Responding to Professor Debbie Ging’s article ‘The ‘Lost Boys’ debate: Are positive male role models the answer?’, Dr Angelos Bollas outlines ways fiction can be used to teach boys about masculinity.

In her compelling Irish Examiner article, Professor Debbie Ging challenges the popular call for “positive male role models” as a solution to the rise of manosphere figures like Andrew Tate and the broader crisis facing many boys today. As she rightly points out, this appeal—whether couched in conservative rhetoric or progressive language—risks reasserting gender essentialism, overlooking empirical evidence, and ultimately reinforcing the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle.

I agree with much of Ging’s critique. The idea that boys can only relate to or learn from other men reinforces a binary and hierarchical view of gender. It underestimates boys’ capacity for empathy, complexity, and connection across difference. But rather than abandon the search for guidance altogether, I propose we turn to another, perhaps richer, source: fiction.

Narratives—whether through television or literature—can model the kinds of relationships, emotions, and behaviours that traditional masculinity has long denied boys. In both the Netflix series Adolescence and contemporary fiction such as the novels of Sally Rooney, we find alternative scripts: not for what a man should be, but for how people—especially boys—might be allowed to feel, relate, and connect.

In Adolescence, the character of Jamie is not lacking father figures or male teachers; as Ging notes, they are present but fail to provide meaningful mentorship. What’s missing isn’t a man at the helm—it’s connection, care, and emotional literacy. The show resists the simplistic notion that male presence equals male guidance. Instead, it depicts how boys are often abandoned emotionally, even when surrounded by adults, and how they seek out—sometimes disastrously—the intimacy they are denied.

This resonates with the findings of my book, Contemporary Irish Masculinities, which analyses the representation of male relationships in Sally Rooney’s fiction. Rooney’s novels offer a clear-eyed view of how masculinity is performed, often in limiting and self-silencing ways. Her male characters—Connell, Nick, and Felix—struggle to articulate care, fear, admiration, and vulnerability. In their world, male friendship is either absent, superficial, or tinged with competition and detachment. And yet, amid these constraints, we find moments of rupture—brief but powerful—where emotional connection flickers into view. These are not the heroics of a “role model” but the quiet bravery of feeling.

As Ging notes, the crisis boys face is not one of masculinity but of connection. Literature and television offer not just commentary on this crisis, but blueprints for healing. They present us with characters who cry, falter, grow, and try again—not because they are male or female, but because they are human. In Rooney’s fiction, the few moments of genuine male homosocial connection occur not through shared dominance or status, but through shared vulnerability—when men are allowed to be emotionally honest without fearing emasculation.

This is why I believe we need to rethink what we mean by “influence” or “guidance.” Instead of seeking perfect role models who embody some fixed idea of positive masculinity, we should embrace cultural products, like fiction, that challenge the need for such models in the first place. A boy doesn’t need someone to tell him how to be a man; he needs stories that let him imagine ways of being that aren’t confined by manhood at all.

Fiction—particularly when it avoids didacticism—can show boys that there are many ways to be in the world. That they can form friendships that aren’t based on sexual conquest, wealth, or status. That their worth isn’t determined by dominance, silence, or stoicism. In this sense, what they need isn’t a role model, but a mirror—and sometimes, a window.

Crucially, these cultural materials also allow us to decentre gender as the guiding framework for support. Ging is right to critique the essentialist logic that says only men can guide boys. Research shows, again and again, that effective mentorship depends far more on empathy, availability, and trust than on gender identity.

Adolescence succeeds where many youth dramas fail because it doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t pretend that a more masculine man would have “saved” Jamie, nor does it absolve institutions like school and family from responsibility. Instead, it invites viewers to reflect on how isolation, performativity, and emotional repression are actively taught—and how they might be unlearned.

The same goes for Rooney’s fiction. Her novels do not offer male saviours or exemplars. Instead, they show how masculinities are shaped by class, power, intimacy, and fear. They show how men police each other’s emotions, avoid intimacy, and sideline themselves from meaningful connection, not because they want to, but because they’ve been taught that real men don’t feel.

What we need, then, is not more men teaching boys how to be men. We need more spaces—on screen, on the page, in schools, and at home—where boys are free to become themselves without reference to a rigid ideal. We need to stop asking how we can produce better men and start asking how we can build a world where being better doesn’t depend on being male at all.

In this, Ging’s final point is essential: the role model panic often centres boys at the expense of others—girls, non-binary youth, and boys who do not align with dominant ideals. We must resist framing the issue as one of male redemption alone. Rather, we should focus on creating communities of care and critique, where all young people are free to define themselves without fear, punishment, or erasure.

So yes, boys do need mentors, guides, stories, and support—but they don’t need them to be male, and they don’t need them to be mythic. They need them to be human. And perhaps fiction—nuanced, complex, contradictory—remains our best tool for imagining just how wide that humanity can stretch.

For more from Angelos Bollas and his thoughts on fiction and masculinity, check out his book Contemporary Irish Masculinities.

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