There is a particular kind of silence that follows the men at this University. Not the silence of apathy, but that of over-calculation: the quiet of people constantly deciding whether an action will be read as intention, character, or moral failure.

This is not a backlash story. It is not about resentment, reaction, or nostalgia for an ‘older masculinity’. It is about something subtler and more corrosive: a growing difficulty among male students in forming a coherent sense of self at all. Across colleges, the same uncertainty appears. Many men are not hostile to feminism. They are not dismissive of gender politics. They care deeply about doing the right thing. Yet many struggle with a basic question: how do I exist here without being misread?

Confidence risks arrogance. Caution risks passivity. Emotional openness risks performance (who wants to be a ‘performative male’, you know?). Emotional restraint risks suspicion. So, behaviour becomes provisional. Men hedge, delay, and soften. They wait for permission where initiative once felt natural. This is hyper-attunement, rather than disinterest. And hyper-attunement, when paired with unclear norms, produces paralysis, not ethical maturity.

“Men learn the language of gender ethics long before they learn how to act within it”

The clearest evidence of this rarely appears in activism societies or Cambridge Union debates. It appears in supervision rooms after essays on gender, power, or social justice. Male students often submit rigorous written work: holding competing frameworks in tension, acknowledging uncertainty. But when the same arguments surface verbally, something shifts. Claims are downgraded into questions. Positions are withdrawn before being tested. Critiques arrive wrapped in apology. Supervisors ask, gently: “But what do you actually think?” The reply is often a pause, then: “I’m not sure I’m qualified to say.”

This is reputational self-protection under the guise of ‘intellectual humility’. The essay is safe because it is private. But speech is too risky because it is public. Thought is permitted so long as it remains uninhabited. What matters is that this comes from care. From a belief that moral error is not a mistake but a verdict.

Cambridge also intensifies these dynamics. It is an environment dense with evaluation, where reputations are durable and social worlds overlap. In such conditions, identity becomes something to manage rather than inhabit. Men learn the language of gender ethics long before they learn how to act within it. Social psychology predicts this. When people believe a misstep will be read as a moral failure rather than a learning error, they default to risk-minimisation. Withdrawal becomes safer than initiative, and silence is preferable to sincerity. After all, who wants to be ‘that guy’, right?

What is distinctive about this moment is not that norms have changed – they always do – but that they are enforced almost entirely through negative example. Men know exactly what not to be. They are far less certain about what they are allowed to become. Moral discourse has grown skilled at condemnation, yet poor at formation.

“A mature gender culture would extend beyond punishing failure”

But gender is relational, so these effects aren’t confined to men. When men retreat into careful minimalism, women often experience not safety but fatigue. Conversations become scripted. Attraction becomes bureaucratic. Emotional labour redistributes itself quietly. Everyone senses the loss of something human, but few can diagnose it. This is where debate usually derails into accusations of fragility or calls for ‘thicker skin’. But that misses the point. The issue is not resistance to change, but that change has been framed almost entirely as avoidance: avoid harm, avoid offence, avoid risk. But is avoidance really an identity?

What is missing is a positive account of male agency compatible with contemporary gender ethics: not dominance or entitlement, but responsibility, competence, emotional literacy. We must celebrate the capacity to act without perfect certainty, and to learn publicly when action goes wrong.

Theoretically, Cambridge could help cultivate this. However, in reality, Cambridge relies on abstraction: policies, statements, workshops. These communicate values but not practice. Men are told to listen – rightly so – but rarely shown what action looks like once listening is done. They are warned against misconduct, but rarely exposed to visible models of healthy initiative: boundary-aware confidence, accountable leadership, ordinary decency enacted without performance. Listening without agency risks becoming suspension instead of growth.

In social life, uncertainty is treated as moral risk rather than intellectual necessity. Students learn to delay action until consensus appears, even when it never comes. The result is not ‘trash men’. It is hesitant ones: men who care deeply about doing the right thing but have lost confidence in their ability to do anything at all. This is not progress, but it isn’t inevitable either. A mature gender culture would extend beyond punishing failure. It would model ethical agency in practice: visible, imperfect, accountable, yet deeply human. It would allow growth rather than demand correctness in advance.

Until then, Cambridge will continue to produce men fluent in the theory of gender justice but disconnected from lived realities: men who can cite De Beauvoir, yet unsure how to inhabit themselves within those frameworks. And this uncertainty will not make them better allies – it will only make them quieter. Silence, however well-intentioned, has never been the same thing as integrity. Let’s stop pretending that they’re interchangeable.