We were men

Ask a boy what men are good for. Watch how long it takes him to answer.

He has heard plenty about what men do wrong. He has heard it at school, online, in films, and sometimes across his own kitchen table. What almost nobody has told him is what men are for.

We Were Men is written to end that silence. The title is the accusation. The book is the answer.

Drawing on history, research and years of coaching work, Deon Groenewald makes the case that masculinity is not a problem to be managed. It is a contribution the world still runs on, and it is being lost for want of anyone willing to name it.

This is not a book about what has been taken from men. It is not a call to go back to some harder, older version of manhood. It is construction, not restoration.

At its centre are four words.

Protect. Absorbing risk so that others do not have to.
Provide. The unglamorous labour of making sure there is enough.
Build. Making what did not exist, and building people up.
Guide. Shaping the ones coming behind, who are the most completely lost of all.

Inside you will find:

• How the ground shifted under men, traced from the workshop and the farm to the factory, the war, and the day the work disappeared
• What the evidence actually shows about fathers, sons and young men, including the famous statistics this book refuses to use because they cannot be verified
• The truth about testosterone, aggression and self-control, and why what a man believes about his own nature decides how that nature behaves
• Six ordinary men, from Nairobi, Glasgow, Kraków, Gothenburg, New South Wales and Osaka, none of them heroic, every one of them load bearing
• Why what you pass to your son is not what happened to you, but whether you have made sense of what happened to you
• What to do on Monday morning, in your own house, with the boy in front of you

Written for mothers raising sons in a world that keeps telling them something is wrong with boys. For fathers who want to do better than they were done by. For men who suspect they have been quietly written off and want something more useful than resentment. For anyone who teaches, coaches or leads young men.

Every claim in these pages is sourced. Where the evidence is thin, the book says so. Where a famous quote turns out to be invented, it names it and lets it go. The men you will meet are drawn from years of coaching work, their details changed to protect privacy.

A boy becomes what he is shown. He is waiting to be told what he is for.

It is time he knew.