‘There’s a significant change in where sexual scripts come from’

I'm dual-qualified as a health psychologist and a public health specialist. This results from my need to understand what's going on in people's heads but also understand the structural drivers and determinants. Public health also brings the discipline of prevention, data and evidence-based approaches to my work.

That work has been in sexual health, sex education and wider public health policy for many years, and I've ended up specialising around minoritised voices in sexual health and sexual violence. The need to share the evidence base with a wider public and policy audience pushed me to write a book in 2022, #MeToo for Women and Men, which covers what sexual violence is, who it happens to, what works in terms of prevention and what the data says.

Right now, we've got a government who are really wanting to take onboard violence against women and girls, although I would tend to use the phrasing 'gender-based violence' which encompasses violence against women and girls but also recognises that men can be victims to. To say 'women and girls' recognises the gender inequality that drives sexual violence, but it also doesn't acknowledge why it's happening, which is male or gender-based violence often intersectionally targeted.

Gender stereotypes are changing and there is a backlash against that, but I think that this is a symptom of change, rather than a symptom of our ultimate doom. The recent concern over examples of hyper-masculinity such as Andrew Tate are of course concerning, but also a promising symptom of movement and questioning around what does it mean to be a man, what gender roles are on offer? Perhaps female gender roles are expanding, but male gender roles aren't able to keep up with that expansion, they are kind of static. Masculine gender roles are having a crisis.

Male gender stereotypes are very fragile. They need repeating. They need reaffirming. The whole performance of masculinity can mean you have to keep re-stating it. This might look like cat-calling women on the street in front of your mates and it's this repetition that interests psychologists. You have to keep doing it to show you're a man because it's fragile.

It might feel comfortable to simply blame and call out at men, but as the mother of teenage boys I need to ensure all young people get to be true to themselves and are offered multiple ways to do that. Society isn't offering men the richness they deserve and they're suffering because of that. They have greater rates of suicide, premature death from illness, higher rates of homicide and violence against themselves as well as other people. It's not much fun being a traditional male.

I always come back to what helps, rather than just pointing at the problem. It's partly about offering wider potential roles within masculinity, rather than pointing at problematic masculinity and saying, 'that's terrible.' A section in my book is called 'protect your daughters, educate your sons'. This is very, very important. If you want to do something about it, saying what's wrong with people isn't going to help. What will help is compassionate calling in vs calling out. The work of Michael Flood at the University of Queensland is worth looking at.

He's got a website which looks at engagement in rebuilding masculinity that include positive options. The message is that nurturing is okay, communal roles are okay, building community and being community leaders is okay. The whole idea is that there are options outside of the man box of limited, traditional concepts of masculinity. His work is great because it talks about how we grow men's ability to see a range of ideas of what a man can be. The rise of Andrew Tate shows that young men are struggling to find role models. They are asking, 'How do I be a man?'

Gender-based sexual violence is increasing, but why is that? There's obviously a range of factors but there's a significant change in where sexual scripts come from and that's really about the scale and availability of violent online pornography, which acts as a wallpaper to sexual beliefs. We've got good evidence about this, we know the scale of access is much greater, and it's now normalised that 10, 11, and 12-year-olds will accidentally come across online pornography as a result of getting a smartphone. I'm not going down the 'smartphones are terrible' route – they're tools that can be used for good things, but they can also be used for bad things. The content as well as the scale has changed. The nature of that content is much more aggressive, violent and demeaning towards women. It's a kind of a normalisation of degrading sexual aggression targeted at women. We know that there's a lot of young people seeing it, and we know that lots of young people are using it as a sort of sex education.

Equimundo, an initiative that promotes healthy manhood and works to prevent violence, did research which shows hypermasculine stereotypes take a greater hold on men who come from families where they witness domestic violence. It might be that they serve a function in overcoming shame. An early study we did on young men's attitudes to porn use suggested there's a fragmentation or a deficit that needs to be filled with an extreme stereotype and that this might drive gender based domestic and sexual violence (Charles and Meyrick 2020).  Hyper-sexual gender stereotypes: Men are strong. Men are independent loners. Men don't depend on anyone. Men don't talk about their feelings. Men are sexually avaricious, may find a place where there's a fragmentation or a need to compensate, and therefore particularly appealing to certain groups of men.

A few things coming from this are very alarming, and one is the rise in sexual choking. This is essentially consensual choking in sex. The prevalence data is quite new, but studies from Australia looking at college students found that about 61 percent of women, 43 percent of men, and 79 percent of trans or gender diverse people had experienced sexual choking (Sharman, 2024).

So, in younger age groups, we're getting to normalised levels. Contrast this with the fact that there is no safe level of sexual choking. Let me repeat that – there is no safe level of cutting off oxygen to the brain. The Institute for Addressing Strangulation have got some useful stats and resources about this. The pressure of a normal handshake is 80 to 100 PSI. It only takes four PSI to shut down a vein, 11 PSI an artery, and about 34 your windpipe, so it doesn't take very much to cause important and permanent damage.

There's this idea that talking about this stuff is kink shaming and that we have to be sex positive, at the same time, there is no safe way to strangle. In the summer, I was at a sexual health conference and the doctors there recognised that this is a problem. They had a good discussion around this and presented all the data, but I was really struck by the internal conflict in the room with professionals who are used to working in a very sex positive, open way. They were asking how we deal with this without kink shaming. In the UK in 2023, 600 women died from strangulation.

There's just been a study by Bangor University that found non-fatal strangulation is the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40. The damage is huge and very poorly understood. It's kind of framed as a normalised kink.

We know that rates of sexual violence are increasing but reporting isn't. A lot of people think it's getting better but that's unlikely. If you look at the stats, about 85 percent of people do not report sexual violence to the police. There's a worrying conflation of sexual freedom framed as the normalisation of sexual aggression against women as a practice. There is a massive hole in the middle of what we know about normal, everyday sexual violence. It's a hugely silenced phenomenon. 

The number one priority for me is around enabling or 'earning' disclosure and how we ask more people about it but also make it safe for them to tell.  Then we can look at prevention in light of a more accurate picture of prevalence. Laws have needed to catch up. For example, using a consensual 'rough sex' defence for murder is now no longer possible, now you cannot legally consent to serious harm. You can consent to strangulation, but you cannot consent to any resulting harm.

Of course, there's only a small percentage of men who do any of these things, but there's many men who are reluctant to stand up against it or call it out in their friends or try to actively prevent and I think that's really important. There's a role in positive, proactive roles for men and being allies. There's a huge role for the education of young men and women about positive role models for masculinity, what it is to be a man, what you want to be as a man. There's more than just the off-the-shelf male stereotype that Andrew Tate epitomises.

People who simply call people who perpetrate gender-based violence 'monsters who are nothing to do with our society' are incorrect. They are the fruition of our training program that says women are sexual objects, or 'the sons of our patriarchal system'. Challenge the normalisation of that narrative. Men are not one homogenous group; men are and can be a range of things. But conversations around 'well, it's not me, and I'm getting badged the same' need to be moved, so be the ally, call it out, challenge the normalisation of that narrative.  It can feel like there are a lot of angry, older women trying to police this and having male allies is really important.

The evidence shows that there are some great southern global programs about changing gender stereotypes to build empowered societies through liberation of men and women and balancing gender stereotypes through sex education and community programmes. We tend not to do that here, especially in the UK. 

We have schools that struggle to do sex education that competes with the online world, that really struggles to deal with important stuff like pornography. Teachers aren't given the resources or training to deal with that kind of stuff and they are struggling against a wave of normalised sexual harassment in schools without the equipment to deal with what that means and how to react to it.

We've done research, particularly on violence against women and girls in Somerset, and they told us about a landscape of sexual violence that they have experienced across their lives; domestic violence at home, harassment on the bus, getting to work, at work, at school, on the street, going out at night. Policy tends to work in silos or settings like trying to create 'safer streets' because of the Sarah Everard case… but streets are only a fragment of women's experience of gender-based violence. 

To do only that is kind of meaningless. There is an invisibility. And then we go back to where we started, which is an invisibility of the breadth of low-level harassment, sexualised harassment, domestic violence – catcalling, not being able to use the streets, women talk about having to do exhausting 'safety work' or shrink their lives to stay safe. It inevitably ends up as a civil rights issue.

I think that's a helpful way to explain this because a lot of people, not just women, can identify with equality and want to be champions of equal rights. Positive steps forward are about pointing out the benefits for men in terms of health, in terms of achievement in the workplace, in terms of really simple things like money and business effectiveness. There's a huge gain from this, rather than the fear of what is being lost from female gender stereotypes, expanding the idea it's not a net loss for men, no, it's an overall gain for everybody. And we don't tell that story.

As soon as you say the word 'patriarchy', you've lost people because you're falling into that angry feminist stereotype. There's a range of masculinities and there's problematic masculinities that are on offer which are not good for men. I don't want my teenage boys to be more vulnerable to suicide, I want them to be whoever they want to be. I don't like the idea that they will not be offered a better version of masculinity by our society. 

We need to do better than waiting for things to go horribly wrong and pointing out that 'there are the monsters'. If we create them we can change that pattern and offer something better. There's no inevitability around this, it's very amenable to change. We've created this training programme in our society, and we can change it and I think there's an appetite for it and we're getting there. If you look at it the purpose of these boundary markers of moral panics, there's a purpose in them. There's a threat and if you can try to see it, not for what it is, but as representing that gender stereotypes have moved, then we're doing some of the right things.