The poignant images of five murdered Ipswich women that dominated the UK’s front pages the week before last presented me with the usual task of explaining the issues arising from such news to my 12-year-old son. It’s never easy to do so, but at least the idea that women are simply immoral for taking to the profession is beginning to lose its grip as the majority are drug dependent and vulnerable.

However, a matching awareness that men caught in this world may also be vulnerable has not arisen, which still presented me with difficulties in explanation. Men who use prostitutes are only ever portrayed as misogynist, criminal and, worst of all, macho. Macho is worst because it suggests that the abuse of women is somehow natural to men, just one end of the spectrum of male behaviour.

I’m not going to address the culpability of those men, but I am going to question the implicit guilt of all men. As my son struggles to process the many mixed messages about men and what they are capable of, I feel compelled to play up his feminine side. But is that the best way to help him engage with his masculinity as he enters puberty? Steve Biddulph, author of Raising Boys and Manhood, poses an important question: might prostitution be as demeaning to men as to women? He doesn’t try to answer for women, but details the devastating effect of society’s expectations of male behaviour on men. And how, in a numerous ways — from robbing them of a voice to causing them to distrust their own parenting skills — it makes abusive behaviour more likely.

Since the 80s we have engaged with feminism privately and publicly. In schools this has translated into a sort of gender neutrality — an emphasis on equality of opportunity rather than on the diversity of needs. Without question this is “fair” and hence “right”. But as girls tend to be more mature than boys, in co-educational schools this results in the creation of norms that are more female than male.

What is understood to be deviant behaviour, for example, is almost without exception boys’ behaviour. The way that girls can be destructive in more emotionally adroit ways, is not acknowledged by detentions. At an early age, this can result in boys pathologising their gender, withdrawing from girls — and school — and gathering in groups of their own: a rationale for exclusively male environments later on.

On BBC Radio 4 recently, Justice for Women representative Julie Bindel insisted that if a man has sex with a woman who is too drunk to know, the woman is always a victim and the man — whether equally drunk and out of his mind himself or not — is guilty of rape!

It’s time for the gender debate to become a dialogue. When men are alienated from the discourse on male behaviour they likely to suppress its extremes and the chance for transformation is gone. Masculinity is still a distinct force: Men are in power and in prison. Masculinity needs to be better understood, if we are to hope for a safer, happier, richer society. —The Guardian