve been told is so thin. “It allows people to say, well, they said yes, so I did it. But then they ignore how that person is responding, ignore the fact that they’re no longer into it, ignore that they’re maybe no longer conscious, ignore that it’s not mutually enjoyable.” Consent isn’t just a permission slip you get signed before the fun can start, but an ongoing habit of paying attention, something in flux that exists in a thousand small moments.

The alternative, suggests Hancock, is disarmingly simple. “Consent is everything that we’re doing to make sure we’re all having a good time.” Instead of making this about one big conversation, we need to make these discussions part of everyday life He doesn’t start with sex, by way of example. He tells me to start this conversation with my son with the basic act of watching telly. “Let’s say you and your son are going to watch TV later.

What do you feel like watching? What are you in the mood for? Who’s holding the remote? Midway through, perhaps one of you is scrolling on your phone. Are you still into this? Shall we switch?” What to watch, what to have for dinner, what to do on a Saturday – all of that is consent. The core message to get across, he says, is that “you can’t really be having fun unless everybody’s having fun.” This is considerably different to the “yes or no” model, which essentially sets itself up as a game with a winner, with girls as the gatekeepers who might eventually get worn down.

It’s also a departure from the idea that consent is about turning every encounter into an elaborate questionnaire. “During sex, if someone were to say ‘Is this okay? Is this okay? Is this okay?’ it would be too much,” Hancock says. open image in gallery Josh: ‘I’m not sure I was particularly good at putting other people’s feelings first at his age. But perhaps that’s the point’ ( Josh Burt ) So yes, talking to our sons is hugely important.

But instead of making this about one big conversation, we need to make these discussions part of everyday life. I was born in the 1970s, raised around stiff upper lips, breadwinning and stoicism, and came of age in lad culture. I’d like to think my generation has moved on in how we approach relationships and parenting, but there’s still plenty of work to do. And how men treat each other matters to how they treat girls and women. Hancock spent years working with lads in a south London clinic.

“Outside, it was ‘Yeah, I shagged her, blah blah blah.’ Inside, they were all talking about their intimate lives in this really raw and lovely and touching way. Young men want to talk about intimacy. It’s just about creating spaces where we can do it.” Recommended Why we need a new ‘Everyone’s Invited’ to tackle our toxic rape culture The ‘Cornell 7’ case is the next #MeToo – if you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention Inside the deepfake epidemic sexualising students and terrorising British schools We need to change the way we communicate, whether to our friends, our parents or our children.

We need it to be okay to show those parts of us we’re still keeping hidden from view.