Somewhere between a GCSE prep session and the year 10 locker room, a boy opens TikTok. He scrolls. One video tells him how to bulk up fast. Another is how to win an argument. And then: “Women don’t want a man who cries. They want a man who conquers.” The speaker is Andrew Tate. The boy double-taps.

He doesn’t agree with everything Tate says. But something in the confidence, the swagger, the answers — lands. And in a world that has never stopped to ask him who he’s becoming, that feels like a lifeline.

We can pretend this is fringe, but the numbers won’t let us. In the UK, boys as young as 11 are quoting Tate in classrooms. Nearly half say they lack strong male role models. One in three say they’ve felt ashamed to show emotion in front of others. And while we fine-tune PSHE curriculum on paper, influencers are fine-tuning their reach in real-time — through algorithms that never sleep.

This isn’t about one man. Andrew Tate is not the disease. He’s the diagnosis — loud, viral, profitable. His rise tells us something we don’t want to hear: we left boys emotionally unparented, so someone else stepped in.

Masculinity is Being Outsourced to the Internet

There’s something achingly ironic about this moment. We live in a society that critiques toxic masculinity, yet offers boys no real blueprint for healthy manhood. We ask them not to dominate, not to objectify, not to repress — good. But we rarely show them what to do instead.

What does strength look like without aggression? What does leadership look like without control? What does “being a man” mean in 2025 if all the old scripts are obsolete and no one’s handed them a new one?

That vacuum is where YouTube fills in.

And it doesn’t just fill it—it curates it. It shapes an entire algorithmic worldview in which masculinity is reduced to cars, cash, and coldness. Platforms turn gender performance into content and feelings into liabilities. Boys are trained to perform, not to process. Every insecure scroll becomes a feedback loop: don’t be weak, don’t ask questions, dominate or disappear. There’s no nuance in a 15-second reel. Just a distorted masculinity on autoplay.

PSHE: The Ghost Period That Could Save a Generation

If there’s a classroom designed to wrestle with these questions, it’s PSHE. And yet, in too many schools, PSHE is the “ghost period”—half-taught, under-trained, squeezed between science and lunch.

This is a missed opportunity of generational scale.

We don’t need a “don’t be like Tate” lesson plan. We need critical thinking modules on how ideas spread online. Conversations about loneliness and status and gender and power. We need to tell 13-year-old boys: you are allowed to ask who you are without already knowing the answer. Because if we don’t, someone else will tell them — and they might not like the answer they get.

We could be teaching them how to decode manipulation, how to recognize insecurity dressed as arrogance, and how to talk about shame without shutting down. Imagine PSHE that trains boys to become literate in themselves—to recognize not just what they feel, but why they feel it. Imagine PSHE that normalizes awkward questions instead of silencing them. That’s not fluff. That’s foundational. It’s the emotional scaffolding on which everything else rests—relationships, careers, even democracy.

Learning from the Nordic Model: What Works Elsewhere

While the UK struggles with these challenges, other countries offer instructive examples. The Nordic countries—particularly Sweden, Denmark, and Finland—have pioneered approaches to gender equality in education that deserve serious attention.

Sweden's education system mandates teaching through democratic methodologies, with specific attention paid to boys' emotional development. Swedish curricula focus on helping boys "construct a more complex masculinity, in turn enriching the set of collective masculinities available and working towards a more egalitarian social model".

In Denmark and Iceland, compensatory teaching strategies give both boys and girls the chance to develop all their facets, with a focus placed on encouraging autonomy and emotional intelligence. These programs recognize that boys and girls inevitably take on gender roles in mixed groups, which justifies targeted interventions to train different capacities that would otherwise be conditioned by group dynamics.

Nordic preschools integrate gender equality work into daily practice, promoting "gender awareness" through systematic organizational changes rather than one-off interventions. The key insight? Gender equality isn't achieved through policy alone—it requires embedding new approaches into the fabric of educational practice.

We Are Paying the Price of Our Silence

The cost isn’t just cultural. It’s economic. The UK’s NEET rates are disproportionately male. Boys are falling behind in reading, university enrollment, even friendship. There is a loneliness epidemic among men, and we’re still pretending it starts at 40. It doesn’t. It starts at 12, in a classroom that teaches photosynthesis but not self-worth.

And if you think boys being influenced by Tate is a niche issue, try working in a service job with a man who thinks women owe him deference. Try dating someone who’s never been taught to say “I’m scared.” Try living in a society where vulnerability is still coded as weakness — and strength as silence.

When we talk about lost boys, we forget that those boys grow into men who vote, who parent, who run institutions. Unspoken hurt calcifies. Emotional illiteracy doesn't stay confined to adolescence—it becomes cultural policy. And then we’re no longer talking about “boys in crisis.” We’re talking about systems in crisis, built by people who were never given the tools to reflect, to connect, to course-correct.

Let’s Give Boys Their Stories Back

The Netflix series Adolescence understands this deeply. It shows teenage boys not as caricatures, but as kids trying to script themselves into a world that doesn’t speak their language. It’s not a show about masculinity. It’s a show within it. And that’s exactly the tone our classrooms need — less doctrine, more dialogue.

Boys don’t need to be rescued. But they do need to be invited. To feel. To speak. To doubt. To be something other than a punchline or a problem to be managed. If we reimagine PSHE not as a duty, but as an offering, we just might get through.

Because at some point, every boy asks the world: what kind of man should I be?

If we don’t answer, TikTok will.

And TikTok doesn’t care who he becomes—only that he keeps watching.

And if that’s the standard for masculinity in 2025, then we’ve outsourced something far more dangerous than attention. We’ve outsourced the moral imagination of the next generation. And we might not like what comes back.