The Australian organisation ManCave released an open letter on May 14, titled “An open letter to the sector working with men and boys, in healthy masculinities, gender equity, and the prevention of violence”. Professsor Steven Roberts and colleagues responded to this in a Substack post.
Activism & Politics
Male allies are men who act to challenge patriarchal inequalities. Male allies ideally take everyday action to challenge sexist behaviours and relations, act in solidarity with women, and hold themselves accountable for striving to meet a gender-equitable standard.
This article summarises some of the research on allies, covering:
Political institutions around the world remain shaped by gender norms that influence expectations of leadership, authority, and power. These norms often reinforce patterns in which political leadership and decision making are associated with men and masculinity, shaping how political parties, parliaments, and other institutions operate and who is able to participate fully and lead in politics and public life.
In countries across the world, there are growing numbers of men taking action to help end violence against women.
And there are growing efforts to engage men and boys in prevention efforts: as participants in education programs, as targets of social marketing campaigns, as activists and advocates, and as leaders and policy makers.
Part 1: How the rise of lady-workers affected economics, employment, and inflation
Jan 14, 2026
Growing up, telling the heroes apart from the villains was easy.
The good guys were good, and the bad guys were bad. The odds were stacked against them, but the good guys always won, and the bad guys went away.
Everything was enviably clear.
The villains and the monsters, the Voldemorts, Saurons, and evil Emperors, they were all concrete, consistent, and always separate from ourselves.
The tension between attention to men’s privilege, on the one hand, and men’s disadvantage, on the other, is a fundamental one in efforts to understand and work with men and boys.
Debates over how to understand men’s and boys’ social positions have been part of self-conscious attention to men and masculinities since the beginnings of this work in the early 1970s. There have been competing understandings of men’s social situations in different strands of men’s organising (pro-feminist, men’s liberation, mythopoetic, and anti-feminist), and these disagreements persist today.
How can we engage male students and staff on campus in violence prevention?
I want you to think for a moment about the young men you see every day on your campus. The young men in your classrooms, in the cafetaria, in the college residences, and so on.
From social media influencers to academic theorists, preachers and politicians, everyone weighs in on the question of what makes a good man, especially what young men need to do embrace their masculinity.
Here’s a simple, sensible answer: If you want to be a good man, do your best to be a good person.
"10 Ways to Engage Men and Boys to Counter Backlash" is a fact sheet and guidance note for activists, academics and practitioners in gender equality, human rights, democracy and climate justice.