Is the cure to male loneliness love and reading?

Why I think reading to boys, and expressions of love could be what the world needs right now. A ranticle.

Depending on where in the world you live, but assuming you are in a western society, somewhere WASPish, and or anywhere else in which this shit is pervading the world, you may have noticed men being awful. (Awfulness is not only afflicting the abovementioned places, it's just that as a white western dude, I don't feel it's my place to speak on what the rest of the world should be doing, for reference see, all of history basically).

Everything good in my life, in some way shape or form, I assume comes down to my mum doing an ace job at raising me. I was one of four boys raised by a single mother, and we were all head cases. She didn't have whatever the easy version of single mothering of four could be... I don't believe there is an "easy" version.

You see it on the news all the time at the moment. Stuff about A****w T**e and his ilk, tales of alpha males being alpha, and men being awful. Awful to each other, awful to minorities, and awful to women. Honestly, I think to heap all of this on a couple of influencers and genuinely bad humans is a shifting of blame. To say "my boy watched a video and now he's x or y" is an exculpation of responsibility. I'm a school teacher, and not a parent, so I see the outcomes of this toxic shit from a different side. It's not boys I am raising, it's boys I am teaching. It's the potential going to waste, and the lives being set up for ruin.

There is a lot to all of this, and I think to assign a monocausal blame is myopic and misses the point, as well as being too easy. So naturally, I am going to suggest two things I see which I think are related.

Boys today are lacking empathy, and they are not sure they are loved or if they fit in.

My mum, mentioned earlier, is amazing. When she ended up with four boys on her own (great call by her, a real veteran move to protect her kids) she did everything she could for us. One of the best things my mum did, among many others, was that she read to all four of us, every night. Mum knew the importance of developing a love of reading in us, as well as the importance of what books can teach young ones. Mum was reading from before we could fully appreciate the stories, well into the time period where we could have been reading our own stories without her aid.

Mum always did the character voices, that is also critical.

I am a strong believer that one of the greatest things fiction can teach us is empathy. Before I'd experienced much of the world, I'd been able to experience losses, loves, adventures, and a whole gamut of wonders. Books with characters who didn't look or think like me, books about situations which would never affect me directly, and books which I didn't always love. Mum read all of them to me, and then as I got older she read them with me, and then at certain points, she'd sit and listen while I read.

The data is conclusive and damning when it comes to reading in young men in today's age of screens, and distractions. What this ranticle (portmanteau I am trying out) is about, is that I don't think a lot of this is the fault of young men. These people aren't raising themselves, they are victims of their childhoods in a lot of cases. I know this is not the case for all of them, I know this is a nuanced and varied thing, but if we can teach boys empathy, maybe they won't get lost down the fear mongering rabbit hole in which we are losing them.

The young boys I deal with at school just don't get it. They struggle to empathise, they struggle to describe their own emotions, and they struggle to process them. What if there was a way we could supercharge their emotional literacy? What if we weren't constantly on tenterhooks for when the next emotionally inept man was going to explode because he couldn't handle a rejection, or a bump in the hallway, or sometimes what feels like nothing at all.

I don't think there is anything special about me, but I do believe my ability to empathise was enhanced by the fact that before I was in high school, I had experienced snapshots of hundreds of people's different lives.

Half of the trigger for this ranticle is my seeing a recent study which showed Gen Z parents aren't reading to their children because they find it boring. That terrifies me. We are going to have kids who never learned a love of reading and with the literacy (emotional, and standard kind) levels of poorly cooked celery sticks, raising kids for whom reading will seem like a foreign language. Schools don't have enough time to expose children to enough literature. Classes are too big, teachers are like butter, spread over too much bread already.

Reading needs to be a life long adventure, and it is the responsibility of parents and caregivers to start the ball rolling.

The next thing young men need is to know they are loved. These same boys who can't empathise and don't understand even their own emotions, are looking for acceptance in a world they don't understand.

I'm lucky that I grew up in a lacrosse club in which men spoke about their feelings, the good ones and the bad ones. People told people they loved each other, when times were bad, we looked after each other, when the times were good, we celebrated with each other.

It meant that when things went wrong, I wasn't looking for an easy excuse, or for somewhere to shift my blame. It was ok that I failed at times, it was ok that I fucked up at times, I knew I was loved and valued. When the world was confusing, I had mentors to turn to.

I think a big part of what drives young men toward right wing influencers and alpha male bullshit, and ultimately towards the gendered violence epidemic we are seeing in Australia, is that they don't know how to feel and process negative emotions.

When a young man says something insensitive and gets called out for it, their only options for emotion are happy or angry. They don't get the nuance. So then they are angry because they got called out. That anger leads them to places attractive to other angry or scared men.

They find communities where everyone else feels like they are on the outer in a world they don't understand. They become the same sort of vulnerable people who are attractive to cults. Lost individuals who are taught to externalise their anger at the world and that the way to feel in control is to be in a position of dominance.

The other thing that enraged me today (other than having covid and stabbing myself in the palm of my hand while trying to catch a knife I dropped) was reading an article by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) in which it was revealed in a recent poll of Australian men, that over 1/3 of men have carried out some form of relationship violence. The majority of this is verbal and/or psychological abuse, but 1/10 men (or near enough to) stated that they had been physically violent in a relationship toward their partner.

That's fucked. I don't have another way to say it, it's fucked. If you are a "not all men" person. You're fucked too.

I don't have all the answers. I may not have any of the right answers. But I feel like if we can teach young men empathy and love, then maybe we have a chance. It's too late for a lot of men out there. They are so far into their own toxic worlds that I don't know whether any kind of ferret could get them out of the rabbit holes of hate.

I believe reading to our children, and instilling a love of literature and especial fiction is a good start.

The other thing we need to do is let young men know they are loved and of value. That includes when they fuck up. If every time a young man makes a mistake, we make them feel they are not welcome, they will find themselves welcome elsewhere.

Men are killing themselves, each other, and women at alarming rates. We need to do something about it. Young men need to learn empathy and know love. Perhaps that's a start.