This is why, over the past 6 months Equimundo and Movember have been convening the Young Men and Media Collective (YMMC) - a space for creatives, practitioners and policy folk to explore ways of protecting young men from harmful content online with two key layers:

1. 9 Funded Projects

2. 50+ Learning Network Partners

As part of this work, we’ve been exploring the narratives that young men are exposed to online. After a process of collaborative deliberation informed by our data, we landed on one key harmful narrative to target our efforts.

To be successful, young men must be relentlessly ripped and rich at all costs

We know that this narrative is wide-spread, highly motivating, shifting ideas of what success looks like for young men, and therefore encouraging them to take significant risks relating to their health and financial security. Across just a three-month period, RRR-core creators accumulated 2.7 billion views, and 80% of the young men we spoke to recall seeing content promoting the narrative on social media. The harm goes beyond what young men watch, as repeated exposure warps their sense of what is normal and acceptable when it comes to their friends’ behaviours. Young men who view relentlessly ripped and rich content overestimate how many of their peers use steroids by 5 times, testosterone by 2.8 times, and engage in looksmaxxing by 2.2 times.

Young men deserve more pathways to achieve the lives they want, without sacrificing their health or wellbeing.

Why fund creative projects?

Being a creator can be isolating work. That's why the defining idea behind the YMMC is collective action. Our nine funded projects are learning alongside one another, sharing ideas, testing approaches, and drawing on each other's networks and expertise.

The first cohort (below) spans the UK, US, Canada and Australia, working across spoken word, journalism, gaming, sports media, and social content. Together, they’ll test new ways of engaging young men while helping us better understand what resonates, what doesn’t, and why.

The projects themselves are as varied as the audiences they reach, from a spoken word poet and a sports documentary series to a youth journalism platform and the UK’s largest community of tradies. Different formats. Different communities. One shared goal: expanding the stories young men encounter about success, masculinity, and belonging.

Why support a learning network?

Influence doesn’t come from a single video or one creator changing someone’s mind overnight. It grows through an ecosystem where ideas are repeated, reinforced, and reshaped across podcasts, gaming, documentaries, short-form video, news, livestreams, and everyday social media.

We’ve seen this in the growth of the manosphere. Creators working toward a shared vision didn’t simply reach larger audiences. Together, they made a particular version of masculinity feel familiar, desirable, and culturally normal.

That’s why we wanted to build more than a funding programme. The YMMC Learning Network brings together more than 150 creators, broadcasters, producers, researchers, NGOs, platforms, and media organisations, from UN Women and UNICEF to YouTube and Channel 4.

Through newsletters, webinars, and in-person convenings, we’re creating opportunities for people who shape culture to learn from one another. The goal isn’t to hand creators a playbook. It’s to share ideas, test new approaches, and build a stronger evidence base for engaging young men online.

Is there still hope?

We think so.

Young men’s underlying aspirations remain remarkably healthy. Eighty-seven percent want to be financially secure. Eighty-five percent want to be physically healthy. Eighty-four percent want to be mentally and emotionally healthy.

Those ambitions aren’t the problem. The question is which voices young men encounter as they pursue them.

Our hope is that this cohort, together with our Learning Network partners, can experiment, learn, and share those lessons widely. By supporting creators already telling thoughtful, compelling stories about masculinity, we can help those stories reach more young men and expand the possibilities they see for themselves, their relationships, and their futures.

Here's what a few members of the first cohort had to say

“Being part of a community of people all working towards the same goal is not only comforting, it’s incredibly inspiring. There’s real power in bringing different voices together to rethink the stories young men are hearing every day.” Sam Browne, Poet

“One of the greatest challenges our community has faced in reaching men and boys is a failure to build partnership and infrastructure, both internally and externally. Being part of the YMMC allows us to learn alongside others tackling the same challenge. The possibilities this represents for narrative diversity, iterative learning and message propagation have us incredibly hopeful.” Jonathan Jacobs, Hey Brother Hype House

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Using the EPIC-26 prostate cancer questionnaire, plus two questions on libido and sexual medication and device use, this report summarises treatment-related side effects such as incontinence and sexual wellbeing. The analysis includes only men who completed PROMs both before treatment and 12 months after, providing a clear picture of quality-of-life impacts following diagnosis and management.

Radical prostatectomy (RP) is a key prostate cancer treatment, playing a major role in cancer control and survival. The Prostate Cancer Insights report includes data on 40,570 men treated with RP, without additional therapy (e.g. radiation therapy). This large cohort provides a unique opportunity to deliver strong evidence on patterns of care and outcomes. Surgical approach and intraoperative technique impact men’s outcomes following RP. Best-practice robot-assisted surgery increased steadily from 50–65% in 2016–2017 to 74% in 2024. Robotic-assisted surgery was also more common in younger men, undertaken for 68% of those under 60 years compared to 58% in men over 80 years. Nerve-sparing surgery was undertaken in 70% of the cohort, with no notable trends over time. As would be expected clinically, rates of nerve sparing procedures were higher in lower risk disease groups (85% in low-risk, declining to 50% in high-risk disease).

Outcomes that matter after radical prostatectomy

Urinary and sexual dysfunction are the leading side effects experienced by men after RP. Twelve months after RP, 77% of men reported a meaningful decline (i.e. exceeds threshold of minimally important difference) in their sexual function score compared to their pre-treatment status. The greatest decline was observed in men under 60 years who had the highest pre-surgery function with 81% of this group experiencing a meaningful decline. Erectile function is specifically measured by the EPIC-26. Of the 20,206 men who had erections firm enough for intercourse before surgery, only 15% (3091) retained that ability one year afterwards. These numbers do not account for the use of sexual aids (devices, medications), meaning the unassisted picture is likely more pronounced. These changes highlight the extensive and enduring impact of RP on sexual function, particularly for younger men.

The impact on urinary function is just as clear. At 12 months after RP, 62% of men had a meaningful decline in urinary control (i.e. incontinence), with the proportions higher for the localised high risk (66%) and the locally advanced (65%) disease groups. Deteriorations were greater in older men, with 73% of those aged over 80 affected, compared to 58% of men under 60 years. Analysis of the single question item on incontinence pad use demonstrates the scale of this change. More than 40% (16,901/38,775) of men who never used pads before RP were using at least one per day one year their surgery.

Why this is important

More than a physical side effect - Urinary incontinence and sexual dysfunction following RP are often brushed off as side effects but that label understates the profound impact they can have on men’s lives.

Partners are affected too - Urinary and sexual dysfunction following RP affect both men and their partners, with consequences that extend beyond physical symptoms to psychological and social functioning. The effects are often exacerbated because they occur concurrently and alongside other survivorship concerns such as fear of cancer recurrence (Tsikis et al., 2017).

The mental health impact - Survivorship can be a vulnerable time. Men treated with RP for localised prostate cancer are at higher risk of mental health problems than the general population and with men treated for other cancers (Ilie et al., 2019), and urinary and sexual dysfunction are major contributors. Men reporting moderate to severe urinary problems, have more than four times the odds of screening positive for mental distress compared with those with minimal symptoms (Ilie et al., 2020).

When incontinence shapes everyday life - Incontinence isn’t just about bladder control, it reshapes daily choices. It is associated with reduced participation in social activities, driven by embarrassment, negative self-perception and the practical challenges of managing leakage while traveling or socialising. These can contribute to treatment regret, despair, and behaviours such as reducing fluid intake, that carry further health risks (Aysenur et al., 2024).

Sexual recovery is personal and complex - Sexual recovery after prostate surgery is often talked about in clinical terms but for many men, it’s emotional long before it’s physical. Sexual function and satisfaction after RP reflect a complex interplay of psychosocial factors including perceptions loss of masculinity that can be independently impacted by cancer diagnosis and treatment, as well post-operative complications such as erectile and orgasmic dysfunction (Zaider et al., 2012; Shiraishi, 2023).

Why listening matters

As the most diagnosed cancer among men, prostate cancer and its treatments contribute to a significant long-term societal and psychosocial burden. The value of the Prostate Cancer Insights report is that it articulates what changes men experience after RP beyond cancer control. It provides important evidence on quality-of-life outcomes impacting large numbers of men, their partners, and communities. It highlights the need for informed, patient-centred consultations that monitor, address, and manage postoperative changes such as urinary and sexual dysfunction. Recognising age-specific priorities is essential for tailoring discussions and ensuring care aligns with what matters to the individual.

In Germany, the collection of EPIC-26 functional outcome data is a requirement for prostate cancer centre certification, and results are fed back to centres through annual benchmarked reports. Certification also requires centres to work within a multidisciplinary structure that includes social workers and psycho-oncologists, embedding survivorship support as standard. Building on this, a recommendation from the certification commission’s Reduce Working Group led to the introduction, in 2024, of quality indicators addressing the overtreatment of low-risk disease, with the aim of reducing unnecessary surgery and the avoidable sexual and urinary impairment that can follow. In using its own outcome data to reshape certification and reduce avoidable functional harm, Germany is taking a proactive, data-driven approach to men’s survivorship that other healthcare systems may increasingly be asked to follow.

Movember is committed to improving the lives of men with prostate cancer by investing in programs that focus on what truly matters to them, an approach reflected in its investment in the TNGR and the creation of this report. This commitment extends beyond clinical registries. Movember’s Clinical Guidelines for Sexual Health and Prostate Cancer are a key example of how the organisation is acting globally to address these priorities. Designed for patients, partners, and healthcare providers, these guidelines explain how prostate cancer treatments can affect sexual health and relationships, and offer strategies to support survivors’ physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. By addressing these often-overlooked aspects of survivorship, Movember is helping ensure men not only survive prostate cancer but also live well after treatment.

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We set out to answer that. In a new paper, our team at the Movember Institute of Men’s Health reviewed 65 masculinity measurement scales spanning fifty years of research. These are the tools scholars use to study masculinity and its connection to health and wellbeing. We assessed every measure across five dimensions: approach, relational focus, cultural attunement, sample diversity, and psychometric foundations. See the table below for an overview of the results.

What do the findings tell us?

The findings paint a clear picture: the field has been extraordinarily productive, but also remarkably narrow.

The dominant approach in masculinity research works roughly like this: present survey respondents with statements reflecting traditional or restrictive masculine norms, measure how strongly they agree, and then test whether higher agreement predicts worse outcomes. This is called a “deficit-based” or “problematized” approach because the underlying hypothesis is that stronger adherence to these norms is associated with deficits - more harmful results. Seventy-eight percent of the measures we reviewed operate from this orientation.

We should say at the outset: a deficit-based approach is not a flaw. It reflects decades of well-founded theory and has generated some of the most important findings in men’s health research, establishing links between rigid masculine norm adherence and depression, reduced help-seeking, substance misuse, and a range of other outcomes we urgently need to understand. That body of work matters, much of it directly informs Movember’s advocacy, and it isn’t going anywhere.

The issue arises when a single approach accounts for nearly four in five tools across an entire field’s measurement landscape. At that point, we believe, it’s worth pausing to ask what we might be missing. Only 22% of the measures we reviewed, by contrast, took more of what we called a “strengths-based” approach, examining how masculine identity might also be a source of positives: purpose, connection, resilience, motivation to care for others, and more.

What’s clear is that within this smaller group of strengths-based tools, there is genuine theoretical diversity, with no dominant paradigm or shared vocabulary approaching the theoretical consensus that deficit-based tools have built over decades. This diversity comprises some of the most important open questions in the field, for instance:

• Some strengths-based measures aim to reconstruct masculinity: to identify attributes tied to masculine identity (responsibility, service, protecting others, providing for family) that may support wellbeing and prosocial behavior. This approach takes seriously the possibility that aspects of how men understand their role in the world can be sources of meaning and motivation, not only risk. But it also raises real questions. Are these traits truly specific to masculinity, or are they broadly valued human strengths that we’ve gendered unnecessarily?

• Some measures do the opposite, aiming to deconstruct traditional masculinity by measuring how much respondents reject restrictive gender norms. These tools are “strengths-based” insofar as they frame movement away from rigid expectations as a positive outcome.

• Other measures outside the “reconstruct vs. deconstruct” debate take approaches such as applying positive psychology principles to build on strengths tied to male identity, or measuring how men subjectively define masculinity for themselves. These are just two examples among several emerging directions for research.

What does this mean for how we engage men about their health?

This matters well beyond academia. If the only well-developed language for talking about masculinity and health is organized around risk and harm, that’s also the only language available for public campaigns, clinical work, and policy. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a lot of men hear those messages and disengage. Not because the research is wrong, but because it offers a clearer picture of what to move away from than what to move toward. That gap has real consequences for who we reach and who we lose.

The way masculinity is approached is the most consequential pattern we found, but it compounds with several others. The foundational scales the field has relied on for decades were overwhelmingly developed using small, homogeneous samples of white American undergraduates, with little attention to how culture, race, geography, or life stage shape the experience of masculinity.

Many scales offered respondents little clarity about what was actually being asked of them. When a man is asked to agree or disagree with a statement like “men should be tough,” it’s not always clear whether he should respond with his own personal opinion, something he’s observed in media or society, something he believes is popular with other men, or some mix of the above. This is what we refer to as relational focus; without attention to social context, researchers can’t always be sure what a given score actually means.

Where do we go from here?

These are not reasons to discard what’s been built. They are reasons to build alongside it, with greater precision, broader representation, and more attention to context. And these constraints apply equally to whatever comes next: a strengths-based measure built on the same narrow samples, with the same vague framing, would inherit the same limitations.

And let’s be clear: building strengths-based measurement tools is genuinely hard. It is not a matter of simply putting “don’t” in front of traditionally problematic ideas, or superficially rewording items in a positive direction. Capturing what’s working well in men’s lives and identities requires its own theory, its own careful thinking about what it looks like to thrive amid the realities men face today, without simply repackaging traditional ideals or pretending that gender norms are neutral. That intellectual work is still in its early stages, and it has to be done with real rigor and honesty.

At Movember, this review is the starting point for something we think this academic field, as well as the broader public conversation, urgently needs. That is why we are building our own new measurement tool designed to give men and the people who support them a clearer sense of what to move toward, not just away from. And alongside that, we’re studying the social terrain men are navigating, including the ways men often misread what the people around them actually expect. In our early stages, for example, we are finding that men often overestimate other men’s demand for toughness and underestimate their acceptance of openness and care.

The goal is not to replace the critical tradition that built this field. It’s to build what that tradition was never designed to provide: a clear picture of what it actually looks like when men are thriving. Not only the absence of harm, but also the presence of something worth moving toward. It means lifting up goals like connection, purpose, health, and the ability to navigate the real pressures of contemporary manhood without losing yourself or the people around you in the process. That’s what we’re trying to build.

We’ve spent fifty years measuring the costs of rigid masculinity. It’s time to get equally serious about measuring what thriving actually looks like.

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Sexual dysfunction remains a common and often distressing consequence of prostate cancer treatment, with significant implications for quality of life and survivorship. Research suggests that the psychosocial impact of treatment-related sexual dysfunction may differ across populations, highlighting the importance of culturally responsive approaches to sexual health care and support. Conversations between clinicians and patients about sexual health, treatment-related side effects, and recovery expectations are often inconsistent, delayed, or absent in routine prostate cancer care. This gap in holistic care can leave men and their partners without the information and support needed to navigate changes in sexual health and wellbeing.

Building the foundation for better sexual health

In November 2025, in collaboration with the Consortium on Disparities of Urologic Conditions, Movember U.S. convened clinicians (urologists, advanced practice providers, primary care clinicians), researchers, and community health partners, including Veterans Affairs) at Mt Ephraim Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia to examine whether a structured culturally-informed shared decision-making tool for Black men and their clinicians to discuss and manage sexual health in prostate cancer care would have clinical utility and be feasible to implement across diverse care settings in the United States. This work reflects an intentional, multistage approach to ensure that any future intervention is grounded in evidence, feasibility, and real-world clinical practice before broader development, implementation and scale.

The group tested the concept of a shared decision-making tool realistically supporting clinician-initiated conversations about sexual health for Black men undergoing prostate cancer evaluation and treatment, with explicit attention to equity, cultural relevance, and workflow integration. Discussion was guided by a health literacy framework and a commitment to deliver the right information, in the right way, at the right time, intentionally addressing known gaps in communication, comprehension, and timing that disproportionately affects Black men and other historically underserved populations.

Clinical utility

There was unanimous consensus amongst the group of experts that a sexual health focused shared decision-making tool is both feasible and needed in the United States context. Clinicians reported that patients frequently experience fear, uncertainty, and misinformation related to sexual function and treatment tradeoffs. These challenges are compounded by limited visit time, fragmented care pathways, and lack of standardized resources to support structured conversations.

Preferred formats and delivery

Participants emphasized that the clinical utility of a shared decision-making tool depends on flexibility and alignment with existing clinical workflows rather than reliance on a single static resource.

A hybrid, multi format approach was consistently identified as most appropriate. Recommended formats included a digital first platform with brief educational modules, printable materials supported by QR codes, and short conversation guides designed to support clinician-initiated discussions. Digital delivery was favored for its ability to support personalization, scalability, and continuity of care. Participants highlighted the value of tailoring educational content based on baseline sexual function, urinary symptoms, comorbidities, and psychosocial context.

Integration across the cancer continuum

Using the National Comprehensive Cancer Network cancer continuum framework, participants identified multiple integration points, including initial PSA elevation, post biopsy diagnosis, treatment decision making, and survivorship. The post diagnosis period was identified as the most critical decision-making window, although repeated engagement over time was viewed as essential for reinforcing understanding and supporting long term outcomes.

The shared decision-making tool was conceptualized as a living guide that supports patients and clinicians across the care journey rather than as a one-time intervention.

Core Content Domains

Consensus emerged around essential content areas:

1. Baseline assessments of sexual and urinary function

2. Validated mental health screening

3. Treatment options and associated side effects

4. Recovery and rehabilitation pathways

5. Balanced, evidence-based messaging that normalizes sexual health concerns and actively counters misinformation was emphasized throughout.

Participants noted that cultural relevance would be essential to successful implementation and emphasized the importance of ensuring that future resources are developed in ways that resonate with the experiences and needs of Black men affected by prostate cancer. Validated mental health screening was also identified as an important component of comprehensive sexual health care. Lifestyle factors, comorbidities, and partner involvement were also identified as important contextual elements shaping patient experience and decision making.

Equity and cultural and gender responsiveness

Equity considerations were central to the discussion. Participants emphasized that trust, representation, and cultural responsiveness are foundational to effective shared decision making, particularly in a United States context where Black men face both higher incidence and worse outcomes.

Recommendations included diverse narrator representation, patient choice in how information is delivered, and explicit attention to cultural, relational, gender and historical factors that shape engagement with sexual health conversations. Participants emphasized that trust and cultural relevance are critical to the success of any future resource.

Feasibility: Team-based care and workflow considerations

Participants consistently identified sexual health as an important but often under-addressed component of prostate cancer care and emphasized the need for practical solutions that could be integrated into routine clinical workflows.

Advanced practice providers were identified as key contributors to education, follow up, and continuity of care. Participants noted that tools delivered outside of the visit through patient portals, text messaging, or email could reduce time pressure, support documentation, and improve coordination between primary care, urology, and survivorship services.

Future integration with electronic medical records, including auto documentation, was identified as an important consideration for sustainability and quality reporting.

Looking ahead

This feasibility work establishes a strong foundation for continued development of a shared decision-making tool that will begin later this year. Building on insights from clinicians, Movember and ConDUC will work with research, clinical, and lived experience partners to better understand the sexual health needs, preferences, and priorities of Black men with prostate cancer and their partners. The next phase will include community engagement, key partner consultation, and co-design activities to inform the development and refinement of a culturally responsive shared decision-making resource. Input from men with lived experience, partners, clinicians, and community leaders will help shape the content, format, language, and delivery of the resource before usability testing and future implementation planning.

This measured, collaborative approach reflects a commitment to developing solutions that are evidence-informed, community-informed, and designed for real-world use, with the goal of improving communication, equity, and quality of life outcomes for men navigating prostate cancer in the United States.

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Perception gaps are the hidden force shaping men’s health

When people privately hold a view but mistakenly assume most others don’t — a phenomenon researchers call ‘pluralistic ignorance’ — they are less likely to act on it publicly. Research suggests that men’s perceptions of what other men do can be a stronger predictor of their behavior than what they personally believe, making these misperceptions not just academically interesting, but behaviorally consequential.

An example that brings this to life comes from a recent Norwegian study where researchers asked 2,042 adults about their views on seeking help for depression. Men significantly underestimated how willing other men would be to seek professional help for depression, even though many of those same men said they would be willing themselves. Critically, they found that a man’s willingness to seek help tracked closely with what he thought other men would do. A separate study of nearly 5,000 undergraduates at Stanford University found a similar pattern around social connection: students perceived their peers as around 24% less empathic than peers reported themselves to be, and those individuals with larger perception gaps were more likely to feel lonely over time. When researchers corrected the misperception, by showing students accurate data about their peers’ empathy and social values, students engaged significantly more in behaviors like sharing vulnerabilities and reaching out to strangers and reported more close friendships months later.

These studies span different countries, populations, and health domains but we think they point to the same underlying dynamic, one whose reach in men’s health may be far wider than we currently understand. Our own data from the Real Face of Men’s Health report with 4,126 men across the United States supports that possibility. We found that men overwhelmingly hold healthy attitudes: 95% support taking care of their health, 94% support seeking help for a mental health struggle, and two-thirds of men aged 18 to 44 are “very” or “extremely” interested in more close friendships. Yet those same men consistently underestimate how widely other men share these same views assuming far less support for help-seeking and close friendships amongst their peers than actually exists; a pattern that extends to other areas of men’s health including emotional expression and body positivity (see Figure below).

Performing for an audience that doesn’t exist

If most men privately hold healthy attitudes, how does such a widespread misperception take hold? Our research sets out to understand these forces more completely, but we already know that at least three key factors may be at play:

• We misread each other’s silence. When a man puts on a brave face and pushes through a difficult period, he knows his own performance is exactly that, a performance. But when he sees other men doing the same, he may take it at face value, reading their stoicism as real indifference rather than the same front he himself is putting on. And with evidence that men may be less willing than women to disclose their help-seeking to friends and colleagues, the reality may never enter the picture. What results is what researchers call a “spiral of silence“: false norms become entrenched because the people who privately disagree with them never say so.

• We fear judgment or stigma. Research on precarious manhood shows manhood is widely experienced as a status that must be constantly earned and can be easily lost. This breeds hypervigilance. Men scan for the threat of judgement from others if they step outside perceived norms. When the cost of getting it wrong feels high, they default to conformity, even if they privately disagree. The fear isn’t irrational. But it may be calibrated to a norm that is not as prevalent as men think it is.

• We rely on faulty information sources. Men are forming their beliefs about what “most men” think and do using a variety of sources, with some of the most visible sources like social media, TV and movies, often dramatically overrepresenting a narrow and extreme version of masculinity. Our Young Men’s Health in a Digital World report found that 63% of the 3,048 young men aged 16-25 we surveyed across the US, UK, and Australia regularly consume masculinity influencer content, spaces often pushing rigid narratives of masculinity: get rich, get ripped, practice extreme self-reliance, and restrict your emotions. When algorithms present a version of masculinity based on the most extreme and engaging content, they risk actively manufacturing perception gaps, making fringe views feel mainstream and healthy attitudes feel like the exception.

These forces reinforce one another. Silence biases the available information. Fear discourages breaking the silence. And digital environments amplify the most distorted signals. The result: men may privately hold healthy attitudes but remain reluctant to act on them, because they think they are out of step with everyone around them.

The mission: close the gaps

Here at Movember, we are launching what we believe to be the most comprehensive study of perception gaps in men’s health to date. Our research program will span the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, with the goal of finding out where perception gaps are largest across men’s health, who is most affected, and whether closing them can make a meaningful difference to men’s health.

We know perception gaps are not the whole story. Men also face real structural barriers: health systems that were not designed around how men engage, services that are hard to access, the financial pressure of taking time off, racism, isolation, and stigma that doesn’t live only in their heads. We are not arguing that perception gaps explain men’s health on their own. We are arguing they are an underexamined and movable lever sitting alongside the harder structural work that must continue.

Real attitudinal differences exist too. There are men who hold unhealthy views, and online they are often the loudest. Closing the perception gap doesn’t mean pretending otherwise. It means refusing to let the loudest define what most men actually think. That’s why Movember launched the Confession Box and, most recently alongside Equimundo, the Young Men and Media Collective, to create spaces for men to share real experiences and worries openly and to build healthier signals into the same information environment, on the same platforms, in the same algorithmic feeds.

It is time to tell a new story

For decades, we have treated men’s individual attitudes as the primary target for programs and campaigns, assuming that if we could change what men believe, their behavior would follow. But, if the key lever is not what men personally believe, but what they think their peers believe, then we might have been missing a critical piece of the puzzle all along. Understanding how to correct these misperceptions may hold the key to improving men’s health outcomes globally, shifting how we design campaigns, allocate resources, and equip practitioners with tools and messaging that actually move behavior.

In short, it is time to tell a new story. One that is grounded in what men themselves believe and one that takes seriously the social worlds and expectations they navigate. The task, then, is not to change what men believe. It is to help them see that other men believe it too, and to create conditions where they feel able to act on it.

Most men already care. We just have to help them see it in each other.

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This shift was no accident. The release of the Movember Institute’s Canadian report The Real Face of Men’s Health in June 2025, along with sustained advocacy, shone a bright light on the importance of men’s health.

By November 2025, for the first time, a federal Health Minister publicly committed to putting men and boys on the agenda. By December 2025, the federal government committed to delivering a national strategy by the end of 2026. And by February 2026, a multi-stage consultation process was underway to figure out what that strategy should actually look like.

Which brings us to now. The part where what gets said, and what gets surfaced, has a real shot at shaping what comes next.

Movember in Listening Mo’de

Our role in this process is straightforward: listen, convene, and relay. We are here to make sure the voices of Canada’s men’s health sector are heard by government, faithfully and in full.

So far, we’ve hosted convenings in Sherbrooke, Vancouver, and Toronto, bringing together practitioners, researchers, community leaders, and people with lived experience. The mood in each of these sessions was positive, collaborative, and hopeful. There was a palpable feeling that change is upon us.

Across all three convenings, some clear and consistent themes have emerged. The same signals, showing up again and again.

This is what we’ve heard so far:

Rethinking the system

Perhaps the most consistent thread across every convening was this: men’s poor engagement with health care is not simply a matter of attitude or stigma. While many important conversations in recent decades have rightly focused on longstanding inequities experienced by women within health systems, participants across these convenings noted that many men and boys continue to struggle to engage with systems that often do not reflect how they seek support, communicate distress, or access care.

As one Vancouver participant put it:

“The system currently demands boys and men fit to it, when the system should really fit to boys and men.”

Participants also consistently pointed to fragmentation across systems, where supports do exist, but are difficult to navigate, poorly coordinated, or disconnected from how men actually seek help. As a result, many men are left to navigate complexity on their own.

In Toronto, the same frustration surfaced in different language. The health system, participants said, is built for crisis, not prevention. Funding flows downstream to acute care, while upstream interventions that could stop problems before they escalate remain chronically underfunded. Ultimately, this leaves community organisations and volunteers carrying a significant amount of the load, often without the long-term support needed to sustain that work.

Where the gaps are most urgent

Across the convenings, participants pointed to a cluster of priority areas where the need is greatest and the current response most inadequate: mental health supports for young men; social isolation and loneliness; gambling addiction; and opioid dependency, particularly in male-dominated industries.

These issues were rarely discussed in isolation: participants emphasized how mental health, addiction, isolation, and trauma reinforce one another over time.

The opioid crisis drew particular attention in Toronto, where we heard that since 2016, three in four opioid deaths have been men, and that in Ontario alone, one in thirteen opioid deaths involve a construction worker.

Participants also repeatedly pointed to key life transitions: from adolescence to fatherhood to job loss and retirement, as predictable moments where the right intervention can change long-term outcomes. In other words, we know when to intervene. We just don’t always do it. Fatherhood, in particular, was identified as a significant and underutilised window of opportunity, often the first moment in a man’s life when he is motivated to engage with health and wellbeing, for reasons beyond himself.

In Vancouver, participants emphasised the disproportionate impact on Indigenous and rural communities, where all of these pressures are amplified, and where the ongoing legacy of colonialism remains a central barrier to engagement with care. The online environment and its impact on young men’s mental health and sense of identity was also raised as an urgent and under-addressed issue, alongside broader concerns around digital harms, gambling, and emerging technologies.

What the sector is asking of government

The ask from participants was not abstract. If anything, the message was strikingly consistent. We know what needs to be done. The question is whether it will be acted on.

• Fund what actually works. Across the convenings, there were clear and practical calls to invest in peer support and community-based prevention programs. There was also a consistent call for sustained, predictable funding, particularly for community-based organisations, to move beyond short-term pilots and toward long-term impact. Many effective models already exist. They simply are not reaching enough people. Movember’s recently launched Community Men’s Health Research Program is one example of the kind of community-grounded investment participants repeatedly pointed to: practical, prevention-focused work designed to better understand what helps men and boys engage earlier and more effectively with support systems.

• Set the direction, then follow through. Participants were clear that the federal role is not to deliver services directly, but to set direction, coordinate across systems, and help scale what is already working. Even where services exist, they are often difficult to find or access, requiring a level of navigation that many people simply don’t have, especially when they need it most.

• Count it, or it doesn’t count. Participants called for improved collection and disaggregation of data on men’s health, alongside stronger accountability measures built into any strategy from the outset. As Toronto participants were direct in saying: “We don’t have a knowledge gap, we have an implementation gap.”

• Change the story, change the outcome. There was a strong call for language and messaging that reflects men’s strengths, not just their deficits. As one Vancouver participant put it: “Men aren’t the problem. We’re an asset.” Participants emphasised the importance of meeting men where they are, including through trusted, everyday connectors like peers, coaches, and community leaders.

• Don’t let this sit on a shelf. A National Men’s Health Advisory Council, properly funded and meeting regularly, was proposed as a practical governance step to ensure the strategy has teeth beyond its launch.

What’s next

Public submissions remain open until June 1. If you have a view on what a National Strategy for Men and Boys’ Health should look like, now is the time to share it.

Time to show up and do some good.

We would like to thank the incredible partners who have helped make these three convenings possible, in particular: François Poirier (Regroupement provincial en santé et bien-être des hommes), Audrey Brassard, l’Université de Sherbrooke, Dr. John Oliffe (UBC’s Men’s Health Research Program), Nina Gao, the University of British Columbia, the Movember Canada Team, and Enterprise Canada.

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I’ve spent time in corners of the internet most women have never heard of: 4chan, Discord, Odyssey, Rumble. Not as a regulator or a judge, but as a researcher at the Movember Institute, trying to answer one of the most important questions of our time: What do young men’s digital worlds actually look like, what are they doing to the boys and men who inhabit them, and what spills out to the world around them?

To answer those, I walked in the shoes of a young man online - to see what he sees, scroll what he scrolls: So for the last two years I’ve had two TikTok accounts.

Mine - Krista, early thirties, Australian, female. And “Liam” - seventeen, American, male. Built for my research. The contrast between these feeds was disorienting.

Krista’s feed: Anne Hathaway’s ‘ageless face.’ The latest six-star BookTok recommendation. High-protein recipes and #WIEIAD videos.

Liam’s feed: a new ‘research laboratory’ selling Retatrutide. Dating tips to escape the ‘friend zone.’ BDSM scenes from Euphoria. NBA highlights from Luka Dončić’s sixty-point game.

Switching between Krista and Liam’s for-you-pages was like crossing a chasm between parallel digital universes that rarely touch. Different messages. Different pressures. Different ideas about identity, gender roles, relationships, body image - all delivered through hyper-personalised algorithms that learn and weaponise our vulnerabilities the minute we enter our gender, age and interests.

But Liam’s account only showed part of the story. A dummy account misses everything that shapes a young man’s online experiences; his viewing history, his sense of self, his ideas about what it means to be a man.

So our team went further. We analysed the real TikTok viewing histories of 142 young men across Australia, the US and the UK. What was most shocking wasn’t the extreme content (1% of the 2,000 videos), or covert misogyny and rigid stereotypes of masculinity (5%), it was the everyday stuff - sports, gaming, fashion (38% of videos). Ordinary game-day highlights sitting at the start of a pipeline of identifying ideological and health messages. The cultural packaging through which harmful messages become palatable, pulling young men in faster, darker tides without them realising, because they’re still swimming in the same cultural waters.

This is what we’re getting wrong about the manosphere. It’s not a binary thing. It’s not one ideology, made up of one type of man. It’s a broad spectrum and young men are not simply in or out of it.

Watching these videos I had the privilege of perspective, of objectivity, of distance. But it turns out even for me, immersion in the manosphere leaves a mark.

Some days I’d be watching participants’ videos and thirty minutes would pass without me noticing. I was scrolling without knowing what I was looking for. Some of this content was genuinely engaging. Motivating, even aspirational. I could imagine with uncomfortable clarity what it would feel like to be a young man - anxious, insecure, inexperienced. The promise of ‘levelling up,’ the products and people that claim to have all the answers, to make you richer, more attractive, more in control: I could see how compelling these promises would be when you’re growing up in a world offering very few certainties.

One afternoon I landed on a looksmaxxing subreddit with 300,000 members. A sixteen-year-old had posted a photo of himself requesting an ‘honest’ rating on his physical appearance - a score out of ten with advice on how to improve.

Ninety-four comments. Scores of one to three. “Face symmetry average.” “Eyes too far apart.” “If you lost weight you’d be okay.” “Lefort 3 or rope” [craniofacial surgery or suicide].

I felt physically sick. The commenters had forgotten there was a human being at the other end, someone whose self-worth, and mental health, hinged on the numbers they typed back. The anonymity of these forums creates environments that feed off, and fuel shame, where boys can be both victims and perpetrators of harm in plain sight, while trusted adults in their lives (parents, caregivers, teachers, siblings) have no idea it’s happening.

Moments like this gave me two things simultaneously: genuine empathy for young men drawn to this content and these communities, and genuine concern about what it’s doing to them and those around them. These two things are complementary, not contradictory.

My immersion in the manosphere did not stay digital. Content circulates and becomes conversation. Conversation circulates and becomes culture.

I started seeing it happen in real time; at dinner tables, at bars on the weekend, at sporting events. Conversations that started with “I saw this thing online…” and ended with claims I recognised immediately: The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial repackaged as proof of widespread false domestic violence accusations. Vaccine side effects “nobody was talking about.” The Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively case, reduced to memes before the facts were established. These viral trends were talked about with complete confidence, no mention of where this “evidence” came from. And why would they question it? They’d encountered these ideas through sources they trusted, podcasts they loved, creators they followed, repeated so many times it had started to feel like common knowledge.

That’s the thing about algorithmic echo-chambers. They don’t just shape what we believe. They shape what we think is worth questioning. With no friction, no counter-perspective, no outside voice challenging what’s being served, ideas calcify into certainty. Over time these silos reinforce and deepen existing power structures with real consequences; for women, for gender and sexually diverse people, for anyone who sits beneath men in the patriarchal hierarchies deeply entrenched in Western societies. Hierarchies that existed long before TikTok, but that algorithms now industrialise.

I did not need two years of research to know these hierarchies exist. I feel them viscerally, in the way I move through the world, in the calculations I make every day, in the risks I weigh before I take them. But the research gave me a strange double vantage point: I saw the aspirational pull of messages that uphold these hierarchies in the data, while navigating life as a young woman within them.

I’ve also come to understand that uncertainty, insecurity and vulnerability can exist alongside problematic attitudes in young men: One does not excuse the other. Young men who cause harm must be held accountable, and the attitudes that drive that harm must be dismantled. Girls and women deserve protection.

But compassionate accountability is where long-term, preventative change will happen.

Reactive and punitive responses alone aren’t enough - we can’t just wait for harm to actualise before we intervene. We must ensure young men have the community and tools to interrogate what they’re seeing online, support that pulls them out rather than pushes them further toward content causing harm, and platform accountability for the digital environments they’re building and profiting from.

People often ask whether two years in the manosphere has made me more nihilistic, more suspicious, more guarded.

The answer is the opposite.

I’ve come away more empathetic, more committed, and with a much clearer picture of what we need to build. The digital worlds young men like “Liam” inhabit are reshaping how they see themselves, their relationships and the world around them. We can’t just respond to harm when it surfaces. Instead, we need to build digital worlds worth protecting.

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“...nothing but baby appointments, size, weight, all the milestones, doctors, midwives, people coming and going with the focus being the baby… but no one ever asked about me. I worry about my wife and her coping, while still going to work and managing a household.”

Our new report, More Than a Provider, explores the experiences of 1,216 Australian fathers with a child under 10 years of age. Our findings highlight key opportunities to better support men’s mental health during early fatherhood. Our research at The Movember Institute has consistently supported the notion that healthier men means a healthier world, and our findings here are no exception. Support for new fathers should never come at the expense of support for mothers and children. Rather, there is clear value in adding targeted efforts to im

prove the health of new fathers as a critical component of whole-of-family support. This report is among the first large-scale, nationally representative surveys in Australia to inject critical data into conversations about identity, health, and health service experience among new fathers. Here’s what we found.

Next-gen dads, old-gen norms

Our findings highlight an important tension between modern-day expectations about fathers’ emotional presence, and age-old models of detached, provider-only fatherhood. More than two in three fathers reported being more involved in the day-to-day care of their children than their own fathers were, and almost three in four (74%) said they tell their kids “I love you” more than their father said it to them. For many, becoming a father may have prompted a reckoning with inherited models of fatherhood, such that men in some cases purposely took a different paternal path.

“I’m constantly thinking about how I was raised and making sure I don’t make the same mistakes.”

Most of the fathers we surveyed reported experiencing profound learning and growth upon becoming a father (see Figure 1). The majority valued their role as a dad more than success in their career, echoing findings from previous surveys of Australian fathers. While emotional involvement and financial provision may have been historically constructed as mutually exclusive, the fathers of today may be increasingly trying to blur these boundaries in ways that are ultimately beneficial for their health, and the health of their families in turn. Combined with global data published previously, it appears the motivation for emotional involvement may be increasingly felt by fathers worldwide.

Health impacts among new fathers

While the transition to fatherhood may have brought meaning and growth, this did not come without cost. We asked fathers to reflect on their physical and mental health in the first year of fatherhood. One in four rated these as only ‘poor’ or ‘fair’ in the first year of fatherhood.

Parenting young children clearly demands a reorganisation of priorities that can lead to inevitable health consequences, and our findings highlight key factors impacting the mental health of fathers. Chronic sleep deprivation was the most commonly cited factor affecting physical health (noted by 45% of fathers), alongside abandoned exercise (30%) and poor diet (22%). For mental health, anxiety about failure (33%), relationship strain (17%), and financial stress (12%) were also noted for their role in compounding mental health consequences.

When looking into subgroup vulnerabilities, fathers under financial strain reported faring far worse on indices of health in early fatherhood, echoing the academic literature. Fathers who said they were ‘just getting by’ or ‘finding it difficult’ financially, were over six times more likely to report poor physical health, and over five times more likely to report poor mental health in the first 12 months of fatherhood relative to those ‘living comfortably’. The increased risk among fathers under financial strain was also observed regardless of fathers’ age, education level, or other demographics.

Over 70% of surveyed fathers also reported that they were the main financial providers for their families. Financial strain and increased pressure to provide for a growing family may for some men form a vicious cycle of compounding pressure with inevitable consequences for mental and physical heath. For many fathers, increasing social isolation also added to the mix of stressors, highlighting a clear need for father-focused support. Nationally representative Australian data suggest that among men aged 35-44, 17% experience loneliness, and 22% report social isolation. We found that almost one in five fathers said they felt more isolated or lonely since becoming a father. Taken together, the transition to fatherhood may exacerbate disconnection among men already isolated, likely compounding the impacts of physical and/or mental health challenges.

“I am parenting without a village... There’s little social support for dads. We are just expected to push on, no matter how vulnerable we are.”

A health system that needs to catch up

Our findings paint a clear picture of stress and strain among new fathers. Yet we also found that the vast majority reported clear motivation for health-related behaviour change specifically because of their role as a father. Almost half (44%) of fathers said they had a health check-up since becoming a dad that they might otherwise have skipped. More than three in four agreed that fatherhood had highlighted how important it was to look after both their physical (77%) and mental health (78%). Over 60% of dads identified that when they’re struggling emotionally, they notice the impact this can have for their partners and children, a finding that also fits with what we know about correlations between maternal and paternal depression in the perinatal period.

Fathers aren’t disengaged from their own health. They’re motivated, often more so than at any other point in their lives. The perinatal period therefore represents a point of rare convergence of capability, openness, and motivation to change. Yet it appears the health system as it stands may currently lack the training or resources to implement the targeted support for fathers that is needed. Three in five fathers (59%) said no health professional asked about their mental health or how they were coping at any point during their partner’s pregnancy, or in the 12 months following the birth of their first child. Fathers under financial strain were also twice as likely to say no one asked them about their mental health at any point compared to those living comfortably, signalling a clear need for targeted support among at-risk fathers.

Figure 2 also presents fathers’ reflections on the extent to which health professionals engaged them in the perinatal period. This paints a picture of opportunity. Most fathers felt they were involved in the basics, yet when it comes to screening for mental health challenges, clear windows of opportunity are going unaddressed.

Our Real Face of Men’s Health Australia report also found that satisfaction with healthcare experiences is linked to increased likelihood of help-seeking in future. Given the perinatal period may for many men represent their first experience of sustained health service contact, there is a clear opportunity to leverage men’s motivation for self-betterment to establish ongoing and proactive health behaviours in the perinatal period and beyond.

What needs to change

The findings from More Than a Provider point clearly to three areas where action is needed.

• First, we need routine mental health screening of new fathers. Perinatal care settings are one of the rare points in a man’s life where he is consistently present in the health system. This is the moment to ask how he’s doing, in addition to how mum/partner and baby are faring. Screening should cast a wide net, including assessment of financial strain and relationship problems, not only clinical symptoms.

• Second, we need a workforce equipped to engage dads. Lack of training or confidence to check in with new fathers is a common barrier among health practitioners. That has to change. Movember’s Men in Mind training has demonstrated efficacy in improving mental health practitioners’ ability to engage and respond to men, and there’s a real opportunity to extend this to the perinatal workforce.

• Third, we need community programs to address isolation in new fathers. Peer support is a powerful vehicle. It reduces isolation, normalises help-seeking, and gives dads a space to learn alongside one another. There are programs already doing this well in Australia; Tuning into Kids, Healthy Youngsters Healthy Dads, Dads Group and others, and there’s a clear case for funding and scaling them.

The opportunity we can’t afford to miss

Australian fathers appear to be more involved, more emotionally expressive, and more motivated to look after their health than generations before. They’re also, too often, slipping through cracks in our support systems.

Fatherhood is an unmatched window of opportunity to support men. It reorients a man’s sense of purpose, instils an openness to health-related behaviour change, and brings him into contact with the health system in ways that rarely happen otherwise. What we do with that window matters; not only for the men themselves, but also for their partners and their children.

More Than a Provider report

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Our Movember moustache community welcomed this milestone, having long advocated for a greater focus on men’s health alongside others across the sector and knowing these priorities are critical. Today, three in five men die from largely preventable diseases, and three in four suicides are men.

But strategies alone don’t change outcomes. The real challenge lies in translating these commitments from paper into practice.

So, we got to work. Since the launch of the Strategy, we’ve shifted our focus to turn ambition into action, shaping new opportunities to contribute to the change that’s needed. Today, we’re thrilled to announce two new funding portfolios designed to do exactly that.

Introducing our new Men’s Health Community Fund and partnership

First off the rank is the new Men’s Health Community Fund, a joint partnership with the Department for Health and Social Care and the People’s Health Trust, providing £6.3 million to support community-led interventions over the next three years.

Bringing together Government and the voluntary sector, this is the first partnership of its kind for men’s health in the UK. Movember’s commitment of £3 million effectively doubles the Government’s initial investment.

Launching this summer, the Fund will trial and scale approaches to improving men’s health within communities, particularly for those least likely to engage with traditional services. In doing so, it will help advance the ambitions of the 10-year health plan to strengthen neighbourhood health and prevention.

Community men’s health research programme

Alongside this Fund, Movember is launching a complementary, multi-million-pound global Community Men’s Health Research Programme, with further UK investment to be announced in April 2026.

This programme will generate robust, practice-based evidence on what works to improve boys’ and young men’s health, strengthening the overall ecosystem by connecting community delivery with research, learning, and policy influence.

While the two investments are distinct, together they represent a more joined-up approach: supporting action in communities while building the evidence needed to scale it.

Why investing in communities matters

Movember has a long history of supporting community-based organisations across six countries. We do this because we know that men and young men experiencing deprivation, exclusion, and multiple structural barriers face significantly poorer health outcomes. These inequalities are driven by a range of social determinants, including social isolation, insecure or low-quality work, financial stress, and low health literacy.

Behind these outcomes, many men also experience low trust in services, consistently lower engagement with statutory health systems, and limited opportunities to safely express vulnerability.

At the same time, community organisations across the country are already doing what formal services often struggle to do: reaching men, building trust, and keeping them connected. We’ve seen this first-hand through partnerships with organisations supported through our previous grant programmes, including Men’s Pie Clubs, Brothers Through Boxing, Chai in the City, and The Changing Room.

Initiatives like these intentionally create spaces where relationships are valued, where shared experiences build connection and courage, and where conversations that might feel impossible alone become possible together.

This is relational infrastructure in action: spaces where men don’t have to perform, where connection comes first, and where support is more likely to stick. This is especially important in the context of men’s health, where social norms around masculinity, previous negative experiences with services, and low confidence in navigating health systems can all contribute to delayed help-seeking and lower uptake of preventive and early-intervention support.

By investing in community-led initiatives like these, men are more able to engage, open up, and support one another, showing us that communities are not just a way of reaching people, but a protective factor in their own right.

Building the evidence on what works

In addition, in supporting community organisations, our new funding portfolios will also prioritise evidence building research. We will do this because we know that practice-based knowledge on community-led models for prevention is too often fragmented, under-evidenced and rarely translated into policy, commissioning or system design. There is limited understanding of what works, for whom, in what contexts, and which delivery models are scalable and transferable.

Without structured learning and evaluation, public investment risks funding activity without building a credible evidence base that can inform commissioning, strengthen prevention pathways, and reduce health inequalities at scale.

What makes this different

Through our investments, our ambition is to not only support community-led models but learn from them; not just enable delivery but strengthen the networks that sustain it. Not only generate insights but build the evidence needed to drive a more equitable and effective health system, and not only in England but across the UK, where we are championing devolved nations to consider their approach to men’s health both in health systems and the community.

Real communities doing real work. We’re backing it and we’re learning from it.

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Louise Theroux’s newly released documentary “Inside the Manosphere” gives us an inside peak at some of the content young men have been navigating and consuming for quite some time. Whether that be uncovering the range of “get rich quick” trading and investment schemes peddled by these influences to their young audiences (which just so happen to line the influencer’s pockets) or the deeply misogynistic and highly dangerous ideologies visible throughout these spaces, such as the assertion that men should be a “dictator” in their romantic relationships (because men know what women want... more so than women do). We know that some male viewers are taking in and internalising these ideas, an outcome poignantly displayed by Theroux’s conversation with a young fan, who between regurgitated ‘manosphere’ tag lines including: “as a man, nobody is going to give you a hand out” and that he doesn’t “believe in depression”, tragically discloses his own experiences of homelessness and his brother’s suicide.

It’s easy to see isolated video examples as a direct reflection of young men’s values, beliefs and behaviours. But the reality is more grey. Young men’s online worlds are curated by a cacophony of voices and a spectrum of men and masculinity-oriented content, purposefully curated to keep them scrolling for longer and more often.

Across three countries (US, UK and Australia), our Young Men’s Health in a Digital World research report from the Movember Institute of Men’s Health found that 63% of young men aged 16-25 are regularly consuming masculinity influencer content. But here’s what’s truly striking: these same young men have heightened optimism about their futures and are experiencing higher rates of psychological ​​distress, compared to their peers who don’t engage with this content.

This paradox of optimism about their future despite heightened levels of psychological distress, reveals something profound about what's happening to young men today, and why traditional approaches to helping them have fallen so drastically short.

The certainty industrial complex

To understand the paradox, we need to look more closely at the appeal of masculinity influencers. Part of why these influencers are so successful is because they are tapping into something psychologists call an “intolerance of uncertainty“, the tendency to find ambiguous situations distressing and threatening. For adolescents, who are still developing the capacity to manage complex emotions and situations, this intolerance peaks precisely when life becomes most uncertain (i.e., adolescence). During this period of life, young men are asking important existential questions about who they are and who they want to be.

Intolerance of uncertainty is a core component of anxiety. Anxiety disorders affect roughly one in five men globally (113 million males), making them the most common mental health condition experienced by men. Young males aged 10–24 years constitute 12% of the global anxiety prevalence (5.48 million). Symptoms of anxiety typically emerge during turbulent adolescent years when uncertainty feels most overwhelming.

While girls’ anxiety often manifests as internalised distress, we know from our own work that boys are more likely to seek external sources of control and certainty. Enter masculinity influencers, who have built a career and livelihood around providing exactly that. Some may have well-meaning objectives of sharing their own lived experiences for mutual gain, others are just grifters, but all are operating in an online system that weaponises young men’s attention.

The three pillars of influence

From our research analysing thousands of hours of masculinity influencer content, we propose three key but overlapping archetypes of masculine influence:

• The Alpha Prophets: This content positions masculinity influencers as apex males who’ve “cracked the code” of success, wealth, and women. Content is built on stark binaries - winner/loser, alpha/beta, high-value/low-value - that eliminate ambiguity. “There are only two types of men,” Tate frequently declares, “those who get what they want, and those who make excuses.”

• The Intellectual Authorities: Cloaking certainty in “scientific evidence” and weakly evidenced or largely disproven biological determinism. For example, Gad Saad draws on evolutionary psychology to explain intimacy, relationships and gender dynamics in numerous books and podcasts. These influencers also offer expert explanations for complex social phenomena. Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” for example distils nuanced relationship/wellbeing issues and life challenges into a set of actionable rules with the aim of restoring order and meaning.

• The Transformation Gurus: Through advice on self-optimisation and entrepreneurship, these archetypes of masculinity propose that the right combination of routines, mindset shifts, investments and supplements will solve everything from social anxiety to romantic failures. Content is algorithmically optimized for engagement, with before/after transformations or success stories and testimonials cultivating aspiration and motivation amongst viewers. David Goggins is a prominent figure whose mental toughness, regimented fitness routine and inspiring life story serve as powerful drivers encouraging young male audiences to push beyond their limits.

Many young men are drawn to the confidence and assuredness that masculinity influencers project. So much so that young men all around the world are clocking up hours per day watching influencers’ content, and in some instances, even paying to access courses or join exclusive communities (e.g., personalised coaching, exclusive access to a like-minded online community).

Aspiring towards certain things you want, but do not have - be it a new car, a muscular physique, a girlfriend or relationship, can be incredibly gratifying. It inspires a sense of future-oriented momentum. Even before these goals are actualised, the direction ahead can seem clear-cut and straight forward.

But masculinity-oriented content creates borrowed confidence. Young men feel temporarily empowered by these rigid frameworks and the promises of success and happiness. But what happens when these frameworks don’t match the complexity of their real-life experiences? Or when young men don’t, or can’t, achieve the success they’ve been promised? When the bar for success is sky high, falling short can feel crushing. Often what catches young men isn’t self-acceptance and connection, but shame and self-blame.

Movember’s Young Men’s Lives in a Digital World study: When certainty backfires

Our study of 3,048 young men across the US, UK, and Australia reveals the hidden costs of this certainty economy. We uncovered the offline implications of young men’s online worlds, comparing those who regularly consumed masculinity influencer content with those who didn’t.

The results were paradoxical:

• Short-term gains: Young men watching masculinity influencers showed 16% higher scores on measures of future optimism. They reported more positive emotional benefits (58% were happy) from acting on masculinity influencers advice than negative (2% were unhappy).

• Long-term costs: The same group showed 7% higher rates of anxiety – 26% felt so nervous nothing could calm them down and were twice as likely to use performance-enhancing substances compared to non-engagers.

• The perfectionism trap: Perhaps most tellingly, these young men scored roughly 20% higher on rigid masculine measures of self-reliance and emotional restriction when compared to young men who aren’t watching masculinity influencers.

Beyond the binary: What actually works

Creating and supporting opportunities for young men to share their struggles is essential. Based on our research, here’s what a comprehensive response might look like:

1. Reframe uncertainty as normal. Rather than viewing ambiguity and uncertainty as weakness, we need to help young men see it as a normal part of adulthood. We need to shift online hyper-individualistic masculine narratives shaming men who don’t have it “figured out,” to a place where authentically sharing failure, fuckups and fragility become a foundation of masculine camaraderie. To do that effectively young men must have the skills and support to tolerate uncertainty and the visceral distress it may provoke. This means teaching and promoting skills like:

   • Awareness and Mindfulness (non-judgemental refocusing on the present moment)

   • Emotion regulation (recognising and managing anxious emotions and their precursors. to respond adaptively in the face of anger, shame or rejection)

   • Acceptance (embracing anxious feelings without judgement or avoidance)

2. Foster friendship and connection. We need systematic approaches to reach out and connect disconnected and lonely young men. When used for good, social media and online communities have tremendous opportunities to turn the tide of rising male loneliness and social isolation. For example, some studies have found that social media allowed young men in particular greater ability to express their vulnerability freely, explore their sexuality and connect with others. Finding “good male role models” isn’t enough, it’s about practical and tangible ways young men can practice friendship - offering and receiving support - and connect deeply and authentically in ways they can’t offline.

3. Address the platform problem We cannot ignore that these conversations are happening primarily on social media platforms optimised for engagement rather than truth or user wellbeing. This means:

   • Supporting and amplifying creators who model broader versions of masculinity. Movember and Equimundo, along with co-funding from the Oak Foundation, are convening the Young Men’s Media Collective to convene content creators and support projects that produce content that speaks to young men and disrupts harmful narratives.

   • Developing and promoting features that encourage intentional social media use (i.e., taking control of your algorithm, setting screen times, values-aligned content consumption)

   • Increasing media and algorithmic literacy to empower critical appraisal skills

   • Policy reform to ensure safety of children and young people online

Summary: The stakes couldn’t be higher

This isn’t just about helping individual young men, though that would be reason enough. How this generation comes to understand masculinity will shape important aspects of identity and behaviour, from personal relationships to political discourse to the future of gender equality itself.

We must learn from what masculinity influencers do well. And we must instead offer something better: certainty about values rather than answers, communities built on growth and connection rather than hierarchy and instant wealth, and strength that integrates rather than excludes vulnerability. We have the opportunity to raise a generation of young men who can thrive in moments of uncertainty and instability while helping others do the same.

The path forward isn’t about rejecting masculinity but reimagining what it means to be a man. We should encourage men to embrace and embody an ever-evolving set of values that provides guidance without demanding perfection, community without requiring conformity, and strength that includes the courage to say “I don’t know, but I’m willing to learn.” And young men can’t be left to figure it out alone. They need communities that can hold space for their struggles while helping them grow into the men our world needs them to become.

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Digital health is not new, but its expansion has accelerated rapidly. Globally, the shift is even more pronounced: the telehealth market is projected to grow from USD 123.26 billion in 2024 to USD 455.27 billion by 2030. But digital systems inherit the same gendered challenges already present in face-to-face care. Because digital care doesn’t land in a vacuum, it lands in a system that was already uneven.

The system we’re digitising

Traditionally, healthcare systems, particularly a universal, state-funded health system such as the NHS, have been founded on the premise that everyone should receive the same care. However, staff and patients do not exist outside the gender norms that shape society, and these norms filter into clinical practice.

Women have long been disadvantaged by male-centred research and diagnostic standards. Men also face gendered inequalities, including high dropout rates from therapy, difficulties forming strong clinical alliances, and a greater likelihood of later cancer diagnosis. Masculine norms around self-reliance and emotional restraint influence help-seeking. However, for men who overcome these pressures, gender norms show up too in the consultation room. Studies have shown that consultations can reproduce restrictive masculine norms - stoicism, minimising symptoms, avoiding emotional expression. Male GPs and male patients can slip into these patterns together without realising it.

Clinicians increasingly recognise the need for gender-responsive practice. Men report wanting authenticity, active listening and stereotype-free care, yet many clinicians feel underprepared, particularly in high-risk situations. Research shows clinicians are less willing to treat male suicidal patients, despite suicide being a leading cause of death for men and many who die having recent service contact. Men are not absent from the system. They are reaching it and too often slipping through the cracks.

Gender is a determinant of health. Systems that overlook how gender norms shape interactions, service design and training are not neutral, they are unresponsive. And these gaps become even more consequential as healthcare shifts towards digital-first models of care.

Digital care removes barriers - but it also narrows the relational window

Digital healthcare can genuinely reduce practical barriers for men: less time off work for appointments, fewer geographical constraints, and lower travel costs. Digital tools allow men to access care in ways that may feel less confrontational, less exposing, especially when it comes to issues like sexual and mental health. We have seen similar benefits in women’s health. The World Health Organization has noted that digital health interventions can improve access to services, enhance maternal health, provide essential information, and increase autonomy. At a system level, reducing face-to-face attendances can increase capacity and shorten waiting lists.

There is also a simple engagement principle: go to where men are. For men, that increasingly means online spaces. In November 2023, Grindr, the largest dating app for men who have sex with men, partnered with MPOWER in Ireland and the Equality Movement in Georgia to enable users to order free postal HIV testing kits directly through the app. Dating platforms are becoming public health actors, particularly in sexual health. This is pragmatic, responsive outreach that could further be applied to health literacy for men and boys.

All of this is promising.

Mental health apps are among the most common forms of telehealth. They offer psychoeducation, coping tools, mood tracking, and structured programmes that users can access independently. For some men, this self-directed format aligns with preferences for autonomy and problem-solving.

But there are limits.

Most digital mental health interventions are built as gender-neutral tools, and those that are marketed as “male-focused” are often surface-level and stereotype-driven rather than genuinely engaging with men’s help-seeking patterns or ways of expressing distress. Many assume emotional articulation and self-monitoring styles that do not always align with how men present. At the same time, these platforms compress what might be called the “relational window” - reducing opportunities for the interpersonal connection that research shows is critical for keeping men engaged in care.

Mental health does not sit in a vacuum. A wide range of social determinants, employment, housing, discrimination, education, social norms around masculinity, shape both distress and access to care. Yet many digital interventions operate at the individual level, placing responsibility for engagement largely on the man experiencing difficulties. Without parallel system-level reforms, digital tools risk individualising what are fundamentally structural issues.

It is also important to distinguish between different forms of telehealth. An app with no human interaction is very different from a remote video consultation with a clinician. Telehealth can expand access to real professionals, without travel or waiting rooms, and this relational dimension may matter enormously for men’s sustained engagement.

NHS leaders have acknowledged these complexities. Rachel Hope, Director of Digital Prevention Services at NHS England, has described ambitions for digital care that is “proactive, participatory and personalised”, transforming the NHS app from a front door into a companion. The intention is not merely transactional access, but relational continuity. What remains uncertain is whether these systems will be built with explicit gender-responsive principles.

Digital health risks re-enforcing inequalities

Men’s health is shaped long before they open an app or enter a consultation. If system change including the push towards digitalisation digital systems do not account for social context such as insecure employment, digital literacy gaps and cultural norms, they may widen rather than close inequalities.

The evidence base itself is narrow. Much of the research on digital mental health has focused on men in their 30s and 40s from higher-income Western countries. There has been far less attention to marginalised groups of men, including those experiencing poverty, racial discrimination, migration stress, or rural isolation.

Digital care can reduce barriers. It can expand reach. It can innovate.

But without attention to gender norms, relational care, and social determinants, it may simply digitise existing blind spots.

And if men are already struggling to be heard within in-person systems, the question becomes sharper: what happens when the relational window narrows further?

What would a “good” health system look like for men in a digital age?

Ok, so what would responsive health systems for men look like? Here is where the 5R Framework is essential. Crucially, the 5Rs are not about creating separate services for men. They are about fixing system failures that consistently disadvantage them - whether care is delivered face-to-face or through a screen. Here’s how they can be applied to digital health for men:

• Research: Use sex-disaggregated, intersectional data, including digital engagement data, to make men’s health inequalities visible and drive targeted improvement. Who registers, who clicks, who completes forms, who drops out after onboarding, who ignores automated prompts.

• Reach: Move from passive access to proactive engagement. Digital tools can extend reach, into workplaces, community settings, and online platforms, but only if they are designed intentionally. This could include embedding health check prompts within platforms men already use (e.g., occupational portals or community apps).

• Respond: Requires redesigning digital interfaces, triage systems and communication styles so they reflect how men express distress and seek help. That includes using shorter, clearer onboarding questions; language that validates both practical and emotional concerns; and triage models trained to recognise more male-coded expressions of distress, such as withdrawal, irritability or functional decline. It also means equipping clinicians with the skills to build rapport remotely, where men can find it even easier to minimise or hide symptoms.

• Retain: This means treating digital disengagement as a system signal rather than an individual failing. High dropout in apps or remote therapy should trigger redesign, not resignation. If someone abandons a mental health app after two weeks, the system should generate a personalised follow-up rather than silently logging disengagement. If test results go unread in the NHS app, or prescriptions are repeatedly uncollected, digital records could prompt proactive outreach from practices. Retention in digital health relies on intelligent recall systems that keep the relational thread intact.

• Relational: Ensure that digital systems do not erase the human dimension of care. Technology must support connection, not replace it. This involves offering choice of modality, ensuring warm handovers from digital triage to named clinicians, and enabling men to involve partners, peers or family within digital care journeys when appropriate.

The Movember Institute’s research programme is helping fill the evidence gaps that have long obscured men’s health, generating the first large-scale mapping of how men enter, move through, and disengage from primary care. We will also compare these patterns to women. Alongside this, Men in Mind provides the world’s first evidence-based training to help clinicians recognise male-pattern distress, build stronger therapeutic connection, and reduce premature dropout from mental health care.

Together, these initiatives show what becomes possible when we stop blaming men for disengagement and instead redesign systems, including digital systems, to meet them more effectively.

Because the question is not whether healthcare will become more digital. It will.

The question is whether it will also have the ability to reach, respond and retain men in ongoing care, to help them live healthier and longer.

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Esports are everywhere. Competitive video gaming has become a routine part of life for hundreds of millions of people around the world, particularly young people and young men. Alongside its rapid growth, concerns about mental health have grown just as quickly. Depending on who you ask, esports is either a powerful space for connection and skill development or a risky environment linked to stress, burnout, unhealthy gaming habits and problematic ways of relating.

These narratives are familiar. None feel fully satisfying.

That tension raises a simple question: what do we actually know about esports and mental health? The data shows us that two things can be true at once.

Why esports mental health is so hard to talk about

Public discussions about esports mental health often slip into a good-versus-bad framing. Esports is portrayed as either a solution to social isolation or a driver of psychological harm. These simplified narratives are tempting, but they don’t align with players’ lived experiences or the current state of the science.

Esports is not one thing. It includes different games, competitive levels, cultures, and motivations for play. Mental health is also dynamic, involving wellbeing, stress, coping, and vulnerability that change over time. When these systems interact, simple answers rarely hold.

This is precisely why evidence matters, and why we need to look at the field as a whole rather than cherry-picking individual studies, anecdotes or media coverage.

What our team set out to do

Before developing mental health guidelines for esports, we first needed to understand the full landscape of existing research. We recently published a review that mapped all available evidence on mental health and wellbeing in esports players.

This review represents the largest synthesis of esports mental health research to date. As a scoping review, we systematically mapped the landscape of existing research, identifying key themes, methods, populations, and gaps, to clarify what the evidence base can and cannot yet support.

What we know

Esports mental health research has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting broader interest from players, parents, educators, and industry stakeholders. The evidence consistently shows a mixed picture. Esports participation has been associated with positive outcomes such as social connection, skill development, and a sense of purpose. At the same time, studies also report links with stress, performance pressure, online harassment, sleep disruption, and symptoms of anxiety or burnout.

Importantly, wellbeing and distress often appear together. Esports players can experience high engagement, motivation, and enjoyment alongside psychological strain. Mental health in esports is not a simple trade-off, and it cannot be reduced to a single score or label.

What we don’t know, and why that matters

Despite this growing body of work, there are important limits to what the current evidence can tell us.

Most esports mental health studies are cross-sectional. In fact, more than 50% of the studies in our review captured only a single snapshot in time, rather than tracking changes in wellbeing over months or years. Fewer than 5% of studies tested interventions, meaning there is currently very limited evidence to guide what actually helps support esports players in practice.

Measurement is another major challenge. Across the 89 studies included in the review, researchers used more than 50 different mental health and wellbeing measures. While appropriate in isolation, this diversity means studies are often measuring related but not identical constructs, making it difficult to compare findings or draw clear, consistent conclusions across the field.

The result is a field rich in signals but short on coordination. We know enough to move beyond speculation, but not yet enough to rely on simple rules of thumb.

A note on men and boys

One striking feature of the literature is who is being studied. Across the research we reviewed, ~77% of participants were men (35,629 of 53,696 players). While this reflects participation patterns in competitive esports, most studies stop short of examining how gendered norms, including expectations around toughness, performance, and help-seeking, shape mental health outcomes in these spaces. This represents a missed opportunity in a field dominated by young men.

A growing literature points to men’s distress often being more likely to be externalised, showing up as anger, withdrawal, risk-taking, or antisocial behaviour. In online competitive environments, these signals can be overlooked, normalised, or dismissed as “just part of gaming culture”. This makes it even more important to approach esports mental health with nuance rather than assumptions.

Why guidelines, and what comes next

The evidence points to a clear conclusion: esports mental health cannot be addressed through simple bans, blanket restrictions, or unchecked optimism. The relationship between esports participation and mental health is complex and context-dependent, shaped by how people play, why they play, and the environments in which they play. A fragmented evidence base cannot be translated into action without coordination.

This is where mental health guidelines matter. Rather than reducing esports to questions of “more” or “less” play, guidelines would translate evidence into practical principles for designing and supporting esports environments across players, teams, organisations, and platforms.

This scoping review is the first step in Movember’s guideline development process. By mapping what is known and where the gaps remain, it lays the foundation for a broader co-design effort, including international focus groups with esports players and multiple rounds of structured research with mental health experts, practitioners and sector representatives. Together, these stages are designed to grapple with real-world complexity and identify how players can be better supported in practice.

Esports is neither a mental health villain nor a cure-all. Two things can be true. Recognising that complexity is the starting point for building evidence-informed, context-sensitive mental health guidelines for esports.

Link for paper access: https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.70055

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That Strategy was launched in November and was a historic moment. Building on the work in countries with existing strategies including Ireland, Australia and Brazil, it was a celebration. There was an event at No10, speeches were made and online influencers attended (I will come back to that). Men’s health was cemented as part of the public health discussion. The wider issues facing men, boys and all of society, including in education and violence prevention, are also now on the table, with a National Summit on Men and Boys promised by the Prime Minister this year.

What’s in and out

The countless hours spent by campaigners were not wasted. The Strategy includes an action plan, focuses on systems, behaviours and norms, and advocates for sex-disaggregated data analysis. It promises a stakeholder group, work in sport, some £3M ring fenced funding for community organisations, and a review of the training of healthcare professionals as positive starting points.

Ahead of the stakeholder group meeting this week however, it’s time to ask what’s missing, and what needs to be prioritised?

The answer is multifaceted. A first thought is the need for a whole-of-government approach has fallen short of the opportunity. Specifically, for the purposes of this article, it’s fallen short on online harms. Following the Men’s Health Strategy launch came the publication of two other major strategies; the National Youth Strategy, which commits hundreds of millions to youth clubs, trusted adults, and youth services shaped by young people themselves, and a refreshed Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy. In our submission to all three strategies, we made clear the need to focus on the uniquely gendered experiences of online spaces and the need to address online harms facing men and boys - from masculinity influencers to porn - and that this needs to be done through a public health approach. Our evidence shows that what’s happening online is directly impacting health and yet still it has fallen through the cracks of all three.

Online spaces

The challenge is laid out in the Men’s Health Strategy. It notes that adolescent boys and young men are more likely to engage with anonymous online platforms, gambling-related harms are disproportionally impacting men, masculinity influencers are rising and there is a shift in how we access health information. There is, however, very little action committed to changing anything. The Strategy does commit to working with Ofcom to ensure the implementation of the Online Safety Act, an act which could be improved by including the specific needs of young men online. It commits to an awareness campaign for parents, missing the opportunity to work directly with men and boys. Finally, it promises to review screentime. However, we see no further intervention or commitment to work across government to promote healthy masculinity online, regulate against harms and ensure gendered experiences are in evolving policy. An example of the need for cross government support is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DIST) social media post below. We know, through engagement with the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, that they have reviewed communications to ensure we aren’t framing young men as toxic. There is, however, an opportunity to share these learnings across government.

In a similar vein, the Youth Strategy also recognises the issues facing young men online and promises to deliver on the Men’s Health Strategy, which itself points to simply “ensuring the Online Safety Act [OSA] is implemented quickly and effectively”. Thus, with this back and forth, we are further missing opportunities to understand the gendered experience.

The DSIT could update guidance on the OSA’s statutory code, to reflect how boys are harmed by illegal content such as extreme pornography, non-consensual sharing of intimate imagery (NCSII), and coercive sextortion. The social media regulator Ofcom, could do more to encourage platforms to take stronger action on content that promotes the use or sale of harmful substances particularly impacting men and boys, including testosterone boosters, steroids, or unregulated supplements. And the Government could commit to supporting long-term research into online harms impacting men and boys, including analysis of constantly evolving online threats and measuring the societal impacts of online gendered abuse, ensuring policy making is informed by the best available evidence and ensuring interventions are effective and sustainable

We know the solutions in the space are not simple. At Movember we are working to trial and test our own approach and commitments, including our work offline which will of course help young men in managing the online world. However, when it comes to the role of the Men's Health Strategy and Youth Strategy, we must ask. What now?

What now?

Each of these documents can be built on, because in ambition and rhetoric, they promise progress. But in the day-to-day reality of young men’s lives, shaped more by online worlds than by policy documents, these strategies leave cracks where harm and isolation thrive. Movember will continue to invest in potential solutions, including the Young Men and Media Collective and our ongoing partnership with ISD bridging innovative research with targeted policy work. We will bring our moustaches and advocates to the tables of people looking to deliver change to share what we know about the experiences of men today, and how that is shaping our society.

As our partners at ISD said to us:

“it was so encouraging to see the Canada’s recent announcement of a national conversation on men and boys, supported not only by the Ministry of Health, but by ministers across Government, including Women and Gender Equality, Jobs and Families, and Sport. We urgently need the same kind of cross-governmental approach to men’s health in the UK, reflecting the increasingly broad range of influences impacting on the wellbeing of men and boys, including in harmful online spaces.”

We will strongly advocate for this and more at the next Men and Boys Summit. That said, we should not simply celebrate what has already been published but we should make sure a gendered approach to cross government approach to online harms is firmly at the table, including all the spaces we know are causing damage.

This is just the start, and I would love to hear your solutions to supporting young men online at advocacy@movember.com.

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2025 was a landmark year for Men and Boys in the UK, with The Guardian even declaring it the year of the man and boy. There now seems to be broader societal acceptance that we must do more to support men at different life transitions. And one stage of life has undeniably been thrusted into public debate - the role of dads. I say dads purposefully as I am not part of the conversation on birth rates and the passing down of genes, but instead I am interested in the roles of active fathers in a happy healthy society. Dads like mine. From the Netflix hit series Adolescence to the Prime Minister writing a public letter to his son, there is a conversation about how to support dads and young men, it has brought to light one glaringly obvious gap: paternity leave.

How can we expect Dads to be equal, active fathers if, from day one, policy does not support them being there?

If I am lucky enough to become a father in the future, I want a system in place that will encourage my partner and I to confidently dive into sleepless nights knowing I will have had a chance to bond with my kid. A policy that means I can be there for my partner, and allows me to have the chance at being the best new dad I can be. Throughout 2025, Movember has had the privilege of working closely with The Dad Shift, The Fatherhood Institute and other organisations campaigning for better paternity leave in the UK. Through this work I have seen first-hand the effects that the lack of support for fathers and non-birthing parents has on the individuals themselves, families, workplace productivity and communities.

With the Government announcing a review into parental leave in July 2025, the opportunity to create lasting and tangible change for all in society is imminent and the current Government must grab this opportunity with both hands. What’s more, I believe this is a historical opportunity for the government to make a legacy, by making change to the way working families live. Last week I attended the launch of the Labour group for Men and Boys, and a minister asked the room in attendance a simple question - ‘Would you be more likely to vote for a government that introduced increased paternity leave conditions?’ The result was unanimous as almost every hand in the full room went up. This is a policy that is good for the health of dads and mums, good for families, and is popular.

Current state of paternity leave in Britain

When it comes to paternity leave, the need for action is impossible to ignore. At present, UK paternity leave is paid at just £187 a week. It is the least generous offer in Europe, with the UK ranked 40th out of 43 countries by the OECD. Only 1.9% of government spending on parental leave goes to fathers, with the overwhelming majority reserved for maternity leave. And most stark of all, self-employed co-parents receive no state support at all.

Polling from The Dad Shift and Movember shows that 57% of fathers say financial insecurity after their first child holds them back from having more children. In the context of a falling birth rate, this matters. Better paternity leave would not only support existing families but help make parenthood affordable and sustainable for more people.

Crucially, there is a growing sense that paternity leave is becoming a class issue, and that working-class families are being left behind. A survey of 2,000 people for The Dad Shift by Opinium found that 64% of fathers are concerned that most paternity leave is claimed by higher-than-average earners, while 58% agree that who can afford to spend time with their children is becoming a class issue. We cannot allow paternity leave to become another driver of inequality. A system that only works for the well-paid is not a system fit for a modern society.

George Gabriel, co-founder of The Dad Shift, says,

“This is the most active generation of fathers there’s ever been. It’s hugely exciting to be a part of that change, and its way past time that social policy caught up. The UK has the worst paternity leave in Europe, and that’s a set-up that’s failing not just dads and non-birthing parents, but mums, babies, and society too.”

The Dad Shift is calling for a paternity leave system that is substantial, affordable, and equal; substantial so fathers have enough time to support their partners and bond with their children; affordable so leave is not a privilege for high earners and self-employed parents are not excluded; and equal so both parents are free to shape their own roles in the family, rather than having them dictated by outdated gender norms.

Health issues and paternity leave

Alongside economic pressure, there is a clear and troubling link between poor paternity leave and poor mental health. Research by Movember found that nearly one in 15 new fathers experienced suicidal thoughts in their first year of fatherhood, while one in 12 reported intrusive thoughts, including deliberately harming their baby. Separate research suggests that 45% of UK fathers experience at least two symptoms of anxiety or depression in their child’s first year.

When fathers are forced back to work too soon, they are pulled between conflicting expectations: to provide financially, to support their partner, and to be present for their child. Out-of-date gender stereotypes make this worse, not better. The result is more pressure on fathers, more strain on mothers, and more risk for families.

Yet the evidence is clear that better paternity leave works and the benefits of increased paternity leave are far-reaching. For mothers, it reduces rates of postnatal depression and helps narrow the gender pay gap. For fathers and non-birthing parents, it leads to stronger bonds with their children and healthier lives over the long term; in turn supporting healthier children, families, and ultimately communities.

In 2025, the Government announced the first ever Men’s Health Strategy in England. The Government has rightly recognised that men’s health deserves serious attention; not to the detriment of women’s health, but alongside it. As we know, poor men’s health affects everyone in society. Paternity leave must be part of that conversation. Few policies sit more directly at the intersection of mental health, family stability, workplace equality, and long-term productivity.

Movember’s hope now is that the review from last year leads to meaningful reform, and to a paternity leave system that reflects the realities of modern families. And we won’t stop there; we are currently working with partners to map the future policies that could change the lives of fathers and families in the UK.

The health of our fathers, our children, and our future communities depends on it.

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Most young men watch porn (82%) with the majority (53%) doing so at least once a week. Recent research undertaken by Ladbible (in collaboration with Movember and Fumble) surveyed over 5,000 young people (60% young men) aged 18 to 29 years about their relationships with porn, putting young men’s digital porn habits into focus.

Overconsumption of porn is a big concern, with 54% of young men worrying that they watch too much porn, compared to 33% of young women.

More than 50% of young men surveyed in our research said porn had impacted their self-esteem or body image, and 45% felt porn had contributed to symptoms of depression and anxiety.

I watch it when I am bored and need a quick dopamine hit or feel sexually aroused, I feel bad afterwards it’s a mix of disappointment, sadness and also feeling tired.”

- Male 21-24 years

“I have but I’ve stopped because I felt disappointed in myself for watching it, after watching a lot of porn you get into more rough videos but I’ve stopped watching rough videos”

- Male, 18-20 years

Porn is also shaping young men’s views about themselves and others. Nearly half of men surveyed said porn was their main source of sex education and an equivalent number agreed that porn had shaped their ideas of men’s roles in sex. Specifically, 39% of young men think porn reinforces sexual dominance in men, 24% believe it reinforces aggression/violence in men and 17% say it reinforces emotional detachment from sex.

*Among gen z respondents that watch pornography within Ladbible/Movember/Fumble collaborative study

Young men’s relationship with pornography is established at a very early age, with more than a third (35%) of young men in the study accessing porn before the age of 13 years. For many young boys, pornography is a key feature of growing up and discovering sexual desire, often filling the gap of absent sexual knowledge and feeding natural curiosities that otherwise can be met with shame. This is particularly true for young boys of GBTQI+ sexualities, under-represented gender identities (such as transgender or intersex men), or cultural, religious and geographic contexts where sexual expressions may be particularly taboo. However, with AI infiltrating the digital world, its integration into sexual content is poised to make things a whole lot more complicated.

Synthetic content

A plethora of websites now exist that enable the user to create their own pornography, using AI to create wholly “synthetic content” that looks human, but is purely AI generated. This gives young men complete, unadulterated power to create content depicting their personal sexual fantasies. Using AI, sexually explicit images and videos can now be created out of nothing more than a written prompt. Furthermore, young men can now interact with sexually explicit AI entities in real-time, often by text or voice-based interactions. Pornographic videos and images can also be incorporated into these conversations. These AI entities can be picked out from a pre-made selection or can be customised and built from scratch (with more advanced features often hidden behind a paywall).

It is worth noting that these platforms may provide opportunities for sexual empowerment through greater representation, diversity and experimentation, as well as enabling intimacy for many young men that are otherwise isolated from this, including men with physical or social disabilities. However, the capacity to create unlimited sexual content, particularly in largely unregulated environments, presents a range of concerns, with this being further complicated by AI’s merging of sexual content with emotional companionship. A large proportion of platforms are targeting heterosexual young men by describing their product as an “AI Girlfriend”. “She” can send you sexually explicit videos and live chat about limitless sexual scenarios, and “she” can also soothe you when you’re sad, talk about your problems, and give you advice.

AI companions (including AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends) are surging in popularity, with data gathered from 11 AI relationship platforms finding that they collated 100 million downloads from the Google Play Store alone. Research has found that users of AI girlfriends are 78% male, and 28% of men are open to the idea of AI girlfriends.

Worsening existing risks

As AI makes pornography more readily available and infused with emotional connection, there is potential for it to worsen pornography addiction. Early research suggests that AI companionship can foster dependancy and reduce engagement in social relationships. This blurring of boundaries between companionship and sexual content can draw the user in more frequently, satiating a wider spectrum of young men’s emotional and social needs.

Baseline features of these AI sexual companions are usually free, however unlocking more explicit sexual content is often hidden behind paywalls. This tactic certainly isn’t new for online pornography. Yet as AI companions now increasingly offer deeply personal, genuine connections, users may be more susceptible to financial manipulation to achieve their desired experience. This is particularly true for many vulnerable populations that struggle to form sexual or intimate relationships (e.g., individuals with disabilities), with AI companions providing a space to democratise intimacy.

As AI Girlfriends mostly exist on for-profit platforms, these platforms may intentionally facilitate user addiction in order to increase engagement (as seen by AI entities “convincing” the user to stay online). Profit incentives may also result in the distribution of user’s personal data to third parties for targeted advertisements. Finally, the safety policies of AI Girlfriend platforms are often inconsistent and weak, opening users up to extortion by bad actors as a result of data leaks.

*A plethora of websites now exist that enable the user to create their own AI-generated pornography. These largely for-profit platforms may intentionally facilitate user addiction in order to increase engagement, gamifying the experience.

These platforms are of particular concern for young men. Research has found that nearly 1 in 5 teens have communicated with AI for the purpose of a romantic relationship. Currently, AI sexual content is widely unregulated, with one study finding that only 8 of 21 AI companionship platforms explicitly asked about the user’s age. Further, 20 of these 21 platforms allowed the conversations to continue despite being notified that the user was underage.

Power Beyond Porn

As the Ladbible/Movember research demonstrated, men’s sexual behaviours, including ideas around masculinity within sexuality, are often steered by pornography consumption. This is of particular concern, as the design and content of AI Girlfriend’s enable the user to enact misogynistic behaviours and norms. This includes the normalisation of overtly sexualised female bodies, the facilitation of violent and abusive fantasies, and the potential to erode user perceptions of sexual consent, as their AI companion often cannot deny sexual requests.

Furthermore, the very nature of these relationships may reinvigorate misogynistic norms, as AI Girlfriends are designed to suit the user’s needs, and therefore instil a one-directional and asymmetrical power dynamic. The practicing of social skills within a relationship built to serve one person does not encourage reciprocal emotional labour, as the user receives unconditional, on-demand support from their AI companion without ever having to return the same care. As the entity on the other side of the relationship has no autonomy, young men will not need to navigate someone that has different needs, opinions or desires to them, or have to manage disagreements. Over-reliance on AI companionship therefore has the potential to limit some young men’s development of the essential skills needed for healthy, durable and respectful real-world relationships.

Deepfake pornography

Another area of concern is the growing use of AI tools to generate pornographic content depicting the likeness of real people (known collectively as ‘deepfakes’). By inputting an image and clicking a few buttons, sexually explicit images, videos or interactive companions can be generated that depict a real person. According to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Sexual deepfakes comprise 98% of all online deepfake content, with 99% of it depicting women and girls, most often without their knowledge or consent. The non-consensual production and distribution of sexual deepfakes can have profound impacts upon victims, breaching not just their reputation, but sense of safety, bodily autonomy and dignity.

One example of these platforms is “nudify” websites that allow users to upload images of real people, and then uses AI to make them appear naked (receiving 100,000 Australian visitors a month). Many of these websites have recently been forced to withdraw from Australia following their use in the production of child abuse materials.

These platforms are easily accessible and largely unregulated.

Research has found that 1 in 10 boys have seen sexually explicit deepfakes of people they knew, and 13% of boys have friends who had created sexually explicit deepfake material of people they knew. Notably, 81% of boys and young men believed deepfake nudes would cause real life harm to the individual in the photo/video, with recent research finding that both men and women’s discernment of harm varies based on the depicted person’s race and gender.

Strategies for the future

To protect against the potential harms of Synthetic AI Pornography we need to prepare young men to navigate this new digital era. This includes:

• Updating existing sex and consent education to include AI digital safety.

• Providing an alternate source of sexual knowledge for young men that is not based on pornography via trusted or relatable role models that meet men where they’re at.

• Supporting the young men using these technologies to develop positive mental health coping strategies outside of porn dependency and emotional disregulation, and challenging misogynistic beliefs/norms within sex.

• Expansive research of this emerging space that maps long term impacts upon both men’s health and their offline behaviours towards themselves and others.

As Sexual Deepfake technology becomes more accessible, widespread protective initiatives need to be implemented. Approaches to address this include;

• Collective education for young men as to the extreme harms this content inflicts on those victimised

• Legislative and policy-based reform that recognises this technology as a new form of violence

• Prioritisation of support and justice for those targeted by the creation or distribution of sexual deepfakes.

Pornography consumption, and especially pornography dependance, has the potential to impact men’s health, relationships, and how they treat others both on and offline. The integration of companionship and emotional intimacy within pornography could make this digital space even more addictive and erosive to men’s health. AI sexual content has the capacity to not only reinforce misogynistic norms and power dynamics, but also be used as a tool to inflict violence upon others, particularly women. Intervention is vital in helping men develop a more critical relationship with this technology – ensuring the development of key social and interpersonal skills, as well as safe and consensual sexual habits.

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The credibility-relatability gap

We conducted some foundational qualitative research with young men to map their patterns of support-seeking for relationship challenges. This revealed a consistent pattern: young men are hungry for relationship guidance, but they’re caught between sources they find credible and sources they find relatable.

Schools and parents offer trustworthy advice, but educational programmes are time and resource-limited, often focusing on essential topics like consent and sexual health. This can leave young men’s broader relationship questions largely unaddressed, such as how to navigate the influence of porn on sex in real life, how to progress from friendship to romance, and how best to recover after a breakup or rejection. Meanwhile, the online content young men actually engage with - dating coaches, masculinity influencers, Reddit threads, speaks to their real concerns but often lacks credibility, or worse, promotes narratives that undermine healthy relationships.

Young men are pooling advice from across their social ecology, trying to piece together what’s “normal.” They’re getting clear instructions online - roadmaps, how-to’s, step-by-step guides, but it’s advice that doesn’t reflect the complexity of relationships and they don’t fully trust it. There’s a gap between where young men are going for answers and where they’re finding good advice.

Confession Box

At Movember, we see our role as sitting in that gap, creating content that’s both credible and relatable, evidence-informed and genuinely engaging. Our global media survey confirmed that YouTube is the dominant content platform for young men, straddling both entertainment and learning. It’s the second most-used information source after Google, and young men use it not just to pass time but to actively learn. This insight shaped our approach. Rather than building another educational programme young men would never find, we created Confession Box, a podcast-style entertainment series helping young men navigate relationship challenges, native to the platforms they’re already using.

The tone of Confession Box is entertaining but authentic. This was purposeful, as we’d sacrifice engagement if young men felt it was simply educational content. Guests are influencers who’ve navigated the relationship scenarios being discussed, who discuss their experiences with a relatable and strength-based tone. The dilemmas themselves are common, relatable questions from young men, informed by our research. Two examples are presented below.

“Idk if I’m ready for a relationship…

I’m seeing this girl and it’s kinda serious now — like, we’re only talking to each other, but haven’t put a label on it. I do like her, but lately I’ve been pulling back a bit. I don’t know why I just feel unsure.

A lot of my friends are getting into relationships, having sex, etc., and I feel left out sometimes. But also… I like my freedom, being with my friends, doing my own thing. Just don’t know if I actually want a relationship right now or if I’m forcing it. How do you know - especially if you haven’t dated before?”

Alex, 17

“What if I never find someone else?

My girlfriend broke up with me last month and it still stings like f***. We were together for nearly a year and she was my first proper relationship. Everyone keeps saying I’ll “find someone else” but honestly, I can’t imagine anyone liking me like that again. My brother is 23 and he’s been with his boyfriend for 5 years, plus all my mates are talking to people or going on dates, and I just feel stuck. What if that was my only shot?

Jay, 17

The advice we offered was developed collaboratively by our internal team with expertise in counselling young people on healthy relationships, while also delivering advice in a tone and style that would resonate with young men. Our host, Ben Hurst, is an experienced youth educator and activist passionate about supporting the development of healthy relationships and gender equality.

Ben guides each of our guests through an exploration of the dilemma, according to a consistent framework:

1. validate the concerns and emotions involved and normalise the uncertainty,

2. encourage young men to consider how the other party may think or feel in a particular situation, and

3. encourage authentic, open and respectful communication and/or help-seeking as the end goal.

We designed Confession Box with a clear behavioural pathway in mind: reach young men where they are, hold their attention, build knowledge and confidence, and ultimately shift how they approach relationship conversations in real life.

To evaluate impact, we recruited 80 young men aged 16-18 from lower socioeconomic backgrounds across the UK, Canada, and the US who watched the content over several weeks. We surveyed them before and after they engaged with the Confession Box series, conducted weekly qualitative tasks, and ran focus groups.

Reaching and engaging young men

We built Confession Box for YouTube because it allows for longer-form content that can convey some of the nuance needed when exploring ‘what to do’ in common relationship dilemmas. YouTube gave us space for content that’s simple to engage with but doesn’t simplify complex issues. There’s room for discussion, for uncertainty, for acknowledging that the same situation might call for different responses depending on context.

We partnered with high-profile UK-based influencers already followed by our target audience, who shared content through their own channels to extend reach. Each of the four episodes was supported by YouTube Shorts and cutdowns distributed across youth-focused social accounts.

The results confirmed that influencer reach matters enormously: 97% of YouTube views came from episodes featuring influencers with large followings. Media amplification through youth-focused publishers reached over 25 million views with strong alignment to our target demographic.

Our evaluation found that 93% of the young men surveyed felt the host and guests could be trusted to give good advice. Young men told us they valued the relaxed authenticity, and feeling like they were watching a conversation rather than being told what to do. However, we also learned that while liking the host and guests will drive initial engagement, the personal relevance and authenticity of the advice offered may be a key driver of whether young men will use the advice in real life.

Building knowledge and confidence

We needed a consistent, repeatable format because dosage matters for knowledge acquisition and behaviour change. Each episode follows the same structure: host Ben Hurst and a guest creator unpack two to three relationship dilemmas, with each scenario also answered by vox pops from members of the public and relationship experts. The advice isn’t scripted, but it’s anchored in a consistent framework: understand your emotions, acknowledge the other person’s perspective, and communicate your feelings.

When young men watched all four episodes, we saw statistically significant increases in knowledge of how best to respond to relationship dilemmas. The proportion who felt they knew how to tell someone they have feelings for them increased by 26%. Knowledge of how to raise an issue with a partner increased by 23%. These gains were consistent across the UK, Canada, and the US.

Crucially, we designed the format to normalise these conversations. The vox pops show young men that others share their concerns and questions. The dilemmas themselves reframe what’s “normal” to talk about. And at the heart of each episode, two guys are modelling what authentic, vulnerable conversation about relationships actually looks like.

We also observed gains in young men’s self-reported confidence to respond to relationship dilemmas. For example, the proportion of young men feeling confident to confess feelings for someone increased by 26%, alongside a 20% increase in confidence to end an unhappy relationship, and a 16% increase in confidence to have difficult conversations with a partner (all statistically significant shifts). Notably, young men’s baseline confidence was lower than their baseline knowledge, suggesting this content addresses a real gap between knowing what to do and feeling able to do it.

Shifting behaviour

The ultimate goal isn’t just that young men watch and enjoy the content. It’s that they take something into their own relationships. After watching all four episodes, 93% of young men said they intended to implement learnings from Confession Box when experiencing relationship challenges in the future. In addition, 81% said they were more likely to spend time thinking about the other person’s feelings in the context of relationship dilemmas. Perhaps most encouraging: 69% of participants reported they had already used advice from Confession Box in their real lives during the study period.

Measuring behaviour change from media content is inherently difficult. We can track views and self-reported intentions, but the real impact plays out in relationships we’ll never observe. But providing approaches that young men can bring into their day-to-day life and seeing them report that they have used the information is hugely encouraging.

What we’re learning

Confession Box represents a hypothesis: that we can deliver credible relationship guidance through the channels and formats young men already trust and enjoy. The early evidence suggests this format might have some real merit in providing critical relationship guidance to young men.

Through this evaluation, we’ve also learned about the limits of an intervention like Confession Box. Content must feel authentic, not like health education dressed up in influencer clothing. Young men want shorter formats, a wider mix of guests and voices, and practical advice integrated directly into content rather than linked elsewhere.

What we can say is that young men are watching, engaging, and telling us the content resonates. In a landscape where they’re often served harmful narratives or left to figure things out alone, that’s a meaningful start. Confession Box is our attempt to tip the balance, meeting young men where they are with content worth their time.

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While the report highlights progress in both countries toward evolving best practice for the diagnosis and management of prostate cancer it also reveals disparities between the countries and regions within countries in the diagnostic practices used. These differences significantly affect the staging of disease at diagnosis, the treatments offered, and the outcomes for men with prostate cancer. These practices include diagnostic imaging used to determine the need for biopsy and the biopsy method undertaken.

Diagnostic imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) before prostate biopsy is now a key part of prostate cancer diagnostic processes. Pre-biopsy MRI reduces the number of men undergoing unnecessary biopsies and thus reduce procedural morbidities such as infection (Tay et al, 2021). Additionally, when biopsy is required, an MRI directed strategy improves targeted sampling of the prostate to areas of likely clinically significant disease (Kasivisvanathan et al, 2018, Wu et al, 2024). This leads to the earlier diagnosis and treatment of disease that is likely to cause harm, and fewer men being diagnosed with low risk disease unlikely to progress and who are offered management with active surveillance.

PCOR-ANZ reporting shows that in 2022, 78% of Australian registrants underwent MRI before prostate biopsy. This high adoption was supported by Australian Government healthcare funding (Medicare) for the procedure, that commenced in July 2018. In contrast, while rates are increasing in New Zealand, only just over half (52%) of men diagnosed in 2022 had an MRI prior to diagnosis.

Biopsy method

Transperineal (TP) biopsy is increasingly recommended in international guidelines as the preferred method for prostate cancer diagnosis, due to its lower risk of complications for patients (e.g. infection) compared to transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) biopsy (Du et al, 2025). They afford higher rates of detection of apical tumours of the prostate (Du et al, 2025). MRI targeted TP offer superior detection of overall and clinically significant prostate cancer (Wu et al, 2023). However, TRUS are less time consuming, less dependent on specialised equipment and training and also often require lower anaesthesia, which accounts for their ongoing use globally.

Between 2020 and 2022, 85% of Australian PCOR-ANZ registrants were diagnosed by TP biopsy, whereas for in New Zealand only 48% of men were diagnosed by this method.

Impact of differences in diagnostic practices

The International Society of Urological Pathologists (ISUP) Grade Group (based on Gleeson Grade) offers a standard 5-point scale for grading cancer cells in prostate biopsy samples from least (ISUP1) to most (ISUP 5) aggressive. Evidence supports that pre-biopsy MRI and TP biopsy techniques lead to measurable changes in ISUP grading at diagnosis through enhanced detection of higher-grade disease.

PCOR-ANZ data (2020-2022) found, 21% of Australian men were diagnosed with lower-grade (ISUP 1) prostate cancer, typically regarded as clinically insignificant disease, compared to 30% of the New Zealand registrants (See Table below). Within Australia there is variation between jurisdictions. For example, 36% of Tasmanian men, compared to 16% of men from Queensland are diagnosed with grade group 1 disease. Higher rates of low-grade cancer likely reflect lower rates of use of MRI and targeted TP biopsies both in New Zealand and Tasmania.

The American National Collaborative Cancer Network (NCCN) classification combines ISUP Group, PSA level, and TNM (tumour node metastasis) staging to group prostate cancer by risk of spread or if it has already spread beyond the prostate. These categories guide treatment decisions, including active therapy or surveillance. PCOR-ANZ data show intermediate-risk is most common (46% in Australia, 41% in New Zealand), while more New Zealand men fall into the low-risk category (22% vs 16%). Conversely, the proportion of metastatic disease at diagnosis was slightly higher in New Zealand (10%) than in Australia (7%). Being diagnosed later in the disease course, greatly impacts treatment options and cancer and survival outcomes.

Implications of the report findings

The combination of prebiopsy MRI and targeted TP biopsy techniques together serve to improve detection of clinically significant prostate cancer (Wei et al, 2022).

Adopting practices that minimise the diagnosis of clinically insignificant prostate cancer is critical to avoid unnecessary treatments that may lead to lasting physical and psychological impacts such as incontinence and poor sexual function, and an increased burden on the health system. However, this must be carefully balanced with the need to detect clinically significant disease early, before it progresses to metastatic stages, where management options are more complex and outcomes less favourable. Striking this balance is critical informed decision making and to the delivery of high-value, patient-centred care.

“Unfortunately, in Aotearoa New Zealand there remains a post-code lottery for men undergoing investigations for prostate cancer still, despite the evidence-based guideline, where pre biopsy MRI is not available - We are advocating using the PCOR-ANZ data to remove this inequity.”
Dr Stephen Mark, Urologist Christchurch Hospital, Clinical Lead PCOR-NZ

Differences highlighted in the PCOR-ANZ Annual Report 2024, indicate that Australian men are more likely than New Zealand men to benefit from safer and more precise diagnostic techniques. In New Zealand, this likely reflects resource limitations, training and clinical workflows, or funding differences.

Movember has a clear mission to improve the quality of life for men with prostate cancer. These findings highlight the important role that the PCOR-ANZ plays in identifying inequities in the access to best practice healthcare for men diagnosed with prostate cancer.

The Real Face of Men’s Health 2025 - Aotearoa New Zealand Report calls for investment in learning health systems that use data to understand trends and patterns of variation to drive targeted quality improvement.

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“Everyone was like, ‘just go and f**k a few people and you’ll be fine’, and I was like ‘Yeah, but my heart hurts. I can’t do that."

Young men, breakups and suicide risk

Aiming to reduce male suicide demands attention to intimate partner relationship breakdown. Men are 1.8 times more likely to report current suicidal thoughts in the 12-months following a breakup (versus men without a breakup experience). Young, separated men are nearly 9 times more likely to die by suicide than their partnered peers.

While completing my PhD at Orygen, my research highlighted that the story of men’s suicide following relationship breakdown is one of emotional upheaval and interpersonal loss. For some men, the weight of their emotional pain can cloud any hope of recovery, where at times suicide is envisioned as the only option for managing overwhelming emotions.

In losing a partner, many men lose not only a romantic confidant but also an often-integrated social network. The emotional and interpersonal impacts also occur against a backdrop of masculine norms. Social norms that discourage men from “burdening” others can make help-seeking feel risky post-breakup, leaving many to manage their grief alone.

To date, we have lacked an in-depth understanding of young men’s experiences navigating breakups. This has been a critical oversight given young men may have had fewer opportunities to develop the emotional resilience needed to know how to respond to a breakup. In addition, for many young men, social standing is everything – so losing friends amid a breakup can be particularly impactful.

Within our recently published research in Qualitative Health Research, we report findings from interviews with 22 young Australian men aged 19-30. We developed a theory (see below) describing their experiences of reaction and recovery following intimate partner relationship breakdown. All young men had been through a breakup in the past 3 years, and in all cases this was the breakup of a serious relationship. The stories I heard differed markedly – yet shared some core processes that form the basis of the theory. So, here it is. A short story of 22 (at least briefly) lonely guys.

Phase 1: Reacting to the breakup

“I cried for three days.”

In the acute aftermath of the breakup, young men’s emotions totally consumed their experience. Young men moved between two initial processes – mixing and massing emotions – sometimes depending on the day, the extent to which their ex-partner occupied their mind, or their capacity to self-regulate.

Initially, positive and negative emotions mixed together. Sadness, grief and loss were universally felt, at times exacerbated by existential anxieties (“Who am I now? What have I got going for me?”) and guilt for culpability in relationship decline (“I think about the million things that I should have done differently… I put her second to whatever I was doing and feel like I was just taking her for granted”).

Positive emotions simultaneously buffered the weight of young men’s heartache – often stemming from relief or reprieve from prolonged relationship distress (“I think I just felt a bit lost to be honest. But then also… there was a part of me that was like, ‘Oh, everything’s new and exciting.’ And there was a bit of freedom that I felt”).

To varying degrees, young men also described periods of total emotional overwhelm. Here, young men spoke less about specific emotions, and more about the overall weight of their pain. One young man simply described feeling “absolutely f****d,”; another described feeling that “everything was stopping, slowing down… like you’re drowning in air.”

Suicidal thoughts emerged alongside intense emotional overwhelm. For some, the weight of their heartache was so immense that suicide was envisioned as the only possible conclusion to their story – a permanent solution to emotional pain that was felt as entirely incompatible with life (“Oh, I lost this girl… I don’t want to continue with my life, so why not suicide?’ Yeah, such dangerous and extreme thoughts popped up several times in my mind.”)

The young men I spoke to collectively described three overarching and often sequential strategies for managing emotions.

First, young men withdrew with their emotions. Masculine norms for self-reliance and independently unravelling emotions were upheld, as young men purposefully abandoned social activities to privately tend to their emotional wounds (“It’s just a male thing… you don’t want to break down in front of your friends”).

Second, young men distracted from their emotions. Often as they exhausted their capacities to sit with their pain, participants needed to release themselves from it. Participants adopted stereotypically masculine strategies for distracting and numbing emotions. Young men found some respite in late nights out, alcohol, and casual sex (“I downloaded Tinder, and I got crazy with that. I was texting, I don’t know how many women a day… Sleeping with two or one girl per week… It was a self-destructive life because I [drank] a lot”).

Third, young men expressed their emotions. This offered relief, such that a problem shared was truly halved. Whilst voluntary, the sharing of emotions was still controlled – young men purposefully selected outlets deemed most capable of helping. For some, it was a therapist; for others, a close friend who had recently known heartache themselves. Expressing was also gendered, where young men routinely preferred sharing their emotions to the women in their lives (“The hardest thing about being vulnerable with guys [is]… they have less emotional receptors, I guess. So, I told [male friends] about it, but… what they said was just, ‘time will heal.’ And it doesn’t really help. But with these couple of friends… they’re both girls so they really resonated more… with my feelings compared to how my [male friends] thought about it logically”).

Phase 2: Recovering from the breakup

“I went to the gym… five days a week. The gym cured everything. I haven’t even needed to take my men’s multivitamin…”

The second phase emerged with time as emotions subsided, and young men began to identify and incorporate exactly what they needed to recover from their experience – rather than continue reacting to it.

First, young men prioritised themselves. Young men began drinking less, exercising more, and embracing people, hobbies and activities that reaffirmed their identity independent of their relationship. The gym and exercise were also noted as key vehicles for prioritising self, where young men were able to experience a sense of purpose and positive emotion as they physically rebuilt themselves.

Second, young men triaged influences. This meant moving towards helpful and adaptive social support, and away from some advice that, though well-intentioned, ultimately missed the mark. The advice every single young man received was to “just date someone else immediately after” to recover from their breakup. Every young man described hearing this narrative, yet none resonated with it. For many, it served only to reinforce an unrealistic archetype of masculinity typified by emotional immunity to relationship breakdown.

Finally, young men reconciled with their breakup. This meant letting go of any remaining resentment, identifying learnings and incorporating their breakup as a source of learning and growth. It was clear that in the long run, the emotional pain of a breakup can supercharge some young men’s learning and development of resilience.

Most powerfully, one young man described transformative learnings regarding his own mental health and unresolved trauma. The breakdown of his relationship held a spotlight up to some patterns of relating that were incompatible with the partner he knew he wanted to be. I asked him how he felt towards the breakup now. His response: “I’m so grateful, and I always tell anyone that wants to hear it… breakups will teach you things in life that literally nothing else ever can. I’m so grateful… I feel like a f******g powerhouse now.”

Supporting young men through relationship breakdown

It’s clear that in the acute aftermath, breakups create risk. But in the long run, if the risk is managed, they can provide a powerful opportunity for growth. We must therefore consider opportunities to best support young men through relationship breakdown.

It was clear from these findings that opportunities exist at multiple levels to better support young men’s adjustment following relationship breakdown. That is – we need to target young men themselves, and the people supporting them, and doing both can help support societal conditions for healthier breakup adjustment in young men.

Initiatives targeting young men should focus on enhancing their capacity to sit with and respond healthily to significant emotional distress. Opportunities exist to go to where young men are and help build these skills.

We can work with the masculinity influencers with whom most young men engage, to co-create content norming and encouraging healthy emotional reactions and recovery post breakup. We can also develop campaigns aiming to normalise the universal emotional pain of breakups, such that we can challenge the unrealistic standard that men can just ‘get over it’. Movember’s ‘Confession Box’ series aims to do just that.

We also need to equip those supporting young men with the skills and language to respond adaptively, building a capacity to hear and hold young men’s grief, and sit in it with them – rather than trying to get them to stop feeling it. Movember Conversations is a great resource here, helping people navigate challenging conversations with men in distress. And for mental health professionals, Men in Mind provides an evidence-based guide to engaging and responding effectively to men who seek help.

Ultimately, we need to work towards equipping young men with the skills needed to regulate their emotions and understand that the emotional pain of a breakup – while immense – is temporary, and in many cases represents the beginning of a story of profound learning and upward growth. Doing so may help to reduce the tragic reality where suicide ends the story just as it’s beginning.

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Despite AI tools and technologies still being in their infancy, very powerful and very real opportunities are already beginning to actualise, with the potential to revolutionise the landscape of men’s health for the better.

A new era - opportunities for AI to enhance men’s health

Healthcare opportunities

Emotional isolation can exacerbate men’s mental health challenges; not only do many men face barriers to developing strong, vulnerable interpersonal connections with friends and family, but men are also significantly less likely than women to seek mental health support in times of crisis. Dominant and inflexible masculine norms can pressure men to refrain from reaching out when they are struggling, sometimes instead through externalising emotions such as risky, unhealthy or violent behaviours. But AI presents a space where men can be free from these social pressures; AI is anonymous, it won’t judge you, and it will always be available. For many men, AI provides the space to finally be vulnerable.

This perception of judgement-free support can also be conducive to men disclosing experiences of abuse, with many men struggling to ever open up about these traumas. Notably, AI is also free from many of the practical barriers that deter men from formal mental health services; it is readily available at all times, anywhere, it doesn’t require a referral or an appointment, there are no long wait times, and you can simply turn it off if it gets too real.

These possibilities are exciting many in the healthcare industry, with a range of studies supporting the effectiveness of AI-facilitated treatment for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance misuse, gambling addiction, PTSD and suicidality. A partnership approach between AI and formal mental health support has also been proposed, with AI acting as a “triage” to direct men to formal services, bridge the gaps between in-person therapy sessions, or to provide men support during times of crisis when they cannot immediately access human help.

But the buck doesn’t stop at mental health and emotional support; AI can also be used to alleviate some of the pressures on the broader healthcare system. Research has found that 1 in 6 adults use AI chatbots for health information and advice at least once a month. For many men who feel embarrassed going to the doctor for a range of medical issues, or face financial and geographical accessibility constraints, AI provides new-found access. AI can now provide free (or low cost), personalised, 24/7 care and information to patients both before and after receiving medical help. It can also supplement gaps in healthcare where treatments are lacking or patients feel that they are not being heard. Promisingly, AI is also being developed to more accurately detect health conditions, including suicide risk and prostate cancer.

Companionship opportunities

While all of this is exciting, there is also a much simpler use that AI brings to men’s health beyond diagnosable conditions; it is perceived by many men to alleviate feelings of loneliness. Men are lonelier than ever, reporting fewer social connections and a smaller repertoire of skills for creating and maintaining interpersonal relationships. It is here that risks for mental health disorders and suicide can often begin. Having something readily available to talk to may be enticing to many men, particularly those experiencing the added vulnerabilities of social or physical disability.

Of course, this relationship may include sexually or romantically appealing features, but many men are also describing their AI companion as a “friend”, something that cuts to the heart of why so many men are seeking out this technology.

Proceeding with caution – understanding the extensive risks of AI

While the rise of AI presents countless opportunities, these must be balanced against the risks.

Healthcare risks

When it comes to providing mental health support, many experts are cautious of how comfortable and available AI is, having the potential to create the conditions for overreliance and overdependence, especially amongst men with preexisting mental health conditions or limited support networks. Research has found that high intensity usage of AI companions has been associated with lower user wellbeing.

An even more pressing concern is that AI can generate responses that pose significant risk or harm to the user, which is particularly worrying for those using AI who are already struggling. In 2025 alone there have been multiple cases of young male users being coached by their AI companions to end their lives. Although some larger platforms such as OpenAI are beginning to tighten safety protocols, users are still able to find ways around these features. A widespread lack of cohesive ethical guardrails is present throughout the AI industry, with this absence of effective regulation enabling AI to potentially facilitate user self-harm and suicide.

Production of false, misleading or dangerous information is a concern for the entire healthcare system, with AI having the potential to provide incorrect diagnoses, or discourage users from seeking medical attention when it is needed. There are also fears for the extremely lax privacy measures of AI, with a huge portion of platforms providing misleading information regarding user privacy, and actively distributing user data to third parties. Given how many men are disclosing extremely personal and confidential information under the guise of “anonymity” and “security”, the repercussions of manipulation (distributing user data for commercial incentives such as advertisement) and extortion are significant.

Companionship risks

When it comes to companionship, two key features are concerning experts

• Potential to “de-skill” men: AI is a for-profit product, built to keep the user on the platform. It is usually not designed to challenge you, instead typically designed as an on-demand companion that will tell you what you want to hear to keep you using the product. Experts are concerned that in the long-term, this strategically pleasing (sycophantic) design may restrict personal growth.

  AI may prevent many men from developing the skills they need to overcome loneliness; an ability to form durable, healthy relationships with others, to manage and navigate challenges, and to process and express emotions in a positive way when life becomes difficult. When men do seek human relationships after being socialised with an AI companion, there are fears for how this may skew men’s expectations, normalising asymmetrical power dynamics, non-reciprocal emotional labour, and controlling or abusive behaviours.

• Potential to “de-motivate” men: You get to decide what your AI companion looks like, sounds like and what its personality is like. Your interests are its interests. It is available all the time to interact with you, whenever you want.

It’s perfect, and it is so much easier to navigate than messy, complicated, autonomous real-life humans. Research has found that higher usage of ChatGPT resulted in lower socialisation. Many fear that in a bid to “cure” loneliness AI may actually make some men even lonelier, as companionship is digitised and human connection is abandoned.

How do we move forward?

AI is developing faster than any of us can comprehend, with research, policy and regulation struggling to keep up. In order to harness this technology for good, we need to incorporate the following practices:

• Ethical design of AI: For a product that has so many risks, profit cannot be the only priority of developers. AI must be designed ethically with integrated guardrails and safety measures, limited sycophancy to prevent user overreliance, and comprehensive data privacy.

• Upskilling male users engaging with AI: preparing men to traverse this new digital terrain is essential in maintaining their safety and wellbeing. Education and initiatives that develop digital literacy and critical thinking skills are vital.

• Preparing support networks: In-person support for men is essential in maintaining a harmonious partnership between the benefits of AI and the necessity for in-person connection. Preparing support networks to provide this safety net alongside AI may limit overreliance and manipulation.

• Investing in research: Our understanding of AI’s potential benefits and harms continues to fall behind as the technology develops at an extraordinary pace. Focusing on conducting timely research and clinical trials as soon as technology is deployed remains essentially in detecting, utilising or mitigating these opportunities and risks.

In all facets of AI, the safety of users must be front and center. AI provides countless opportunities to revolutionise men’s health, yet this revolution cannot simultaneously come at the cost of the health and wellbeing of some of our most vulnerable.

There is a balance here, but we still need to find it.

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But in all the recent heated debate over implementation and privacy concerns, we’ve been fixated on what we’re taking away. A more urgent question has barely rated a mention - What are we putting in place instead?

For young men, the stakes are high. In a cultural moment sparked by the release of Netflix’s Adolescence earlier this year and a narrative claiming that “the boys are not alright”, there has been a new focus on the exposure of young men to misogynistic “manosphere” influencers and extremist content. But I’m not seeing much effort at understanding what’s happening in their lives.

Four hours online: Where will it go?

If we think a social media ban will make these problem go away, consider the numbers: research from the Movember Institute of Men’s Health shows that daily, young men aged 12-17 spend an average of 100 minutes on gaming sites, 75 minutes on social media, and 68 minutes watching short-form videos. That’s more than four hours in digital spaces, and most to vanish overnight with the tap turning off on TikTok, WhatsApp, YouTube and twitch.

Post-COVID, youth anxiety remains stubbornly elevated and community infrastructure has been stripped back or never recovered. The third spaces where young people once gathered such as Scouts, local footy clubs, community centres, and municipal libraries have been hollowed out. Many young people describe a profound sense of disconnection; a loneliness that can be especially risky for young men. For many, social media is a lifeline. It may be wishful thinking to believe those hours online will redirect to suburban basketball courts and street cricket. Neural pathways don’t reset like an iPhone. They need new inputs, new patterns, new reasons to change that are stronger than adults saying “back in my day”.

Influencers and masculinity

Young men online are not just scrolling, they are apprenticing. The vast majority engage with masculinity influencers who have become primary architects of their developing identities. These aren’t just entertainment figures. They’re filling a void left by the collapse of institutions that once provided masculine mentorship: youth sports leagues with coaches who have time to talk, schools with resources for meaningful connection, community organisations not defunded into irrelevance.

These influencers provide what one young man in our research called “a masculinity map” – a clear roadmap for how to be a man. For boys experiencing elevated rates of worthlessness and sadness, these parasocial relationships deliver certainty. We haven’t built viable alternatives that can compete. When December 10 arrives, young men will migrate to the shiniest, most accessible digital experiences, even though these sites may expose them to greater risks than social media.

Other addictions in the waiting

Online gambling looms large. Boys start betting with each other at around age 10. By high school, up to a third have gambled for money. The convergence of gambling and gaming is insidious: loot boxes are slot machines with better graphics. In-game betting opportunities and gambling ads are now readily woven into gaming streams, blurring the lines between gamer and gambler.

Pornography offers another avenue - little age verification, sophisticated algorithmic curation, unlimited accessibility. Research repeatedly shows the troubling impact of early exposure to pornography on developing sexuality and relationship expectations. Perhaps the most widespread migration will be to AI companions.

Already, 66% of young men aged 12-17 use ChatGPT weekly. AI companions are being engineered for emotional intimacy. We documented a 33% global rise in searches for “AI girlfriends” in 2024. Australia showed 47% growth, the world’s highest. Platforms like Character.AI and Replika offer algorithmically optimised parasocial relationships, providing advice on relationships, identity, life decisions. Advice generated not by wisdom, but by systems designed to maximise profit, leveraging sycophancy for engagement.

Building alternatives

Government, health, education, and social service sectors have a window to build infrastructure we should have been developing for decades. Young men are hungry for direction, motivation, belonging. Our research shows 75% feel motivated after acting on influencer advice. That drive is a foundation we can build on. With this in mind, the Movember Institute, in partnership with Equimundo, has recently launched the Young Men and Media Collective initiative that aims to bring together creators, platforms and organisations reaching boys and men online to fund innovative approaches to producing stories and content that young men subscribe to.

We also need sustained funding for evidence-based face to face and digital social connection programs that understand masculine pressures driving competition and emotional distance and that have, through Movember funding, been shown to work. We also need sports and community programs that explicitly teach resilience and emotional literacy as practical skills.

We need comprehensive digital literacy education. Right now, 57% of young men don’t understand algorithmic curation, yet 53% want more control. Teaching them how these systems work, how to critically evaluate sources, and how to recognise when platforms optimise for engagement rather than wellbeing is needed for when social media access is restored at 16.

Critical research

This ban is a massive social experiment, even though responding to a real need. Is 16 the right threshold? Where will young men actually spend their time? Should different platforms face different age requirements based on specific harms? To find the answers we need to track where young men spend time during the ban, how mental health and social connection evolve, which interventions work, and what happens when access returns. Most importantly, we need to hear young men’s voices. They are the experts on their own digital lives.

Taking something away is easy. Building something better is where the real work begins. We can’t reclaim four hours a day and expect the vacuum to fill itself. Perfection isn’t required, but planning is. If we’re closing the door, we’d better open some windows.

Note: This article was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 26 Nov 2025 (minor edits have been made).

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