Helen Lewis

because they find a job that suits them better than being cooped up in school, put into this box that I think is particularly restrictive for boys.

You know, if we're going to take some of this ideology, perhaps we do say that girls and boys, on average, on average, maybe there are some differences between them, and that we need to be more attentive to the ways in which some bits of modern society aren't set up well for boys.

It's not a crazy thought.

I think of it differently to that, which is I think that there are girl-specific problems and there are boy-specific problems, and then there are some problems that affect all young people, you know, screen usage.

But that you break that down and it affects boys and girls in different ways.

Again, these on average is with huge amounts of exceptions.

You know, we're always talking very broad brushstrokes here.

But we, you know, there is some evidence, I think, that things like comparing yourself to other bodies and faces on Instagram hits girls particularly harder, right?

You know, social contagions of particular things hit girls harder.

And then at the same time, you get boys who are funneled towards crypto gambling, day trading.

You know, those things are more heavily peddled to men.

We know that the majority of problem gamblers are men.

But this comes out, I think, we're still steeped in this idea that everything is a kind of neat oppressor-oppressed binary.

And in the case of gender, there are still things and ways in which, like sexual violence being a very obvious example, that women are oppressed by men.

But I think we can also get to this stage now where we say it's not actually a competition.

A lot of times it's capitalism is doing it to both boys and girls, doing unpleasant things.

In the service of social media companies making a profit, girls are being shown huge amounts of very filtered images of what faces can look like.

And I think we just probably need to find a slightly new way of talking.

I try and discourage, you know, feminists from sort of framing everything in kind of men are doing this to us kind of way.

And I think that the real downfall of a lot of this discussion is it's almost impossible to have a conversation about men on its own terms in lots of these parts of the right without it having to be in some point women's fault.