Introduction
Methodology
Method
Data Collection
Analysis
Participant Demographics
Category | Definition |
---|---|
Type of expert stakeholder | |
Community | Expert stakeholders are part of organisations that focus on developing communities |
Consultant | Expert stakeholders are privately run, often single-person enterprises |
Government | Expert stakeholders are part of a government department or program |
Expert stakeholder level | |
Local | Expert stakeholders are focused on supporting local community, so may be restricted to one or more cities or regional centres in providing services, programs, or initiatives |
State | Expert stakeholders are focused on services, programs, or initiatives in one state |
Multi-state | Expert stakeholders provide services, programs, or initiatives across one or more states |
National | Expert stakeholders provide services, programs, or initiatives across Australia (nation-wide) |
Focus of expert stakeholder | |
Boys and men | Programs that are focused on addressing men’s experiences of masculinity or disenfranchisement and supporting young boys and men |
Emotional and/or physical health and wellbeing | Programs that are focused on improving emotional and physical wellbeing, including mental health, diet and exercise, and preventing disease |
Gendered violence prevention | Programs that are focused on addressing gender inequalities, family, domestic and intimate partner violence, and sexual violence |
Sexual health and wellbeing | Programs that focus on relationships and sexuality education in schools, and sexual health promotion, policy, and sexually transmissible infection prevention |
Sport and gendered violence prevention | Gendered violence prevention programs that are run through existing sporting clubs |
Name* | Type of organisation** | Organisation level** | Focus of organisation** | Demographic focus** | State | Interview type |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Alyssa | Community | Multi-state | Boys and men | Young boys and men | NSW, QLD | Single |
Andrew | Community | Local | Sport and gendered violence prevention | Young boys and men | VIC | Single |
Aubree | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | Young people (school aged) | National | Group |
Bailey | Community | Multi-state | Boys and men | Young boys and men | NSW, QLD | Group |
Betty | Community | Multi-state | Sexual health and wellbeing | Young people (school aged) | ACT, NSW, NT, TAS, VIC | Group |
Blake | Community | State | Sexual health and wellbeing | Young people (school aged) | VIC | Group |
Carly | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | Young people (school aged) | National | Group |
Debra | Community | State | Sexual health and wellbeing | Women | VIC | Single |
Declan | Community | Multi-state | Boys and men | Young boys and men | NSW, QLD | Group |
Derek | Community | State | Sexual health and wellbeing | Young people (school aged) | VIC | Group |
Duke | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | Young people (school aged) | National | Group |
Elsa | Community | State | Sexual health and wellbeing | Young people (school aged) | VIC | Group |
Hannah | Government | State | Sexual health and wellbeing | All genders/ages | VIC | Single |
Janelle | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | Young people (school aged) | National | Group |
Jason | Community | Local | Sport and gendered violence prevention | Young boys and men | SA | Single |
Josie | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | All genders/ages | National | Group |
Julie | Private | Local | Sexual health and wellbeing | Young people (school aged) | VIC | Single |
Mahasin | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | All genders/ages | VIC | Group |
Marcia | Private | Local | Gendered violence prevention | Young people (school aged) | VIC | Single |
Melissa | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | Adults | National | Single |
Nadia | Government | State | Emotional and/or physical health and wellbeing | Young boys and men | VIC | Group |
Patrick | Community | State | Emotional and/or physical health and wellbeing | Young boys and men | ACT | Group |
Steven | Community | National | Gendered violence prevention | All genders/ages | National | Group |
Findings
Hesitation and Lack of Adequate Information
Derek (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): I’d say the number one most popular question would be along the lines of ‘What happens if I have sex with someone and then afterwards they take their consent back?’ […] I think that’s what they’re most scared of, they’re absolutely petrified that they’re going to have sexual activity with someone and then get in trouble afterwards.Blake (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): An issue that comes out when speaking to boys is, ‘Well, you know anything I might do might be considered to be inappropriate or might be considered to have crossed the line.’ […] And I think sometimes they want a straight answer to ‘Is this okay or is it not?’, and obviously there’s a lot of grey area and uncertainty around consent and things like that.
Here, Elsa notes that boys are positioned in active roles, while women remain in passive roles, highlighting that such approaches can be gender reinforcing rather than gender transformative (Gilbert, 2018).Elsa (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): They’re the ones that have to get the consent; you know, it’s never that they might be [the ones] saying no.
Carly (Community, gendered violence prevention): I think it’s really important to have a conversation with young men about love and what that means to them […] What does a meaningful relationship mean to them now and do they want that, or do they want to have a lot of different sexual partners and just experiment?
Bailey, in running men and masculinity programs, highlights how concepts of “loyalty” become pivotal to boys and young men’s understandings and engagements with romantic and sexual relationships with women, premised around ideas of ownership and subordination. Marcia highlights the need to shift these conversations about sex and relationships for boys and young men.Bailey (Community, boys and men): It’s really interesting, because they’re always talking about loyalty, and the woman has to be loyal, and that word comes up all the time […] It seems that they’re really preoccupied with the concept of loyalty, right. And, like, how a woman is meant to show her loyalty to a man.Marcia (Private, gendered violence prevention): The sort of discourse that’s being set for them around sexuality is very male centric, very androcentric in terms of pleasure, and we need to help them break out of that.
Influence of Pornography
Marcia, a leading expert in the influence of pornography use on young people, highlights a few consequences of boys and young men’s potential consumption of pornography:Alyssa (Community, boys and men): You know, teenage boys only really get concerned when you say, ‘You know, your dick might stop working.’
Patrick, who provides mentoring programs for young men, reflects on the stories he hears from participants about young men and women’s pornography use:Marcia (Community, gendered violence prevention): Young men are getting a whole range of really problematic messages from pornography – including about gender equality […] Repeated association between porn imagery and experiences of pleasure can create neural pathways, and for most young men, they’re seeing porn literally years before they’ve had a sexual encounter with an actual partner.
Patrick highlights how pornography may influence both young men and young women, and that may ultimately shape negative sexual experiences, resting on assumptions of what a partner expects without effective communication.Patrick (Community, mental and physical health and wellbeing): But it’s not only the boys watching the porn, it’s the girls watching the porn that are going, ‘Oh, he wants me to do that’ and then he’s watching it going, ‘Well, she said that; I don’t really want to do [that]’, and then you end up in this space where, as far as I can tell with some of the stories I’ve heard, you’re going ‘Wow, neither of them wanted to do it, but because it was in the movie, that’s what they end up doing,’ and you’re going, ‘How is that possible?’
In response to this, expert stakeholders like Josie, who works in gendered violence prevention programs, advocate for a pornography literacy:Mahasin (Community, gendered violence prevention): Both young men and young women told us that they can see the problems with pornography, but there just isn’t enough education to support them in being able to critically think about that and take that feeling of discomfort further.
This would, as Josie highlights, assist young men and women in making sense of messaging and images (Crabbe & Flood, 2021).Josie (Community, gendered violence prevention): What we’d really like to see is increased literacy with young people around pornography […] so we want to make sure that young people who are watching porn are seeing some of those things [violence towards women] as they’re occurring, that they can apply some analysis and understanding.
Lack of Sexual Health Promotion Focused on Heterosexual Men
Elsa notes a concern around public messaging regarding penis size and penis shaming, highlighting a lack of discussion around this and how it might be shaping boys and young men’s everyday experiences of their bodies. Research has noted that penis size can be a major source of anxiety for men who may not feel they are “large” enough, as there is limited exposure to a diversity of sizes and shapes to support body positivity (Sharp & Oates, 2019).Elsa (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): I don’t think men are included in the conversation enough about how these issues [body-shaming] actually impact them as well […] I had a really interesting discussion come up in one of my classes, which is something that I feel really strongly about, is penis shaming, because it’s something that’s actually really big in the media at the moment, and there’s people that are like protesting with signs saying, you know, ‘racism is small dick energy’. And there’s this equation where you equate a small penis size to these horrible values.
Debra highlights the impact that contraceptive options have had for women, in which there is an overriding public discourse that positions women as responsible for sexual and reproductive health, with men potentially lacking the necessary skills to navigate those conversations (e.g., Brown, 2015; Wigginton et al., 2018).Debra (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): All that sexual reproductive health contraception is targeted at women. The assumption that women are in control of contraception and, yeah, so I can imagine all that leading into the power dynamics we know that happen in male and female heterosexual relationships because of how men and women are raised and what they’re taught […] If a woman did come to the bedroom or a relationship ready to negotiate sex, it being a challenge, if the partner doesn’t know the same.
Both Debra and Hannah go on to highlight some of the consequences of this, including reproductive coercion, increasing rates of STIs among heterosexual men, and that the long-term serious impacts of STIs (i.e., infertility, cervical cancer) disproportionately impact women:Hannah (Government, sexual health and wellbeing): [Discussing men and STI prevention] I think also one of the things that we found, and we found this over a couple of years with the STI testing week campaign, is it’s really hard to have a campaign that resonates with young men […] We haven’t necessarily thought ‘heterosexual males, how do we reach them, support them with targeted messages’ – and we’ve tended to have more of a focus of – we might pick up that heterosexual male if they fall within another priority population group.
Debra (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): [Discussing impacts of lack of contraception promotion aimed towards men] Coercing a woman into getting pregnant when she doesn’t want to, or coercing her into keeping a baby when she doesn’t want to, or coercing her into having an abortion where she doesn’t want to […] It’s quite complex because that happens, that is a form of violence.Hannah (Government, sexual health and wellbeing): [Discussing men and STI prevention] Hetero men, we’re sitting at an increasing rate [of diagnosed STI infection] than what we have seen in the past […] The majority of the long-term implications of those STI infections are experienced by women not men – the short term is where you might have a rash or a bit of soreness or a discharge or something, but, you know, otherwise it’s no big deal.
Hannah notes three distinct difficulties. First, as research suggests, cisgender heterosexual men in Australia often avoid engaging in medical health services, particularly sexual health–related services unless they are necessary (e.g., Latreille et al., 2014). Second, health clinics are concerned about bringing up sexual health with young men if it is not the reason the patient is visiting the clinic. This echoes other international studies that have noted that GPs are concerned about discussing sensitive health topics, like sexual health, with young people if young people do not broach the topic first (Jarrett et al., 2011). Third, as young cisgender heterosexual men do not experience menstruation or have need for hormonal contraception, there are less opportunities for them to be engaged in conversations about sexual health in an organic fashion.Hannah (Government, sexual health and wellbeing): So, biologically there’s less trigger for a young [heterosexual] male to need to go to a GP [general practitioner] – unless there is, like you said, a cold/flu or they’re off work – they’ve had an injury, they need a medical certificate, or they need an acute intervention for their infection, their injury […] They’re [health clinics] saying, ‘You know, we don’t see the young heterosexual men come into the clinic asking for these tests. You know, they’ve injured themself in some way, or they are coming to our clinic for a particular thing.’ And the health professional then doesn’t say opportunistically, ‘Hey, whilst you’re here, lets [let] you know… are you sexually active, let’s do a sexual health test whilst you’re here’, because the health professional provides a service that that person presented for.
Limited Opportunities to Have Conversations About Sex
Duke (Community, gendered violence prevention): There’s a whole process of, like, no-one even gives permission for young men to have those conversations with each other. You need that first, and so then you need that to develop the skills, so how do you even do that?
This is echoed by Carly, who works in policy and practice for gendered violence prevention, highlighting a need to destigmatise this:Melissa (Community, gendered violence prevention): An issue facing men is that there’s not that … it’s not very normalised for men to talk about this [sex and sexual violence] […] A lot of young men say to me when I talk to them about rape culture, or consent, or coercion, or anything like that, they just say, ‘I’ve just never really had a conversation about this in my life. I’ve just never, no-one’s ever talked to me about this, or no-one’s ever asked me, or I’ve never thought about it.’
Carly (Community, gendered violence prevention): It’s [removing the] taboo around men talking about their emotions and having emotions and normalising it, and I think that sort of work is very much needed and can be very powerful.
This is echoed by Blake, who notes a bind in which young men and boys may want to, but feel unable to, to have these conversations:Marcia: In my experience of working with young men, they often are genuinely interested in something more mutual, and in pleasing their partners. It’s just that it’s not the discourse, no-one is having that conversation with them.Bailey (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): I just don’t, I don’t think that they [young men] know how to pleasure a woman […] [In workshops] they don’t bring it up, actually […] And that would actually be a really good talking point, as to, like, do you have healthy conversations and honest conversations about a woman’s role in sex and how if she’s enjoying it, and are you both getting the same thing out of it?
Blake (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): I think, particularly among boys, there’s perceptions of masculinity as well, [which shape] their openness to actually communicate and express their desires. But also, on the other hand, [to have] a desire to ask their partner what they like and what their desires are. And I think it’s all kind of intertwined in them being afraid of doing the wrong thing, but also being afraid to start the conversation and communicate, because that might be perceived as, you know, not such a masculine thing to be doing.
Derek notes that boys in his workshops are reluctant to discuss issues such as pornography use:Often in society we understand male and female relationships as romanticised or sexualised relationships, we don’t necessarily see it as platonic friendships. I’ve seen this happening in primary school, and when teachers talk about friendships they will speak primarily of same-sex friendships and won’t support young people in seeing friendships across different genders.
Derek (Community, sexual health and wellbeing): Most of the boys that we talk to, if not all of them from primary school onwards, are accessing pornography in some shape or form. But they’re reluctant to talk about it.
Julie (Private, sexual health and wellbeing): So, all we keep hearing are the demonising of porn, I guess as well, which means that there’s a whole lot of boys looking at porn right now, really worrying about their porn use, and not able to tell anybody […] My other big bugbear at the moment is wanting people to critique consent education, because I think we often, using a legal construct, further demonise those boys that cross the line, and I think they need more guidance than that. We don’t have the expertise to assist them to have a positive conversation about the challenges that they find in being with someone, about the pressure they might feel, or the assumptions they have about being a good man when they’re with someone.