Let’s Stop Treating Men and Boys Like Fragile China Dolls: Why Men’s and Boys’ Mental Health Advocacy Must Help End Violence Against Women and Girls

Mental Health & Substance AbusePerpetrator Behavior
Written By Jessica Sisler

By David Mandel, CEO and Founder, Safe & Together Institute

There is a family of phrases I hear often in conversations about men’s and boys’ wellbeing—that this work is “not a zero-sum game,” that it “doesn’t and shouldn’t come at the cost of women and girls,” that it follows a “do no harm” principle in relation to gender equity.

I believe in the importance of attending to the mental health and wellbeing of boys and men—a male suicide rate four times that of women and girls is, on its own, all we need to know this work is critical and overdue. And these statements are meaningful for what they attempt to do: distinguish this work from men’s rights activism and stand in opposition to what is too often an anti-feminist, anti-woman set of beliefs and activities—one that takes the form of misogynistic statements, blames the advances of women for the problems of men, and more. These statements, by advocates for boys and men’s health, articulate a refutation of the narrative that men and boys are in crisis because of the advancement of women and girls. That narrative is false, it is corrosive, and pushing back against it matters.

But these framings are also defensive.

They organize the conversation around what we are not doing—not taking from women, not turning back the clock, not endorsing grievance—rather than around what we are doing. This is too low a bar, wholly inadequate for the moment, and insufficient for accomplishing what is necessary and required to truly advance the wellbeing, health, and safety of boys and men, women and girls.

In these same conversations, we often hear advocates for boys and men acknowledge the structural advantages and privileges that men as a group still garner, whether in the arena of economic opportunity or social attitudes. This acknowledgment of reality, like women only holding 28% of US congressional seats or 22% of Australian CEO positions, is important, but again it fails to grapple with the central reality of the experience of women and girls in relationship to men and boys.

As Caroline Criado Perez documents in Invisible Women, this structural inequity runs deeper than representation. The research and data infrastructure that shapes what we know, what we are told is important, and what we should care about—about health, about safety, about whose harm counts as evidence—has been built around the male as the default human. The result is a chronic conceptual, data, and activism gap around the violence women and girls experience at the hands of men. The work with boys and men, including important, groundbreaking research on men’s health, runs the real risk of replicating and reinforcing this gap, even as it proclaims the desire to be part of the solution.

The vision for addressing the relationship between women’s and girls’ safety, advancement, and wellbeing and the work on men’s health and wellbeing must be bigger, more ambitious, and more accountable to women and girls. The relevance of that work to the health and safety of women and girls needs to be embraced by men’s health advocates. It needs to be seen as central to the work to end male violence against women and girls—but to do that it needs to produce receipts. It needs to show its work.

“Trust us” and “we are not trying to hurt women and girls” and “we are the good guys” sentiments are not enough.

In a world where women and girls daily experience specific, concrete acts of abuse and harassment from individual men in their homes, in public, and in the workplace, receipts must be produced—receipts that show how the work with boys and men will benefit women and girls, not just make men and boys feel better about themselves, be less depressed, less suicidal, using fewer drugs. Let me be clear: While these are valuable goals in and of themselves, these goals by themselves do not explain, or show how, achieving them will translate into better safety for women and girls.

Here is the structural reality we have to keep front and center: Men and boys are the sources of some of the most prevalent and serious harms experienced by women and girls. Not abstractly. Not only as a function of patriarchal structures, and not only as a discussion of masculinity, though both shape and enable everything that follows. We are talking about the individual actions and choices of individual men, in homes, in relationships, in workplaces, in public space. The violence women and girls experience is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men they know.

So what do these receipts look like? How do we take concrete steps toward this ambitious but essential vision? And this is where behavior has to enter the conversation as the throughline—distinct from internal states, distinct from identity, distinct from how a man feels about himself or about his place in the world. Patriarchy and masculinity shape the context. Distress, self-worth, grievance, purpose—these shape a man’s inner experience. But what women, girls, and children actually live with, and what we can see, measure, and change, is behavior. Any conversation about men’s and boys’ wellbeing that loses that throughline drifts straight back into the abstractions we just named.

If that is true—and it is—then a men’s and boys’ health and wellbeing agenda that limits its ambition to “not zero-sum” or “do no harm” is incomplete. It treats women’s and girls’ safety and flourishing as a side constraint to honor rather than as a central question to answer.

The bar has to be higher. Work with men and boys needs to be part of the solution to the harms that women and girls experience. Not adjacent to it. Not parallel with it. Part of it.

That means the question we have to answer—specifically and measurably—is this: how is this work changing men’s and boys’ behavior, and through it, the safety, dignity, and wellbeing of the women, girls, and children in their lives? What are the indicators? How are we tracking them? What do we adjust when the answer isn’t what we hoped?

This is what “show our work” actually looks like. It is not enough to assert that lifting up men and boys is good for everyone. We have to demonstrate it—with the same rigor, the same data, and the same accountability we would ask of any other intervention claiming to address gender-based harm.

And here’s the part I want to be most direct about: This isn’t a constraint on the work with men and boys. It’s an opportunity to deepen it.

When we engage young men with the question of what they want their relationships, their families, their fatherhood to look like—and when we engage seriously with the gap between who they want to be and how they are actually behaving in the lives of the people closest to them—we are not sabotaging the work. We are making it real. We are treating young men as moral agents capable of locating themselves in the lives of others, capable of accountability, capable of repair. We are offering them language to understand the feedback loop that their behaviors may be creating in their own lives (for example, how mistreatment of loved ones, even in the context of one’s own depression and shame, is likely to increase isolation, loneliness, and feelings of self-harm, not decrease them).

That is more dignifying, not less. That is fulfilling the promise of the language of accountability. That is trusting that men and boys are strong, not treating them as fragile china dolls who cannot handle direct, non-judgmental conversations about their behaviors and their impact. That says to women and girls that we are willing to put in the hard work to connect the dots because men’s health work that isn’t part of the solution to women and girls’ safety from men’s violence is unacceptable.

So I would put it this way: helping men and boys flourish, and helping women and girls live free from violence, are not two efforts that need to be carefully balanced so neither cancels the other out. They are the same work seen from different angles. The men’s and boys’ wellbeing agenda has to make that explicit—in its goals, in its measures, in its messaging, and in how it talks to men and boys themselves about what is actually being asked of them.

That isn’t a cost to the work.

It is the work.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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