Michael Flood

There is intensified attention in Australia at present to the messages about manhood, good and bad, that boys and young men grow up with.

There is now a field of programming and policy focused on ‘engaging men and boys’. This involves efforts self-consciously aimed at men or boys and addressing their involvements in gender in some way, and can be termed the ‘engaging men and boys’ field (Greig & Flood, 2020). The last decade has seen significant growth in this field. Programs and initiatives focused on men and boys have proliferated at local, national, and international levels.

This paper provides a critical assessment of efforts to involve men in the prevention of men’s violence against women. Although there is a substantial evidence base attesting to the effectiveness of at least some strategies and interventions, this field is also limited in important ways. Violence prevention efforts often have focused on changing men’s attitudes, rather than also seeking to transform structural and institutional inequalities.

There is a long history of pro-feminist men's activism in countries around the world. As part of this advocacy and education work, some groups and networks have produced newsletters and magazines. This XY collection is an archive of key English-language pro-feminist men's magazines.

XY itself began as a printed magazine, that I founded in 1990 and edited for seven years. You can read more about XY's history here.

This archive includes the following:

How can boys and men be encouraged to respond critically to the anti-women ideologies of the manosphere, the network of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting sexism and opposition to feminism? This page highlights key resources for engaging men and boys.

Curricula, programs, and resources:

This report examines violence prevention education with boys and young men. Exploring how best to work with boys and young men in classrooms and other face-to-face settings, it identifies six standards for best practice in this work.

The report focuses on educational strategies aimed at the primary prevention of domestic and/or sexual violence, focused on boys and young men, and provided face-to-face in schools and other settings.

Unpacking the Man Box makes five vital contributions to our knowledge of men’s conformity to masculine norms and the impacts of this conformity. 

The first two contributions help us to map men’s patterns of conformity and non-conformity to traditional masculine norms. 

Large proportions of the population in Australia have perpetrated domestic or sexual violence. If 1.6 million women (17%) and 548,000 men (6.1%) in Australia have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or previous cohabiting partner since the age of 15, then in turn, large numbers of people are the perpetrators of this violence. 

Traditional models of how to be a man face growing criticism in the twenty-first century, with increasing attention to the harms they cause among men, women, and communities. Social norms regarding manhood are diverse across cultures, history, and within any one society. But one version of manhood increasingly is seen as a problem, the version in which men are expected always to be tough, aggressive, risk-taking, stoic, heterosexual, homophobic and transphobic, emotionally inexpressive, hostile to femininity, and dominant.