India's Teenage Boys And Masculinity: Sticking to a Toxic Script

Rahul*, a 17-year-old student from Kolkata, used to spend time on social media platforms, says Smaranika Tripathy, consultant psychologist at Belle Vue Clinic, Kolkata. He would scroll through posts, forget about them, and go live his life. But that was before he stumbled on content generated by a bunch of self-proclaimed men’s rights influencers. The influencers were on a mission to turn young boys like Rahul into alpha males—‘real’ men—who own the world. Winners, not wimps. All women, according to the influencers, were manipulative gold diggers. A ‘real’ man’s job was to show them their place, to teach them to follow orders. The more Rahul consumed their warped worldview, the more he changed. At home, he started to sneer at his sister’s academic achievements. At school, he would mock his female classmates, “Why bother to study and find a job? You girls will just marry rich.” When a teacher overheard him saying that women should not be leaders because “they just create drama”, disciplinary action was initiated against him.

About six months ago, a top-ranked IB school in Bandra suspended eight male students for their WhatsApp chats about planning to rape their female classmates. The chats—made public by the mothers of the girls and published in a local daily—included talk about rape, one-night stands, homophobic slurs, and body-shaming of their female classmates. In another corner of Mumbai, Ruchira* (41), a working mother, discovered nude pictures of women on her 14-year-old son’s computer by accident one day. “For a moment, I made peace with it,” she says. “It’s normal for kids his age to watch porn.” But when she scanned his search history, she found several searches on “how to tame women” and a stash of abusive content too. She was shocked. Had her son harmed any girls? Was he planning to do so? His teachers called him “kind and helpful”. He had plenty of friends and was popular at school. But what if nobody really knew what was going on in his head?

Dr Jitendra Nagpal, psychiatrist and head of Mental Health and Life Skills Promotion at Moolchand Hospital, Delhi, sees adolescence as a volatile time, “a phase of self-exploration and uncertainty”. Since India has the largest adolescent population in the world, he points out that adolescents’ wellbeing is not just a concern of individual families but a public one. Adolescence is a time of flux, marked by quicksilver emotional and physical changes. Not an easy road to navigate, it has become even trickier terrain in the digital age. Developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg notes in his seminal book that an adolescent’s brain is more vulnerable to the effects of stressors. This increases the possibility of outbursts, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and eating disorders. The human brain’s pre-frontal cortex, which regulates emotions, is not fully formed during the teenage years. So, there is a big gap between the reasoning and judgement skills of adults and those of adolescents. Social media and big-tech-powered algorithms impact adolescents’ psyche differently. No surprise that the stated motto of most big-tech companies is: catch them young, the younger the better. Once they are hooked, they are pretty much guaranteed to stay hooked.

Technology is not all evil. It has gifted incredible opportunities to youngsters for broadening their horizons. But its dark side draws them into spaces where misogyny and extreme rhetoric against women thrive. There are online platforms that reinforce progressive ideals, but there are also any number of them out there that amplify toxic narratives. “The impact of digital exposure is huge and it has grown since the Covid-19 lockdown when many youngsters were exposed to social media and the internet as part of mandatory schooling and recreational activities,” says Tanu Choksi, a psychologist based in South Mumbai, who holds therapy sessions for young children and teenagers. “Isolation, aloofness and free access to the internet with no parental control can lead to a disastrous trail of behaviours,” Choksi and Janaki Bhand, a counsellor at Don Bosco Prafulta Counselling Centre, Mumbai, point out.

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In a country as diverse as India, multiple factors shape an adolescent male’s personality and his perceptions of masculinity. Religion, caste, class, familial factors, tradition, cultural norms, geography, the gender hierarchy deeply ingrained in society—all come into play. But whether you are a teenager living in North, South, East or West India, when it comes to the male archetype, “It’s always the same old stereotype,” says Meghna Joshi, school counsellor at The Indian School, Delhi. “A certain script of masculinity is constantly reinforced. By peers, by the media, by the culture. If you’re not violent; if you have more female friends; you’re soft. You’re not one of the boys.”

Young boys, who are keen to carve out an identity of their own, are inundated with problematic messages like these about masculinity. Those who don’t fit the prescribed definition of manhood—tough, abrasive, emotionally repressed, domineering—are shamed, laughed at, or pressurised to change. Frustrated adolescents may retort to self-harm or lash out against others, either verbally or through acts of physical violence. Many young boys haven’t cultivated the social and emotional skills necessary to cope with failure and rejection. Spending a disproportionate amount of time online and confining themselves to the virtual world leaves them unprepared for real-life interactions with the opposite sex. They adopt the swagger and aggressiveness of all-male online communities as their own. Building on the biased narratives about women peddled online, they shape their views on how women should behave in real life; what they should be wearing, what physical attributes the ideal woman must possess (fair skin, size zero, to name a few).

Adolescent dilemmas have existed in the past as well, says Dr C.J. John, Chief Psychiatrist, Medical Trust Hospital, Ernakulam, Kerala. “But the toxicity of the ecosystem we live in is not changing,” he warns. “Boys [in India] are being brought up with a sense of entitlement. Hence, they are unable to take ‘no’ for an answer gracefully.” Speaking of entitlement, Dr Nagpal brings up the telling example of food practises followed by many Indian households. “I see families where the best food—ghee, high-protein items—are reserved for adolescent boys,” he says. “Girls are told to eat cautiously, to maintain a certain figure. But boys are told, ‘eat chicken, have four eggs, build muscle—you’re the man.”’

Anuckriti Garg, a freelance Mental Health Counsellor from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, distinctly remembers a twelve-year-old boy she met when she was interning at a local government school. He was puzzled because girls were studying at his school and sitting next to him in class while his mother wasn’t allowed to step out of their house, even to buy vegetables from the market. He said he wasn’t a woman-hater. But he simply couldn’t think of them as his equals. Kolkata-based career consultant and student counsellor Mohua Roy mentions a 16-year-old boy she counselled. His father is an orthopaedic surgeon and his mother, an anaesthesiologist. “It was clear that the boy saw his father as the dominant, successful one,” says Roy. “He wanted to pick a career that would make him rich and powerful just like his father. He was dismissive about his mother. He told me, ‘Ma is there, she does her job…but she doesn’t have any idea about most things in the world.”’

Probing the roots of misogyny in the Indian milieu, Garg says that “many biases come from your own family”. Young boys are impacted by conversations at home and the biases older family members flaunt. If the father is all-powerful at home and the mother is sidelined, that sends out a clear message to adolescents. Family culture does play a role in shaping masculine identities, says Dr Amit Sen, Psychiatrist and Founder of Children’s First, a child and adolescent mental health clinic in Delhi.

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Ritvik* was 13 when his parents got divorced. Many of his relatives and family friends blamed his mother for the divorce. “She had an extramarital affair,” Ritvik would say, parroting his relatives. He chose to ignore the fact that his father had slapped his mother more than once. What lessons do teenage boys like Ritvik learn when violence against women is casually dismissed or normalised by families who bank on homilies like “boys will be boys”? It’s not just families. Popular culture props up male leads who use abusive language or body shame women. When a hero stalks the heroine onscreen in a Bollywood blockbuster, insisting that her ‘no’ means ‘yes’, he is valourised for it. Nupur D. Paiva, psychologist and author of the book, Love and Rage: The Inner Worlds of Children, says that young boys gravitating towards a hyper-masculine space is not a recent development. This has culturally existed in India for ages, “whether it’s through Bollywood or popular music”.

Today, social media provides a platform for adolescent boys to showcase a curated macho image. But the image they are encouraged to build is “narrowly defined and ultimately unsustainable,” says Dr Nagpal. He recalls a boy who cracked under this pressure, developing “frustration- aggression syndrome”. The boy had absorbed the carefully curated image circulated on social media and advertising, and his self-worth became totally linked to this image. When faced with the challenges of real-life interactions—such as rejection or failure—his constructed persona began to crack. The boy’s internal conflict, fuelled by the need for constant validation and his inability to express vulnerability, led to cycles of narcissistic self-aggrandisement followed by explosive aggression when his self-image was challenged in any way. According to Dr Nagpal, this pattern of behaviour, seen in several of his patients, is a direct consequence of the toxic masculinity in our culture and promoted online as well. But this brand of masculinity is not winning hearts or minds. “Girls generally consider the boy’s character and academic skills—tests which many of these boys fail to pass,” says Dr Amar Fettle, Nodal Officer for the Adolescent Division of the Department of Mental Health, Government of Kerala. “This leads to anger and depression, which turns into hatred toward women and girls.”

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Amidst growing concerns about Indian adolescents being sucked into the toxic online “manosphere”, influenced by controversial figures from the West like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, Paiva says, “Rewind a few years back and I can think of the ‘Bois Locker Room’ incident [where a group of male students from South Delhi schools shared objectionable photos of women, including underage girls, on an Instagram group and allegedly chatted about raping them], the Nirbhaya rape in Delhi…” She argues that violence against women doesn’t need to be promoted by Western creators when it is already permissible in varying degrees within our culture.

Misogyny has always been in the air. Whenever a horror like the ‘Bois Locker Room’ incident unfolds, you will hear plenty of online chatter about how this was just “boy’s talk”, how thinking is not the same as doing, and that we shouldn’t punish men who think violent thoughts, but don’t act on them. Parents, with the best of intentions, curtail girls’ access to the internet and social media in the wake of such incidents. They ask their daughters to set stricter privacy settings for their accounts or delete them altogether. They set tougher curfews for them, hoping to keep them safe from abusive men and trolls.

Gendered stereotypes abound. They are enshrined in school textbooks; they seep into the everyday language we use to communicate with each other. After the brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor at RG Kar Hospital in Kolkata in August 2024, many conversations about violence against women and sexual assault went on in Joshi’s classroom. To help her students understand how they may be subconsciously promoting sexism, she assigned them field work to track how much gender-specific language they use. She found out that more than a few adolescents in her class used gendered insults when they talked to their peers.

“Many of these insults—Ma-behen ki gaaliyan—centre the female body, often in ways that dehumanise or violate it,” she says. “They don’t just insult, they normalise a culture of violence.” For boys, using these words can generate social capital and a false sense of being in control; silence or gentleness, in contrast, can invite ridicule. Not speaking this way is a conscious choice. Many adolescent boys lack the courage to switch to a different vocabulary, and swim against the tide of toxic masculinity.

Adolescents grapple with their own set of challenges. Parents need large reserves of empathy, patience and understanding to build trust and bond with them. We may be living in the information age, but parenting still remains a trial-and-error endeavour. Parenting guides and manuals—there’s no dearth of them on the shelves—can only help so much. Handling teenagers, who crave independence as well as acceptance, and are prone to risky behaviour and rash decisions at times, is definitely a challenge. No one can offer a one-size-fits-all-situations solution for parents.

Paiva has explored fathers and fatherhood in the Indian context in detail in Love and Rage. She says that the father—the male figure in Indian society—is always cast as the provider. “He’s a providing figure; a disciplining, harsh figure,” she says. “This is no longer working for young men.” The worrisome thing is that care is assigned to femininity as if the caring masculine is an impossibility. “And there is no room in masculinity for the man who wants to be caring,” says Paiva. If the father is not recast as a human figure—vulnerable and capable of engaging with his emotions—what chance do sons have of learning to deal with failure, accepting their own flaws, and building genuine relationships? Young boys need spaces where they can drop the mask, be vulnerable, and feel safe in sharing their problems. In the absence of safe spaces, they tend to retreat into cyberspace, where misinformation is in free flow.

“The most commonly shared concern by adolescents is that they are not accepted and respected as they are by the adult world—by parents and teachers,” says Dr John. Some youngsters reject the term “adolescent problems” itself, arguing that the problems spring from adults and their inability to respect boundaries. Zeena C., who works as an adolescent counsellor at a government school in Thrissur, Kerala, hears this complaint from students on a daily basis. “The root of the problem lies in parenting,” says Zeena. “There is no training to be a parent. Children have a lot of exposure to the world as they are living in the digital era. In government schools, where most of the students come from the lower strata of society, the parents are helpless. Many of them don’t even know how to handle a smartphone. When we find a harmful app on a student’s phone, the parents tell us they need their child’s help to delete them.”

Currently, around 1,000 school counsellors work in government schools under the Women & Child Development Department, Kerala. In addition to this, around 100 counsellors, who work under the mental health programme, reach out to adolescents in schools. The schools in the private sector have counsellors of their own. “If teachers have sufficient time and patience to listen to children, our schools don’t even need permanent counsellors,” says Zeena. “What all these children want is to be heard.”

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The environments at school and at home play a crucial role in shaping an adolescent boy’s thought process. Are enough conversations about masculinity and regressive stereotypes happening there? Joshi says that “deeply rooted ideas of masculinity, reinforced through media and peer culture, often go unquestioned in school settings—unless there is an intentional effort to disrupt them”. Once, when she was having a discussion on gender with Class 8 students, a boy began to challenge her, quoting misogynistic ideas from an unnamed influencer. “‘Are you talking about Andrew Tate?” she asked him. The class looked shocked because they didn’t think she’d know what they were talking about. That moment built a bridge of trust and opened up the conversation. Joshi says, “We explored it together—‘What’s the appeal?’ ‘Why does this type of masculinity feel powerful?’”

Therapist and healer Roshan Mansukhani notes that schools are more aware about the need for conversations on gender and more proactive in holding mental health workshops now. About a decade ago, as he began noticing troubling behavioural changes among teenagers when social media was still emerging, he used to receive blank responses to his proposals for holding counselling sessions for teenagers in high schools. Dr Sen believes that real change has to start at the school level. Open dialogue is part of the solution to combating the narrative around masculinity promoted online, in the media and among peers. Dr Sen is glad some schools have opened up emotionally safe spaces where students can speak freely. In these spaces, “both boys and girls are able to discuss matters about growing up; ask uncomfortable questions about who they are, who their teachers are, who their parents are, and what values they carry.”

Top-down messaging, which has been the norm in most schools, is ineffective. “This falls short in addressing the emotional needs of young boys,” says Dr Nagpal. He recommends redefining the school curriculum and creating environments where peer educators and mentors lead the way. This approach is essential for nurturing boys’ emotional growth and resilience. Sheetal Lakhani, a clinical psychologist who has worked extensively with underprivileged children, hones adolescents’ social and emotional skills through creative outlets like drawing and art. Art helps them to unleash their creativity and express bottled-up emotions.

Initiatives like UNICEF’s gender transformative programmes in schools, active in 12 districts of Maharashtra, work to dismantle discriminatory gender norms among adolescents. “We involve teachers, parents and community members in role-play and activities to convey the discriminatory practices that are normalised in day-to-day life,” says Swati Mohapatra, Communication Specialist, UNICEF Maharashtra. The programme has yielded positive results in preventing child marriages of girls, involving boys in household chores and allowing young girls to pursue education and income-generating opportunities.

(Some names have been changed to protect privacy)

(With inputs from Aranya Mukerji, Shahina K.K., Jheelam Basu, Jinit Parmar, Pritha Vashishth & Shweta Desai)

Vineetha Mokkil is assistant editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories