BOYS ARE AUTHORS OF OWN DESTINY

WHEN one of our best-selling novelists spoke recently of the emotional and cultural crisis crippling Aussie men, I imagined thousands of his fans across the country sitting up to take notice.

Tim Winton, one of the most cherished literary architects and thinkers of our era, recently gave a speech about his new novel The Shepherd’s Hut, an uncomfortable account of a youth’s miserable, abusesoaked life.

Winton has, in his talks promoting the book, implored men to help our boys rid themselves of the patriarchy and misogyny to which they are hopelessly “shackled”.

Boys need help, he says. They’re under attack and we cannot stand idly by. Mr Winton, tell me something I don’t know.

The author has lamented the lack of constructive rituals to signpost the road to manhood, an Achilles heel for many parents including myself. “We’ve scraped our culture bare” of them and we are “not sure what we’ve replaced them” with, he says.

“The poverty of mainstream modern Australian rituals is astounding.” True. But I would go one further and argue that our obsession with feminising boys has relegated traditional “bloke” activities to the bin.

The best man, our culture says relentlessly, is the one most like a woman. I’m probably not supposed to say that in polite company.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to hearing my son’s verdict on Winton’s latest read as he is an important voice.

But while well-intentioned, Winton has also missed an opportunity to be proactive rather than reactive and help end a tiresome, unhelpful debate about “toxic masculinity” – a loaded phrase whose users too often seem to think it redundant.

After all, the implication goes, is there any other kind of masculinity?

Toxic doesn’t just imply something unhealthy – it suggests something insidiously dangerous, deadly even.

Somehow I can’t reconcile this image when I say goodnight to my teenage son and watch him sleep, his adolescent muscles twitching with touching vulnerability as he slumbers.

Toxic, no. Misunderstood, yes. I wonder if being a young male in this age feels more like standing in quicksand.

Worse still, Winton has done a deep dive into the progressive playbook by suggesting boys need to, yes, check their privilege.

“Boys need help,” he wrote. “And, yes, men need fixing – I’m mindful of that. Males arrive in our community on the coat-tails of an almost endless chain of unexamined privilege. I don’t deny that for a second.”

I’m not a bloke but I take some issue with this wild generalisation. It feels a bit like he is selling the brotherhood out and it’s uncomfortable.

Where is the solidarity, the mateship for which Aussie men are held up for all over the world?

And then later: “Yes, boys

need their unexamined privilege curtailed. Just as they need certain prescribed privileges and behaviours made available to them.”

Odd coming from the author of The Shepherd’s Hut, whose main character is singularly male and as unprivileged as you can imagine.

Mr Winton, you’re a grandfather and I’m a mother of a teenage son.

As a woman who relishes the freedom women before me have won on my behalf, but who acknowledges there is a biological difference between the sexes, emotionally and physiologically, I want to know: What is your solution?

From where I sit, I just see more rhetoric that doesn’t really help my son hope for a peaceful and equitable world for men and women.