Online spaces offer boys competing lessons about appearance, success, relationships, and what it means to be a man. My lecture, “How the Internet is Teaching Boys What It Means to Be a Man,” was part of Dawson College’s Social Science Week programme on February 10, 2026.
The topic connects my research on masculinity and digital culture with a broader question of how gender expectations are learned and reproduced. Taking these online lessons seriously means examining the social pressures and inequalities that make particular versions of manhood persuasive. Public sociology can help make those connections visible without treating boys as a uniform group or assuming that online influence produces a single outcome.
