Masculinity and Misogyny: What Do Boys Actually Think?

Two pictures of boys circulate, and neither survives contact with the evidence intact. The first is that this is a media panic and boys are not really encountering any of it. The second is that boys this age are turning into misogynistic, emotionally stunted little Andrew Tates.

Parts of both are true. A lot of boys encounter pressure, misogynistic language and manosphere ideas, and a meaningful minority accept some of them. What neither picture survives is being used as a description of boys in general, and the surveys below are specific enough to show why.

The same 16 questions are also set up as a quiz, which asks for your number before it gives you the real one and takes about 10 minutes. Every answer is below, so guess first if you want to.

The 2026 RSHE statutory guidance puts this in the secondary curriculum, which is why it is on a PSHE lead’s desk this year.

Exposure is not endorsement

What boys encounter

The pressure is real and boys can name it themselves. In the Department for Education’s Parent, Pupil and Learner Voice survey of December 2025, 42% of male KS3 pupils in England agreed that boys often feel pressure to not cry, to man up, or to misbehave. Among KS4 boys the figure is 51%.

A second question in the same survey asks about behaviour rather than attitude, which makes it the stronger finding of the two. 33% of KS3 boys agreed that they sometimes act differently to match what friends and other pupils expect from boys, such as acting tough or not expressing their feelings. Only 25% disagreed. The largest single group, 30%, said neither, which is worth noticing: for a lot of boys this is pressure they can describe without it clearly governing what they do.

The language is in the corridor too. 43% of all KS3 pupils had heard comments about how boys should behave or feel at least some days in the previous month, things like “boys don’t cry”, “man up” and “boys will be boys”. 54% said never. Of the boys who had heard them, and this follow-up was put only to boys, 57% said the comments bothered them at least some of the time.

Andrew Tate’s reach was real as well. In YouGov’s Children’s Omnibus of September 2023, 84% of British boys aged 13 to 15 had heard of him. Only 16% had never heard of him at all.

What boys accept

In the same survey, 23% of boys aged 13 to 15 had a good view of Andrew Tate. 53% had a bad view, 40% of them “very bad”. Of the boys who had heard of him, 67% disagreed with his views on how women should be treated and 13% agreed.

Quoting either of those figures without the other produces a false picture. 84% on its own reads as a crisis. 23% on its own reads as no problem at all.

The same shape holds across the manosphere propositions in YouGov’s Masculinity and boys survey of April 2025, which put a series of paired statements to 460 boys aged 13 to 17 in Great Britain.

Asked whether heterosexual women are biologically hardwired to be attracted to more aggressive, dominant men, 2% agreed and 82% chose the alternative, that different women have different tastes in men. Asked about the purpose of feminism, 10% said it exists to put men down and 66% said it exists to bring women up to be equal to men. Asked whether a man who pays for dinner and drinks on a date can fairly expect sex, 3% said he can and 77% said explicitly that he cannot. Asked whether women should dress in a way their partner finds attractive or however they choose, 6% chose the partner and 80% chose however they choose.

Explicit endorsement of these forms of sexual entitlement is uncommon among boys in this survey. That is a narrower claim than it sounds: the questions measure agreement with two specific statements, not sexual entitlement as a whole attitude.

A minority belief can still do harm

One figure in the same survey goes the other way. Asked to choose between the statement that the large majority of heterosexual women only want to date the most physically attractive 20% of men, and the statement that women do not put such strong emphasis on physical attractiveness and have much broader criteria, 18% of boys chose the first. 45% chose the second. 13% said neither and 24% did not know.

Nearly one in five is not a fringe, and it is the highest uptake of any of the manosphere propositions the survey tested. It is also a minority, and the group that rejected the claim outright was more than twice its size. A further 24% could not say, which is a larger group than the one that accepted it.

Set against the 2% who accepted the hardwired claim, the two results show that boys do not take manosphere claims as a package. Uptake varies enormously depending on the specific claim, which means the persuasive mechanism matters more than the personality promoting it.

Ofcom’s Understanding Online Communications Among Children, published in 2026 asked UK children what they had personally experienced online in the last year. 27% of girls aged 11 to 13 had received mean or rude messages because they were girls. For girls aged 16 to 17 the figure is also 27%.

Put beside the low endorsement figures, that looks like a contradiction, and it is not one. The two surveys measure different things. One asked boys whether they agree with statements. The other asked girls what happened to them. Low prevalence of explicit misogynistic belief among boys is entirely compatible with a lot of girls experiencing misogyny, and neither figure can be used to check the other.

So “hardly any boys think this” and “there is no problem” are not the same claim, and a lesson that treats them as the same will lose the girls in the room.

Masculine is not the same as desirable

Two questions in the YouGov survey were asked separately, and together they are the most useful finding in any of this.

55% of boys aged 13 to 17 described being aggressive as a masculine trait. 2% described it as a positive one, and 85% called it a negative one outright.

Boys strongly associate some traits with masculinity while judging those same traits negatively. That much is incontrovertible from the answers. Why they answered the first question as they did is not something the survey establishes: a boy calling aggression masculine might be reporting a stereotype he has noticed, his own concept of manhood, what he sees men doing, or some mixture. What the data does show is that the association and the approval come apart, and on aggression they come apart by 53 points.

The same split runs through the other traits the survey tested.

Trait	Seen as masculine	Seen as a positive trait
Aggressive	55%	2%
Dominant	49%	11%
Emotionally reserved	41%	13%
Caring	1%	94%

Caring reverses it completely. Almost no boys call it masculine and almost all of them call it good.

A third question asks directly what matters in a man. 94% of boys said being caring is important. Kindness, honesty and reliability each reached 95%. Being aggressive reached 6%, with 89% saying it is not important and 63% saying not important at all. Dominance reached 19%, with 71% saying it is not important.

That is boys’ own account of what a good man is, given in their own answers rather than assembled from what adults say about them. The distinction a unit on this topic usually sets out to teach, between masculinity and the restrictive expectations attached to it, is one boys already hold. It is easier to build on something a class can be shown they already think than to introduce it as a correction.

The typical boy

The isolated boy disappearing down an internet rabbit hole is a real case and a serious one, but he is not the typical boy, and the difference shapes how staff talk about the whole subject.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s analysis of loneliness among boys and young men in England, published in June 2026 reports that boys aged 10 to 15 have a median of five close friends. 2% said they feel lonely all the time. The report gives 13% for young men aged 16 to 25, but the two age bands were offered different answer options, so those figures are not comparable with each other, and the report says so.

Not here, but somewhere

There is one measured perception gap worth putting beside all of this.

YouGov’s Teacher Track survey of April 2025 asked 1,016 teachers how much of a problem misogynistic attitudes and behaviours among boys are, in three different places. Taking secondary teachers on their own, so the comparison is like for like, 16% called it a very big problem among boys at their own school and 28% called it a very big problem in UK schools in general. Counting fairly big problems too, 67% saw a problem at their own school and 79% saw one in schools generally. Across all teachers, 37% called it a very big problem in society at large, the highest of the three.

The further the question gets from the corridor a teacher actually walks down, the bigger the problem looks. That gap has two available readings and the survey does not settle which is right. Teachers may be underrating what happens in their own school. Or they may be reporting their own school accurately and reading everywhere else through the same coverage as everyone else.

There is an easy inference for a school to make in either direction, and it comes from the same place. The boys who repeat this material out loud are the ones who generate incidents, and the ones who quietly disagree generate nothing. A staffroom working from incident logs is working from a self-selecting sample, and so is a newspaper. The same applies to exposure: boys who feel the pressure and say nothing about it generate no incidents either.

None of which tells anyone their own school is fine. It means the two pictures are built from different evidence, and only one of them can be checked against what boys say when you ask them.

How not to use these figures

A sentence of the form “boys your age increasingly believe X”, where X is a minority attitude, tells a boy that the belief is normal for him. It advertises the thing it means to challenge.

Almost every figure above runs the other way, and the majority position among boys is the one that rejects the proposition. That makes it possible to name the harmful minority without conceding the definition of normal boyhood to it.

Every figure, and who was asked

The bases differ from question to question, and not only between surveys. The four DfE figures below come from one survey on four different bases. A figure means something different depending on who was asked, so here is all of it grouped by the survey it came from.

DfE, Parent, Pupil and Learner Voice: December 2025

England, secondary pupils in years 7 to 11. Fieldwork 2 to 9 December 2025. Published report.

Finding	Figure	Base
Agree boys often feel pressure to not cry, man up or misbehave	42%	Male KS3 pupils, n=418
Sometimes act differently to match what others expect of boys	33%	Male KS3 pupils, n=418
Heard comments about how boys should behave, last month	43%	All KS3 pupils, n=867
Bothered by those comments at least some of the time	57%	Male KS3 who had heard them, n=215

YouGov, Children’s Omnibus: Andrew Tate

1,106 children aged 6 to 15. Fieldwork 1 to 7 September 2023. The figures used here are the boys aged 13 to 15 within that sample, weighted base n=158. Published article.

Finding	Figure	Base
Had heard of Andrew Tate	84%	Boys 13 to 15, n=158
Had a good view of him	23%	Boys 13 to 15, n=158

The 67% who disagreed with his views on how women should be treated sits on a smaller base again, n=133, because that question was put only to the boys who had heard of him.

YouGov, Masculinity and boys

460 boys aged 13 to 17 in Great Britain. Fieldwork 22 April to 8 May 2025. Full data tables.

Finding	Figure	Base
Believe most women only want the most attractive 20% of men	18%	n=460
Believe women are hardwired to prefer aggressive, dominant men	2%	n=460
Think feminism exists to put men down	10%	n=460
Think a man who pays for a date can fairly expect sex	3%	n=460
Think women should dress as their partner finds attractive	6%	n=460
See being aggressive as a masculine trait	55%	n=460
See being aggressive as a positive trait	2%	n=460
Say being caring is important for a man	94%	n=460

Ofcom, Understanding Online Communications Among Children

4,097 UK children aged 11 to 17, fieldwork by Savanta, 13 February to 19 March 2026. The question was put only to children who use an app or platform, n=2,789, and this option was shown only to girls. Published report.

Finding	Figure	Base
Received mean or rude messages online for being a girl, last year	27%	Girls 11 to 13, n=628

YouGov, Teacher Track

1,016 teachers. Fieldwork 11 to 21 April 2025. The published tables do not state the survey’s geography. Published article, full data tables.

Finding	Figure	Base
Secondary teachers calling misogyny a very big problem among boys at their own school	16%	Secondary teachers at a school with boys, n=375
Secondary teachers calling it a very big problem in UK schools in general	28%	Secondary teachers, n=396
Secondary teachers seeing a problem at their own school, very or fairly big	67%	Secondary teachers at a school with boys, n=375
Secondary teachers seeing a problem in UK schools in general, very or fairly big	79%	Secondary teachers, n=396
All teachers calling it a very big problem in society generally	37%	All teachers, n=1,016

DCMS, Loneliness, isolation and social connection among boys and young men in England

Published 15 June 2026. Secondary analysis by NatCen of Understanding Society wave 15, collected between 2023 and 2025, England. Published report.

Finding	Figure	Base
Feel lonely all the time	2%	Boys 10 to 15. No base published for this figure
Median number of close friends	5	Boys 10 to 15. No base published for this figure

Trusted resources

• DfE Parent, Pupil and Learner Voice: December 2025. The stereotypes section carries the KS3 figures above, split by key stage and by sex.
• YouGov, Masculinity and boys, April 2025. Full data tables, including the paired statements and both trait batteries.
• Ofcom, Understanding Online Communications Among Children, 2026. Children’s own reports of what they have experienced online, broken down by age and sex.
• Challenging the narrative: thinking critically about misogyny, the PSHE Association’s free KS3 to KS4 lesson pack, developed with academics at the University of York. Downloading needs a free account.
• Our post on talking to boys about masculinity, misogyny and online influencers, which covers the classroom practice rather than the evidence.

Everything on this page is on our masculinity and misogyny topic page, alongside the questions pupils have actually handed in about it. If you want the evidence as an activity rather than an article, the quiz runs in a classroom with mini whiteboards and in a staff meeting with teachers, and the Year 9 teaching sequence is where it sits in a unit.