The Lambo Is Rented. The Loneliness Is Real!

I'll start with the bit most people writing about this won't say. I don't know how to fix young men.

I've read the reports and watched the clips. I don't have a tidy answer, and anyone who says they do is probably selling something. Which is the whole problem.

I was the customer once. Not of the men everyone is talking about now, but their older cousins. Books, podcasts, courses, videos of men shouting at me about getting up at 4am. I wasn't stupid. I was lost. And lost men are very good business.

At the end of October, researchers writing in The Lancet argued that the manosphere should be treated as a public health issue, and tackled the way we tackle the tobacco industry. Not because the lads watching it are the problem. One of the authors put it plainly: "Boys and men are not the problem". The problem, as they see it, is the conditions that leave young men isolated, and the people making money from their anger and insecurity.

They're right about something important. The report says these online communities give young men belonging, identity and an explanation for why life feels hard.

Belonging. Identity. A reason. That isn't a list of things a teenage boy should be getting from a stranger on his phone. It's a list of things he was supposed to get at home.

A huge number of young men never had a solid relationship with their own father. Some had a dad who left. Some had a dad who stayed and was never really there. The Centre for Social Justice estimated that 2.7 million children in the UK had no father figure at home, almost one in five. That's a think tank's calculation from lone mother households, based on 2016 figures, not a register of absent dads. But the scale is hard to ignore.

This is not a dig at single mothers. Most are doing two jobs at once, and doing both well. The point is the gap, not the woman who stayed.

Does the gap actually matter? Yes, but less than the scariest headlines claim. A major review of the most rigorous studiesfound that growing up without your father still does real harm, most clearly to finishing school, to social and emotional development and to mental health in adulthood. Those effects are also smaller than the cruder studies suggest. Plenty of lads without dads turn out fine. Plenty with dads don't.

Now look at the rest of a young man's world. In the spring, 530,000 young men in the UK were not in education, employment or training. In England, the share of young people with no close friends at all has gone from one in 100 in 2014 to one in 20. Government research this year found unemployed young men were the most likely to feel lonely often, and those with less family support were far more likely to: 26 per cent against 10.

So picture him. No dad to show him how a man handles money, women, anger or failure. No job. Fewer mates. A phone that never leaves his hand.

Then a man turns up on that phone with a supercar, a mansion and beautiful women, and says: I'll show you how.

Of course he listens. He isn't looking for a guru. He's looking for a dad.

He doesn't even have to go looking. Researchers at Dublin City University set up fake accounts posing as 16 and 18 year old boys. Every one of them, even the ones watching gym and sport clips, was fed manosphere content within 26 minutes. One curious account on YouTube Shorts got there in under two. By the final round, more than three quarters of what the phones were being recommended was toxic.

Here's the part that makes me angriest. Much of what he's being shown is fake.

Take the most famous example. Andrew and Tristan Tate are in custody in Miami, fighting extradition to the UK, where they are accused of rape and sex trafficking. They deny all of it. That is for the courts.

What isn't in dispute is what their own lawyers told a US court this summer. The $2.1 million Aston Martin and the $5 million and $7 million Bugattis in the videos were rented. In the lawyers' words, the brothers' "business model depends on online attention". Under oath, the brothers said their online personas are characters and that they exaggerate their wealth to boost their clout. That image sold Hustlers University at $49.99 a month, and an offshore finance course at $5,000.

A lot of lads without fathers looked to men like this for a picture of what a man is. The men themselves call it a character.

So what do we do? The Lancet authors want governments, schools and health services to act: jobs and social protection, getting boys back into education, better mental health care, and making platforms answer for what their algorithms push. They admit the evidence that this content directly causes health harm is still limited. Critics like Ella Whelan at UnHerdargue that treating young men as victims of a "commercial ecosystem" feeds the very persecution complex the influencers live off, and that we should argue with the ideas instead. She has a point. So do they.

But neither side can deliver this with a policy. You can't commission a father. No fund pays for an older man who turns up on a Tuesday because he said he would.

I know what didn't work for me. The shouting men didn't. Forcing it didn't. Drink worked until it very much didn't. What worked was getting honest about the story I'd been running about who I was, and seeing how hard my own mind worked to prove it true. I call it the Perceiver and the Verifier. The Perceiver writes the story. The Verifier finds the evidence. Sell a lonely lad the story that women are the enemy and money is the measure of a man, and his Verifier will do the rest. Every rejection. Every bad month. Proof.

And the bill isn't only his. The report is clear that women and girls pay for this too, including through violence. A lad who has been taught that women are the enemy doesn't leave that lesson on his phone.

That's why I've started writing pieces like this one for young men. It isn't the answer. It's my small attempt to be a different kind of voice on the same phone.

Ordinary adults turning up does seem to help. In a randomised trial of the Big Brothers Big Sisters programme in America, young people aged 10 to 16 from single parent homes were matched with a volunteer who saw them a few times a month for about a year. Eighteen months on, compared with a control group who weren't matched, they were 46 per cent less likely to have started using drugs, hit people less and skipped less school. It's one programme, from the 1990s, but it was properly tested. Closer to home, the same government research found that young men in clubs, societies and community groups were less likely to be lonely, though that's a link, not proof.

None of that is glamorous. Nobody rents a Bugatti to film a man showing a fifteen year old how to change a tyre.

So here's the one thing. It depends which side of the gap you're on.

If you're older, find one younger man. A nephew, a lad at work, your mate's son. Turn up, regularly. Don't lecture him. Do something side by side, and tell him one true thing about a time you got it wrong.

If you're younger, ask yourself who you want to be in twenty years. Then ask whether the man on your screen actually lives like that when the camera is off. In one famous case, the lawyers have already answered for you.

I don't have the answers. But I've noticed the men who claim to have all of them tend to have rented the car.