Breaking the Boy Code is Back
Follow the podcast project at Next Gen Men
Let’s start by rewinding the clock.
I started listening to podcasts when I rode my bicycle 15,000 km to the Arctic Ocean as part of a photojournalism project for Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017. I went looking for meaningful discussions on masculinity, and there were a few — that’s when I started listening to German Villegas’ Modern Manhood podcast — but none that featured the voices of boys themselves.
Boys’ experiences, attitudes and beliefs matter. Their stories matter. rWe can’t possibly get anywhere by talking about positive masculinity and feminism without engaging with and listening to the next generation.
I pitched the idea to the guys I knew at Next Gen Men, and they responded with a micro-grant to buy the recording equipment I needed to get Breaking the Boy Code podcast off the ground.
Pause at the pandemic.
Three and a half years and two seasons later, I burned out. The podcast took hiatus after hiatus as I tried to muscle my way through the final episodes of season two, and dropped entirely when I started working entirely online in the spring of 2020.
I knew something had to change, but I didn’t know what.
Three things gradually emerged. The first was a program within my Master of Education that pushed my thinking on youth voice and anti-oppression education. I started wanting to educate myself more on racism in order to embed intersectionality within Next Gen Men’s program design.
The second was my work collaboration and budding friendship with Adrian Leckie. Adrian propelled NGM Boys Club from its initial summer pilot to the burgeoning youth community it is now. As we worked together in the fall of 2020, we started talking about using Breaking the Boy Code to delve into race and masculinity together — and to do it alongside a group of boys.
As these ideas started to spark in my mind, we saw the emergence of NGM Podcast Network, a collective of passionate individuals committed to engaging with men and masculinities in the feminist movement. All of a sudden it wasn’t just me bitterly trying to fight through audio on my own, but me with Remoy, and Samantha, and German and the rest working together to create stories that matter.
So what now?
Season three is a four-part mini-series in which Louis tells his story. It’s a story of friendship and belonging; it’s also a story of bullying, violence and the youth justice system. But most of all, it’s a story of change. It’s about the distance you travel when you’re 11-turning-12, what it takes to be true to yourself on that journey and the kind of mentoring relationship that can bring you closer to who you want to be.
Adrian and I have also been working behind the scenes for almost a year to envision and launch season four of Breaking the Boy Code, in which we centre the voices of BIPOC boys in a series of conversations on race, relationships, mental health, systems of power and chance. We’ve just completed our first recording session and are taking a break for the holidays.
I started the Breaking the Boy Code Medium publication in part because I didn’t have somewhere meaningful to write about the podcast, boys or masculinity.
I have that now within the meaningful work I’m doing at Next Gen Men, so future reflections, articles and updates will be published within the Breaking the Boy Code category on the Next Gen Men blog and shared through the Future of Masculinity newsletter. I might come back to this Medium publication but for the foreseeable future, I’m going to keep the momentum over at Next Gen Men, as well as @boypodcast on Twitter and Instagram.
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Breaking the Boy Code is a feminism-aligned publication on masculinity on Medium, and a podcast on the inner lives of boys on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Spotify. Connect with @boypodcast on social media for podcast-related updates and masculinity-related news.
