Design of boys' programme intrinsically flawed

Last Monday night, Willie O'Dea caught my attention with this remark on Questions and Answers about the "Exploring Masculinities" school programme for boys aged 15 and up. He said: "This programme is designed to allow men to show their true feelings, and for men to appear as victims and to embrace victimhood if they are victims . . ."

A programme aimed at boys in their middle teens which is designed to help them "embrace victimhood if they are victims"? This prompted me to wade through 420 A4 pages of teacher guidelines, resource materials and the accompanying video. What did I find? There is some very useful and creative material. One video clip showed non-traditional work for men, including nursing, full-time voluntary work in the community, being a carer or a full-time parent in the home. Elsewhere, there was good advice on what to do if you are being bullied.

The section on sport raised important questions about excessive competitiveness and the ongoing commercialisation of sport. There was a sensible section on male cancers, which is vitally important. But, all in all, I came away with a great feeling of disquiet. In a couple of sections in particular I felt the material was unbalanced, inappropriate and even damaging to young men.

John Bowman said jocosely on Questions and Answers: "There's a design problem in the young male, and they're going to sort it." He was joking, but he may have been closer to the truth than he realised.

It states starkly in the opening lines of the executive summary: "It is a fundamental premise of the Exploring Masculinities initiative that masculinity is a social construct . . [this] derives from the insights and increased levels of awareness developed by the feminist movement . . ." The summary contains dismissive remarks about our "essentialist ideological framework".

"Essentialism" is the theory that there are essential differences between men and women, that we are not just androgynous creatures socialised into roles. This is anathema to certain feminists, who believe that if they could only get to boys early enough, they could condition all that nasty tendency to patriarchal power abuse out of them and make them caring sensitive human beings - just like women.

Of course all our social identities are to some extent "constructed" but I defy anyone who is a parent to both boys and girls to deny that there are also essential differences - and valuable ones. Regularly, I have heard mothers say that boys are more affectionate and softer than girls. They are also possessed of an over-abundance of energy and it can be wearing to channel that energy positively.

This is not to idealise the male, or society. Male sexist pigs are alive and well. But they are not the majority, and particularly not among young boys. For all our talk of celebrating difference, the "social construct" theory denies difference. It is a lousy starting point for a programme designed to help boys explore being masculine.

Except in the last section, there is little or no affirmation of the value of being male. This is in stark contrast to material aimed at young girls, which tries in all sorts of ways to build self-esteem and self-confidence about just being a girl. In fact, the distinct impression is given that young men have to do a hell of a lot of work on themselves just to be barely acceptable.

The alleged "design problem" is most evident in three sections, entitled "Men and Power"; "Relationships, Health and Sexuality"; and "Violence against Women, Men and Children".

It would be difficult for any young man to work through the material in the section on violence without coming away with the impression that all men are intrinsically violent and a threat to women, other men and children. But the vast majority of men do not use violence against others. Those who do are aberrant, not the norm.

The role-play in the video is of a man who battered his partner and children, and his partner's story. That's fair enough; domestic violence against women is well documented. What is not fair enough is the complete lack of balance, the total absence of the voices of men who have been victims of abuse by women. Surely it is vital to include those voices, because it is so difficult for men to seek help in that situation? It would have seemed an ideal place to include material by Erin Pizzey, a founder of shelters for women who courageously revealed that violence between the sexes is a two-way street. But the student material goes so far as to say: "What male victims of violence have in common with female victims of violence is that in the majority of cases, the perpetrators are male." It does go on to say that, "however, it should be recognised that a minority of men have been subjected to physical, mental and emotional abuse by women". This sop does nothing to redress the imbalance evident everywhere else in this section.

The case histories of victims of male violence are all male-on-male. Nowhere is there discussion of women who are violent to men, secure in the knowledge that their husband or partner will not retaliate, because he believes that using violence against women or children is cowardly and weak.

Similarly, in the section on intimate relationships, all the ways in which boys can intimidate and manipulate girls are gone into in excruciating detail. But there is no equivalent picture painted of girls' flaws.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, acknowledges girls' superior verbal skills but does not agree it makes them nicer. "By age 13 . . . girls become more adept than boys at artful aggressive tactics like ostracism, vicious gossip and indirect vendettas." When I think of the manipulative, bitchy, mean things girls are capable of doing to boys, I am stunned that any programme aimed at boys would not include a discussion on how to deal with such tactics. Instead, once again, boys are painted as being hopeless at relationships.

Certainly, with the increasing tolerance of macho loutish behaviour, we need to examine the values we are transmitting to boys. But is this the best way?

The resource material may have provided an unwitting clue to a better way. Colm Honan, a sports coach, was profiled. Here is a man, according to the evidence of the video at least, who is honest, decent, fair and capable of being competitive without being cut-throat. Yet Colm would have been reared at a time when construction was a term applied to buildings, not gender.

However, character formation and being a person who could be trusted would have been a heavy emphasis in families at that time. In short, Colm is an absolutely unreconstructed man, and yet, strangely enough, is honourable and decent . It's a pity that the programme didn't concentrate more on instilling these "old-fashioned" virtues in our young men, rather than filling them with guilt about the intrinsically flawed and violent nature of the male.

bobrien@irish-times.ie