“Boys Will Be Boys”? No - This Is Just Misandry in Makeup

 

Clementine Ford’s Boys Will Be Boys markets itself as a clarion call against toxic masculinity. In reality, it’s a vindictive screed masquerading as social critique, an ideological battering ram wielded not to uplift women, but to humiliate men. Ford doesn’t aim to correct bad behavior. She aims to indict masculinity itself. This isn’t a book about equality. It’s a bitter polemic of its own, one soaked in resentment, ideological zealotry, and a totalitarian urge to remake men in the image of feminist orthodoxy. Ford’s thesis is as crude as it is tired: men are broken, masculinity is a disease, and the only cure is submission to her brand of third-wave feminism. From the outset, Ford positions herself as the moral arbiter of the sexes, sneering at anything that smells of testosterone. She paints boyhood as a pathology and male socialisation as inherently violent. In doing so, she erases any notion that masculinity might have virtues, like courage, sacrifice, or stoicism, worthy of preservation. To Ford, boys aren’t something to be raised into men. They’re suspects to be reprogrammed. Her contempt is unrelenting. The reader is bludgeoned with cherry-picked stats, emotional anecdotes, and the usual parade of straw men. Ford doesn’t debate opposing views, she caricatures them, then sets them on fire. Nuance has no place here. This is gender war by other means. Worse, Ford refuses to acknowledge the real crisis facing boys today: skyrocketing suicide rates, educational failure, fatherlessness, drug addiction, and social isolation. These aren't abstract issues, they’re bleeding out in real time. But Boys Will Be Boys offers no solutions, only accusations. If anything, the book adds to the very problems it pretends to critique, by shaming boys rather than guiding them. The irony, of course, is that Ford herself embodies the very kind of toxic, unaccountable aggression she claims to oppose. But because it’s wrapped in the language of liberation and feminism, it’s applauded as “brave.” In truth, it’s cowardly. It’s easy to kick men when they’re down. It takes no courage to sneer at your enemies from behind a publisher’s paywall and a crowd of cheering ideologues. This book isn’t interested in justice or healing. It’s about dominance. Ford doesn’t want to build a better society. She wants revenge. In a saner time, Boys Will Be Boys would be dismissed as the fringe rant of a bitter ideologue. That it’s treated as serious commentary is a testament to how far our cultural compass has spun out of control. So let’s say it plainly: Boys are not broken. Masculinity is not toxic. And this book is not a contribution to progress, it’s a setback disguised as virtue. Verdict: A venomous tract of cultural sabotage. Burn it, don’t buy it.