Undeveloped Masculinity vs Toxic Masculinity.

How do we make space for something better to emerge.

Rishi - Unsplash

Part One

Three boys, aged thirteen and fourteen at the time of the offences, were convicted recently of raping two girls in separate attacks in Fordingbridge, Hampshire.

One girl was threatened with a knife, forced to leave her phone in a shop so her location couldn’t be tracked, then taken to a field and raped while the others filmed it.

The second was lured to a riverside underpass on what she thought was a first date. The judge handed down community rehabilitation orders, saying he didn’t want to criminalise the children unnecessarily.

I share these details to highlight the wilful intention of these premeditated acts.

I want to be clear about where I’m going with this, because it would be easy to read it as a piece about sentencing, and that’s not what it is.

I’m also not here to apportion blame (that’s clear)or add to the noise of who or what is most at fault.

What I want to do is look at the question that sits underneath all of it.

How do we start to change things?

How does a thirteen-year-old boy arrive at a place where this feels possible, where a girl’s body is something to be taken, filmed, and shared, where the others stand and watch and encourage, where none of them, in that moment, find a reason to stop.

I don’t know how we got here, actually maybe I do with recent stories about Gisèle Pelicot and CNN investigation uncovering men raping their wives and filming it and sharing on a telegram group already highlights a pattern.

What I do know is we cannot continue like this.

“I’m a father of a daughter”. I notice what’s happening when I and other men often reach for that framing, and I want to slow down on it because I think it matters.

The instinct to say “as a father of a daughter” as a way of establishing that this affects me, that instinct is itself worth examining, because it shouldn’t require a personal stake.

The fact that those girls’ lives have been altered in ways they are still learning to name, that should be enough, the fact that those boys got to that point, that should be enough.

I’m also a father of two sons, and I think about the work their mother and I are doing, consciously, to raise them toward something, imperfectly and not always getting it right, but trying to give them a picture of what it means to be a man that goes beyond physical strength, status, and the entitlement to take.

I’ll be having that conversation with them directly too. That is part of the responsibility.

We are not giving boys that picture clearly enough, not widely enough, not in the places where it matters most.

We have spent years talking about “toxic masculinity”, and that conversation has done some things well, it has named harm, it has made certain behaviours that were not ok, visible that were previously just considered normal or acceptable.

The frame has a problem, though, because it is a catchall. It treats the boy who repeats an ignorant joke and the judge who lets rapists walk free as versions of the same thing.

It collapses the spectrum so completely that there is almost no meaningful distinction left between the minor and the catastrophic, the ignorant and the intentional, the underdeveloped and the actively destructive.

When you collapse a spectrum that wide, you lose the ability to respond accurately to any part of it.

There is something else the frame does that concerns me more, though, and it is this.

It turns a behaviour into an identity. When we say someone is toxic, we are not describing what they did, we are describing what they are, and that distinction matters enormously, because identity statements tend to foreclose development.

They leave no room for growth, no direction to move toward, no question worth asking about how we got here or what might be different.

I want to separate two things that I think we are currently running together.

Toxic masculinity, in my view, is an event, it’s behaviours, a pattern of harm, a destructive force.

Underdeveloped masculinity is a state, a condition, something a person is in, and crucially, something that has a direction because it implies a process of development that is either happening or isn’t.

The boys in Fordingbridge are, in my view, underdeveloped males who created what I can only describe as events fuelled by toxic masculinity.

Those are different things. One describes them, one describes what they did. Holding that distinction open is not about softening the harm, it is about being accurate enough to ask the right questions.

The judge’s response, in my opinion, is part of the problem, not because I am qualified to say what sentence those boys should have received, but because when consequence is removed from harm, what gets communicated is that this kind of behaviour is not serious.

That, too, in my opinion is a toxic masculine event, the excusing and defending of harm, the message that the damage done doesn’t really count putting the needs over the boys over that of the victims.

It is one of the ways underdeveloped masculinity gets reproduced rather than interrupted. More than that, the toxic masculinity frame names a poison without offering a remedy.

It diagnoses without a direction, and if something is toxic, you contain it, you condemn it, at best you remove it, but you cannot develop it, you cannot grow it toward something better.

The language itself forecloses that possibility.

I want to offer a different lens, not to excuse what happened in Fordingbridge, not to soften it, not to redirect attention away from the girls whose lives were violated, but because I think we are missing something important in how we understand this, and that missing thing is part of why we keep arriving at the same place.

What I see, in most of what we call toxic masculinity, is underdeveloped masculinity. When something is underdeveloped, it doesn’t mean it is irredeemably broken, it means it hasn’t yet grown into what it could be.

A boy put in a man’s role before he has developed the values, the emotional range, the sense of responsibility that role requires, that is a developmental problem, it has a direction, it implies something it is growing toward or failing to grow toward.

Underdeveloped masculinity shows up as immaturity, entitlement, blame, reactivity, the inability to hold another person’s humanity alongside your own desires, the need to perform strength because you haven’t yet developed the inner authority that doesn’t need an audience.

We see this in the boy who threatens a woman when she doesn’t respond to his advances. In the man who films rather than intervenes.

I recently saw comments under a George Floyd anniversary post recently, six years on from his death, with people writing “he was a thug,” “it was a heart attack,” as though the precise mechanism of death in a situation where a man was being held to the ground and suffocated changes the moral weight of what happened, as though his history, real or invented, made his life more negotiable. BTW- the murder of George Floyd by police officers was also a toxic masculinity event in my opinion.

That is the same move as asking “what she was wearing when she got raped” or “what was she doing out that late at night”. It’s the same mechanism to detract from the perpetrators and allow the damage to continue.

When we decide that someone is not quite like us, not fully human in the way we are, not deserving of the protections we extend to ourselves, we find ways to make their suffering contingent, we make their dignity and humanity conditional.

That is underdeveloped, it is emotionally underdeveloped, morally underdeveloped, and it is also a failure of the masculine specifically, because the mature masculine holds others in their full humanity, not just people who look like you, not just people who behave as you would want them to, but people.

I want to be precise here because this matters. Masculine and feminine energies are not the same as male and female, men are not only masculine energy and women are not only feminine energy.

I have seen underdeveloped masculine energy in women who have reached positions of corporate power and then reproduced exactly what they displaced, because the patriarchal structure rewarded a particular way of operating and they were human enough to adapt to it.

The problem is not with all men, the problem is that with an extremely high consistency it’s almost always men show up in the most destructive ways of the underdeveloped masculine.

A developed masculine doesn’t need to dominate to feel whole.

It can hold space for women as peers, not the roles that men assign to women but the roles women choose for themselves.

It responds rather than reacts, takes responsibility rather than locates blame, can feel the full weight of someone else’s pain without needing to deflect from it or explain it away.

Men who have developed their masculine can say “I love you” to a friend, can hug each other without flinching, can sit with another man in grief or joy and not feel their sense of self threatened by it or deep discomfort.

I’ve watched men who, by any external measure, represent the height of physical power, fighting men, men who train their whole lives to be able to do serious damage and seen them weep openly when they win, hold each other, speak their care out loud.

That is not weakness operating alongside strength, that is strength. The developed masculine knows the difference between capacity and compulsion, it has the capability to cause harm and chooses not to, it can walk away, it can hold its corner without needing to prove it at someone else’s expense.

Discipline, boundaries, and the willingness to defend what matters, including other people, authenticity that doesn’t shift depending on who’s watching, these are not soft qualities dressed up in masculine language. These are the thing itself.

I’m reluctant to name anyone as an example of developed masculinity because one size miss-fits all here.

What a developed man looks like in one context, one culture, one generation, can look different from another, and that’s as it should be.

What doesn’t change is the direction, toward integration, toward full humanity, toward the capacity to be genuinely present with another person without needing to diminish them to feel whole yourself.

There is a body of work exploring masculine archetypes, rooted in Jungian psychology, that maps the mature masculine as a set of energies in development rather than fixed roles, and the shadow expressions of each when they remain underdeveloped.

It is worth reading into for anyone who wants to go deeper. What I’m pointing at here sits in that same territory, and the second part of this piece will develop that further.

What I keep returning to is the absence. In the absence of strong models, of men who demonstrate what development looks like, boys navigate toward whatever is loudest and most available.

Social media has given the most underdeveloped masculine voices the widest platforms, because what underdeveloped masculinity offers is simple, legible, and emotionally activating, status through appearance, power through domination, the world as something to be taken rather than engaged with. It’s also what the algorithms like.

That can be a compelling offer to a boy who hasn’t been shown anything more complex, and we respond to it by calling it toxic and waiting for it to be removed, without asking what we failed to put in its place.

What I think the Fordingbridge case is, underneath everything else, is a developmental failure made visible, three boys who reached an age where masculine energy was present, active, and pulling for expression, and who had not been given the values, the formation, the models, or the relationships to direct that energy toward something that didn’t cause harm or could actually be a generative force for good.

I’m not saying this to soften what they did, what they did was serious and the girls who survived it will carry it. I’m saying this because if we only ever ask what to do with the outcome, we will keep arriving at new outcomes that ask the same question.

The work is earlier, it is in the formation, the structures, it is in what we teach, what we model, what we make visible as worth becoming.

As a man, as a father, I hold some of that responsibility, imperfectly and with my own gaps, but consciously, with my eyes open to what is at stake, and I think that is also part of what developed masculinity looks like.

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Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

References

Fordingbridge rape case and sentencing: Attorney General’s Office referral to Court of Appeal, May 2026.

George Floyd: death 25 May 2020, Minneapolis. Medical examiner ruled homicide.

On masculine archetypes and shadow expressions: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, 1990.