Head of Facilitation and Training at The Good Lad Initiative, Ben Hurst discusses his work deconstructing and reconstructing masculinity with boys and young men in the Uk
photography Remi Laudat
creative & words Elvira Vedelago
styling Femi Ayo
grooming Shanice Noel
“People rarely want to know about me, [it’s] always about the Ted Talk,” says activist Ben Hurst, referring to the growing attention he has received from brands and media platforms since the release of his Boys Won’t Be Boys Youtube video in December 2018. Coincidentally, stumbling across said Ted Talk online is how I first came to know about Ben, watching him address key issues around traditional forms of masculinity in his presentation by referencing the workshops and training sessions that he facilitates with boys and young men. “The reality is that boys won’t just be boys, boys will be what we teach them to be,” he declares as his concluding summary; a slam dunk and the crowd cheers.
His speech was both intelligent and down-to-earth, his delivery eloquent and sincere, and considering the scale at which discussions on masculinity have reverberated worldwide since the dawn of the #MeToo movement, it is unsurprising that various media channels are falling over themselves to speak with Ben. “It opens a lot of doors. Your voice suddenly becomes important and people look at you as a leader in this field,” Ben explains of life post-Ted Talk. As a result, there are now numerous podcast chats and video interviews with Ben online, discussing his work and thoughts on masculinity today. Yet, I was particularly keen to get a deeper sense of the experiences that have shaped his own male identity and the receptiveness of other men to his position on positive masculinity.
JUST A GUY
Several months after watching his talk, Ben agrees to an interview and invites me to his parent’s home in East London, where we sit at the kitchen table debating feminist theory over cups of tea. At a towering 6ft 2in, dressed in a white t-shirt, shorts and his “B for Ben” baseball cap, and cracking jokes at the expense of the male contestants on this year’s Love Island series, Ben is amicable, energetic and unexpectedly cheeky for someone hailed as a campaigner against toxic masculinity. Calling into question what I had unconsciously presumed about him and the dictates of being a ‘progressive man’ before the interview. “I think a lot of people want me to be the non-problematic man,” he says of the assumptions made about him since the Talk and his efforts to be seen as human. “People want to make [me] into something else - the face of or the spokesperson for whatever - which is a lot of pressure! I try to rebel against it as much as possible and just be an idiot, where it doesn’t infringe on my professional responsibility.”
The responses have been overwhelmingly positive, yet Ben admits to worrying about the expectations placed him on with every online comment, whether from mothers casting him as a role model for their sons or strangers painting him as the poster boy for modern masculinity. A pedestal he strongly rejects, stressing to his online followers (and to the trolls who attempt to emasculate him on Twitter) that he is neither a celebrity nor an academic. He’s just a guy who cares about ‘doing things that really matter in the world’ - as stated on his Instagram bio.
Up until his early twenties, Ben had planned to work in full-time ministry, having himself been raised in a Christian home deeply embedded in church culture. Yet, after getting caught having sex in his final year, he was subsequently kicked off the programme at Bible college - a difficult experience that was both an awkward conversation with his parents and a push to restructure his identity and larger worldview. He went on to teach sex education at a charity, where he was caught off guard by a particular project coaching boys on how to be a ‘good’ man - something that seemed common-sense but was more difficult to put into words. “I was like, what do you say?” Ben recalls. “How do you convince teenage boys that they need to be good or need to not call women sluts?” Searching for an answer to that question led him to the Good Lad Initiative, a collective that promotes positive masculinity across the UK by facilitating workshops with boys in school and opening dialogue in universities and at workplaces around gender equality. Trialling a training session under the guise of research, Ben was surprised to find himself in a room of men speaking candidly about themselves for the first time. For him, the experience provided an alternative framework to make sense of the world, outside of just race, and he would continue at the organisation as a volunteer. Today, he is the Head of Facilitation and Training at the initiative and conducts various freelance diversity and inclusion projects, alongside other creative pursuits.
THE MASCULINITY CRISIS
The Good Lad Initiative began as workshops at Oxford University, created by a group of graduates in response to the growing problem of lad culture on UK campuses. Described by the National Union of Students as “a group or pack mentality residing in activities such as sport and heavy alcohol consumption and ‘banter’ which was sexist, misogynist, or homophobic”, the prevalence and impact of lad culture, since its birth in the 1990s, has been of grave concern in the UK for fostering acceptable environments of harassment at universities and beyond. However, lad culture is a small subset within the larger conversation around toxic masculinity that has come under public scrutiny in recent years. Prompting Good Lad to widen their reach so as to tackle the large-scale masculinity crisis at hand and unravel the outdated notions of manhood that have been detrimental to both men and women at every level of society.
“In 90% of the work that I do, men are just surprised when someone gives them space. Which sounds contradictory, because men take space and are given a lot of space in society. But it’s never space to talk about their emotions.”
The research evidencing the negative effects of hegemonic masculinity is frankly overwhelming. As society still conditions men to feel shame around emotionality and vulnerability, rewarding them instead for proving their masculinity through aggression - often disproportionately impacting women and other marginalised gender identities - young men, in particular, feel restricted living inside the ‘man box’ - a term coined by Lynx in 2017. The men’s grooming brand reported that while approximately two-thirds of young men from Mexico, the US, India, Russia and the UK felt alienated by the characteristics associated with traditional masculinity, they still felt the need to assert their social standing through aggression and violence: the only known way to be a man. A 2012 Samaritans study concluded that the way men learn to be ‘manly' is significantly impacting how they manage stress and anxiety, often self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, rather than simply talking. Thus, despite depression being more common in women, British men are three times more likely to take their own lives.
I question whether Ben, a laid-back yet acutely self-aware man, had faced similar pressures throughout his life. He relays that he had “a really nice childhood” growing up as a keen art student, who was also athletic and generally well-liked. Perhaps as most teenagers, he may have policed his behaviour around the expectations of his peer group but he mostly felt that having an affirming family let him be comfortable with whoever he was. It wasn’t until the recent loss of his grandmother that Ben realised he had unknowingly struggled with anxiety and depression for years, not having the tools to explain the feelings of rejection and sadness he had suppressed since university. When his situation turned critical, he felt embarrassed seeking professional help, as so many intersections of his identity - class, gender, race - had stopped him from accessing therapy. “There was just something in me that was like, if you go you’re admitting that you’re weak,” Ben reveals. By working through what he describes as a fear of confronting himself and learning the language of communicating emotions, he was able to challenge those restrictive behaviours. “Guys are not socialised to communicate our emotions. I think the space of learning to do that is so valuable,” Ben reflects. “In terms of my own masculinity, there is a lot of stuff that I just do out of impulse. But once I’ve sat down and processed it, and [thought] why am I making that decision, what are the feelings attached to it…If you can understand it, it allows you to step back and not do the thing that you normally do. Which is important but hard, so you have to encourage guys to do that work.”
THE CHALLENGE TO GET MEN TALKING
Today, Ben intends to create more safe spaces for men to challenge the archetypal and dominant forms of masculinity that are present in 21st century Britain and explore how it could be more inclusive for all types of men. A complex process that he recognises as “different battles to fight with different men”. Recently, Ben has found that boys, in particular, are becoming disengaged by the word ‘feminist’, having digested misinformed counterarguments from Jordan Peterson videos or Reddit forums online. Whereas for men, conversations centre on sex and consent or ‘how do I not get in trouble for raping someone?’. “If you allow space for the conversation and the exploration of that, and drill down into what the real fears are, then there’s a lot of vulnerability that comes out of that space,” Ben says. “In 90% of the work that I do, men are just surprised when someone gives them space. Which sounds contradictory, because men take space and are given a lot of space in society. But it’s never space to talk about their emotions.”
He names his most difficult professional experiences as working with men of colour in training sessions attended by predominantly white middle-class men who are often viewed as more emotionally literate. “There’s this thing around cancel culture and this real intellectualisation of ideas, which is just another form of privilege. Another way to be like ‘I’m better than you because I think the right thing’”. He notes issues around hyper-masculinity that come up for Black men, which can often be misunderstood or dismissed in those rooms. “Being in a very liberal, white space, and trying to have those conversations when it’s one person in the room who’s like ‘I don’t understand’ and they are getting frustrated - it’s hard,” Ben says, acknowledging that the forms of masculinity discussed at Good Lad are not yet diverse enough. “Why aren’t people of colour recommending this to their friends who are also people of colour? Why are queer people not recommending this to their friends who are also queer?” - an accessibility issue that he is working with the initiative to address. In contrast, he recalls his favourite facilitation session working with a roomful of men who “looked like me. So I didn’t have to use my facilitator voice or change my language. I could just talk normally and people understood.” Spaces that he hopes to facilitate more of in the future.
A POST-PATRIARCHAL MASCULINITY
Seemingly, a slow but transformative rebellion is underway, asking men to be vulnerable as an act of resistance to a tyrannical patriarchy that has constricted men and oppressed women for years. Yet, would it be naive to assume that by giving men the space to soul search, a gender equality revolution will ensue? “It’s a longer process than just running a workshop or having a chat,” Ben concedes. “Learning emotional literacy doesn’t mean you’re a great person, it just means you know how to talk about how you feel. There is a level beyond that, which is understanding intention and impact and what your behaviour does to other people.” Nonetheless, he recognises that real change must begin with men combatting the standards of masculinity that teach violence and emotional disconnect. “The reality is that if we don’t have these conversations, the same shit that’s happening keeps on happening. And disproportionately affects women. People are getting punched up at clubs and in the street. People are experiencing domestic violence and sexual harassment. And for that to change, you can’t tackle the symptom. You can’t say to men, ‘stop hitting women’, because they won’t stop. They have to understand themselves and what things have led to them one being able to do those things and two reacting in those ways. If you can allow that, then things will change.”
“To talk about men being trash without talking about the patriarchy does a disservice. Because you’re giving people the ammunition to fire shots but you’re not giving them the framework to understand who the enemy is.”
Historically, the task of challenging such abuse of power has often been left to the victims and women’s exasperations have produced calls online for accountability from the men of today - most recently, as the contentious #MenAreTrash debates on Twitter. “I think the #MenAreTrash conversation is important and it should continue. Where it becomes complex is [if] there is no distinction between the personal and the political,” Ben explains. “To talk about men being trash, without talking about patriarchy, does a disservice. Because you’re giving people the ammunition to fire shots, but you’re not giving them the framework to understand who the enemy is.” While some bemoan the use of the hashtag implicating all men, Ben insists that “men who are getting pissed off about it should do the work of educating other men so people can stop saying it.” He places the onus firmly on men to work through their issues without imposing emotional labour onto women, thus keeping his sessions as male-only spaces when possible. “It’s not women’s job to sit there and deal with all of the shit they’ve been through, whilst still thinking about men’s feelings. You don’t have to care about how men feel.”
Where some women and pro-feminist men have called for the total disregarding of masculinity altogether, denouncing it for its complete toxicity, Ben’s ultimate aim is to redefine a more positive model of masculinity that is not reliant upon the patriarchy to exist; to expand upon what it means to be a man without losing masculinity. “Positive masculinity for me [is] where you can be a man and feel like a man and have access to all the masculine characteristics and all of the feminine characteristics with none of the abuse of power,” he concludes. Having more choice and freedom in the values attached to his version of masculinity has meant that he no longer feels as limited by gender, describing his first pedicure - a gift from his girlfriend - as a life-changing experience that he might never have engaged in under the ruling of traditional masculinity. “As I get older, I just want to enjoy my life. I want to do nice things and do fun things, and if those things are traditionally feminine then it doesn’t matter anymore. The only consequence is that other men or women will say stuff, but who cares?” He maintains that he is still a guy, so undoubtedly will uncover other gendered limitations to the expression of his identity in the future. An ongoing journey, but for now, he is at peace with just being “a more honest version of myself.”
Interview originally featured in POSTSCRIPT Issue 3.