When I talk about my experiences, they’re always from the female perspective – a very important one to hear. However, it’s not the only viewpoint out there, and I’m aware that a lot of lads read my blog. I’m also aware that young men are renowned for hiding their thoughts and feelings – and that this contributes to a lot of them having poor mental health.

So as a feminist, and a big fan of the male species, I’m going to try and make this a space for them to voice those thoughts. Not just so that they can see themselves reflected in what I write about, but also so that as a young female with brothers and lots of close male friends, I can understand them better – and help them if they ever need me.

And also because girls want to know what goes on in their heads anyway…

This week I asked as many boys as would let me (surprisingly ended up being 25 of the buggers) a set of questions focused on how they perceive themselves, and how they think they’re perceived by whatever gender they’re trying to pull.

There were so many interesting details in their answers; far too many to summarise in one blog. So I’m going to give them lots of attention and scrutiny in the coming weeks, writing blogs discussing each question one by one. Plus some of these lads are eager to have a feature on my blog anyway, so that’ll give me plenty of opportunity to quote all of them…as well as making them obliged to read more than one and up my ratings hehehe.

What surprised me most when I received all of their answers though, was seeing how grateful many of them were to just be asked. A few of them even straight-up thanked me, and that really plucked on my heart strings.

It became so clear that many of these young men lack someone who just asks them how they feel, without having any exterior motive like wanting to pull them or get some gossip out of them. They have amazing groups of friends who they love and trust, but they don’t always have spaces where they feel like they can just give their opinions – without judgement.

Some of them appreciated the fact that I wasn’t about to call them a ‘fboy’ or a ‘pr**k’ for saying that they didn’t want a girlfriend right now. Since, at our age, everyone’s entitled to make mistakes or just want to flirt with whoever. Many appreciated that I’d keep it anonymous, and they liked that all I wanted to know was what they thought. I didn’t want them to cloud it with jokes or euphemisms.

Young men are the same as young women. We all want to be made to feel interesting and relevant. We all have good parts and bad. We’re all in the middle of learning who we want to be and who we want to love. But more than anything, at this point in our lives we just want to work out all of those things without fearing judgement.

With all that in mind, in the coming months I’ll do my best to write some good blogs with the information you gave me lads: I hope I do you proud.

(If not, then I’ll do a wottle……jk, I’m not doing that hahahaha)

Xx

*wottle*: young person’s terminology for downing an entire bottle of wine as quickly as possible a.k.a a death sentence