“You mean Yorkie bars and steel factories, that sort of thing?” Joel is 16 and lives in Wirral. I’ve asked him to define masculinity as he sees it, just as I’ve been asking a similar thing of 16- and 17-year-olds like him all over the country. What is going on in their heads right now, these boys on the cusp? What do they believe, and what do they doubt, about the mantel of adulthood they’ll soon inherit? What do they think makes a man a man, at a time when there are big questions being asked about gender identity and gender privilege?

Joel says: “My grandad was a coal miner for 20 years. So in his mind, masculinity is a very stereotypical man’s-man thing: the guy coming home from work for his meat and two veg, a muscular, massive man. It depends who you ask, but I think, more and more, that idea’s dropped away.” What’s come up in place of the old certainties, Joel thinks, is a wildfire of confusion. “Because when you’re little and that, you think of being masculine as being big, butch, strong. You think of a man as someone who wants to help the people around him and, to an extent, protect.” Then you realise, Joel continues, “there’s a thin line between protecting and being overbearing. That line is often crossed. You hear a phrase like ‘toxic masculinity’ get thrown about. And it all gets... complicated.”

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been canvassing the views of about 30 boys of Joel’s age – encouraging them to speak freely, from Brighton to Birmingham, Cardiff to Canvey Island, sometimes on the condition of anonymity – and certain preoccupations recur. In school they’re stressed (“Exam pressure. School pressure, obviously”) and outside the school gates they’re edgily aware of peer-on-peer violence, or at least the scent of it in the air. They like gaming, Netflix, partying, coupling, the Premier League, “watching useless videos for hours”. They’re irritated by early waking, overtly suspicious security guards, being perceived as wasteful by adults who watch them watching those “useless” videos. They find YouTube relaxing, OK?

The stereotype’s been put in our heads that we’re supposed to be strong, not allow emotions

Some of these young men were responding to a readers’ call-out about identity published on the Guardian’s website. Others came via contacts in youth groups and schools; a few I met while researching other articles. (They are not the boys pictured here, who were interviewed and photographed for a parallel project.) When we spoke they would chat in lucid bursts and then stall, drop into ums, awkwardnesses, silence. I found them confounding and fascinating in equal measure. On masculinity, male identity and what being manly is, they would contradict each other, sometimes take extreme positions, sometimes admit total bafflement. As Joel put it, this has all gotten complicated.

What makes a man a man? Jesiah in Croydon believes it’s the internal things, “the values you stand by, doing what you believe to be right”. Dylan in Canterbury thinks it’s a matter of “not changing who you are to please people”. Hamish in Lanarkshire: “You stand up for yourself, but you also stand up for others.” Sonny in Birmingham: “You’re no more or less a man by being strong or brave.” Matt in Manchester: “It’s mainly about fitness and strength.” Corrin in London: “Strength definitely plays a part.” Evian in London: “The stereotype’s been put in our heads that we’re supposed to be strong, not meant to allow any emotions, but I don’t agree with that.”

Some of the young men I speak to feel their way into answers by considering how they’re different from previous generations. They’ve also got a keen idea what the millennial generation and people my age (mid-30s) think. After all, they’re picking a route through our residue. They’re about to take over our messy bedrooms.

“My dad is quite tolerant, still quite masculine,” says Clement in Northumberland. “I’m still not totally open about everything with him, because there’s that traditional barrier of masculinity.” Discreetly, among friends, Clement has been experimenting with makeup, wearing jewellery. “If it’s interesting to me, I should be able to do it without being called something, put in a box.” Clement says he feels masculine and feminine at the same time, “A healthy medium... But I think many boys are stuck, unsure.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samuel, Blaenau Gwent: ‘I’ve been campaigning for votes at 16 for two and a half years.’ Photograph: Abbie Trayler-Smith/Format

Ty from King’s Lynn is having a cheeky smoke outside school when we talk on the phone. I ask him what he thinks makes a man a man. “Have certain morals? Forgive and forget things? Around this area, the feeling of a lot of people my age is that to be a man, you have to be able to fight.” Ty likes to skateboard, smoke weed, “sometimes a bit of graffiti”. A year ago he hung around with a different crowd, “selling drugs, having fights, things like that”. Then he got beaten up one night, which shook him. Then he got beaten up a second time, “and I thought: ‘What am I doing with myself? All this, to boost the vision I’m manly?’”

I speak to a young man in south-east England whom we’ll call Mark. He’s been stealing bikes for some time. He got caught once, and was released the next morning. He sounds convincing when he says he’ll stop as soon as he turns 18. We’re chatting over Instagram one day when I ask him: what else will he need to do to become a man? Mark writes: “Don’t know,” and after a few seconds adds: “I’m still a kid.” Then he changes his mind about that second part and deletes it, so all that’s left is the blank.

Before speaking to them, I wonder if any will question the premise of my opening question: what makes a man a man? Samuel, who lives near Derby, does. “Being mixed-race makes identity quite a complicated thing for me,” he says. “You almost find that identifying as any one thing can be a way of discriminating against yourself.” Samuel has an older sibling who is trans, and he says this “makes it easier to see that identity can be forced on people. That people are who they are and not how they are.”

This is something that nags at Dylan in Canterbury, too. He groans when I ask him about the phrase “Man up”. Some of his male teachers say it, and Dylan finds this “degrading... You don’t say: ‘Woman up’. It doesn’t make sense.” Others come at it differently. Matias in London, a keen footballer, will hear his coach shout “Man up!” from the sidelines and find motivation in this “harsh encouragement”. Evian uses the phrase with his friends. “When someone’s upset or lonely, yeah, sometimes I do say that. But when you think about it, it’s like saying men aren’t meant to show emotions. And I think differently.”

My generation depends on popularity. The pressure they put on themselves is worse than any older generation’s experience

Evian and Matias are a little younger than the others I speak to. Neither is a big talker; they stick to the point. But they’re self-aware and sharp, and while they can see that for others masculinity has become a complicated thing, they don’t find it all that complicated themselves. Matias wants to become a man in a traditional mould, protecting, providing. Evian hopes to be like his grandfather, “who worked as a carpenter, 24/7, nonstop for 50 years. He was dedicated. He grew a family.”

They both agree – everyone agrees – that young men are no good at talking about their emotions with each other. Sonny in Birmingham says: “It’s not really acceptable to say you’re vulnerable or lonely.” Reece in London says: “Yeah, that’s off the table.” When a young man we’ll call Chris, in north Wales, worries inordinately about what others make of him, these worries remain private. Max in Bradford sympathises. “Most people’s response to being told [something like that] is a blank, confused stare,” he says. There’s “a definite stigma” around discussing your inner life, says Matthew in Brighton. Samuel in Derby goes further: “I suspect quite a lot of my peers have a mental illness of some description, just they’re unwilling to admit it in case it makes them appear less masculine.”

Sonny in Birmingham and Samuel in Derby have never met, but they share a kind of preternaturally wise, fringe-dwellers’ perspective. Independently, they describe a style of arms-race humour they reckon is common among their peers. Outrage piled on outrage, no subject off-limits so long as it’s framed as a joke – rape, race, the Holocaust. I ask others about this and Clement, who has noticed it, too, has a go at explaining. “If you’re gay, or Jewish, or black, that gets kind of picked up on and joked about – not in a way that’s malicious, or that they mean to be malicious, but definitely in a way that feels like there’s no limit. They have to top the last thing, do something bigger or better, increase the scale till the scale’s massive.”

I tell a few of these interviewees, that when I was their age, my friends and I laughed about outrageous things that now make me wince. Maybe this has always been a schoolboy thing? Samuel’s not having it. You didn’t have social media, he says. Nor this nagging, heightened habit of “emulating and exaggerating, emulating and exaggerating. My generation depends on popularity. The pressure they put on themselves for more popularity is higher than any older generation’s experience.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paddy, from Liverpool, one of the 16-year-old boys photographers talked to for exhibition Sixteen. Photograph: Craig Easton

Dylan, who is gay, has a good-side, bad-side view of social media. For every supportive voice you might hear only because of access to Twitter, there’s the homophobe lobbing insults. Before I started talking to the boys, I believed they had caught a historical bad break when it came to social media – an industry helping itself to every sort of choice, enjoying unregulated excess through their most pliable years. Jesiah in Croydon brushes this off as lazy thinking. Social media’s just the part of youth culture most visible to older generations, he says. He thinks that people my age fixate on it disproportionately.

Jesiah may be right. I still wince, hearing from Sonny or Ty or Clement about the closed-loop masculinity that gets impressed on them via their screens – “Making visual,” as Sonny puts it, “what a really large group of people think you must be.” In King’s Lynn, outside school, Ty explains what masculinity looks like as it comes at him via his Instagram and Snapchat feeds. The choice is a stark one “between being a hard man or a fuckboy. The hard men post pictures with their big jackets and balaclavas and knives, trying to boost their reputations. And the fuckboys look in the mirror with their shirts off.”

I’ve noticed, in one or two of the photos put online by Mark in the south-east, the conspicuous knife tucked in his trousers. When I ask him why the weapon is there, he can’t explain, or doesn’t want to. The interviewees who’ve thought about these things most deeply, who can explain themselves most lucidly, tend to have more stable lives than Mark’s. “I got other things to worry about,” he says.

I believe that women aren’t of equal status to men. They’re actually above men at the moment. They act above, I mean

Instead, I ask Ty to explain fuckboys. What’s the deal with the toplessness? Come on, says Ty: “It’s to get girls.” He’s feeling burned just now, he says. A girlfriend has cheated on him or, if I understand Ty correctly, a girlfriend has cheated on him more times than he has cheated on her. “I believe that women aren’t of equal status to men,” Ty goes on to say. “They’re actually above men at the moment. They act above, I mean. To get a girlfriend, you have to try a lot harder than 10 or 15 years ago, when people were getting on that everyone was equal. Now they’ve sort of risen above it because the people [feminists] who were originally saying let’s have equal rights, they didn’t have anything to say any more, so they kept pushing it and pushing it.”

Jesiah is clear-headed and at ease about feminism. “I’ve got two younger sisters. I see what the older sister goes through, especially as a black woman, only trying to get what she’s worked for and deserves. I don’t feel threatened by it, I welcome it. But I know people at school who feel extremely threatened by it.” Clement says: “You see a pushback against feminism, yeah.” There’s unease, Corrin says. “Some of my friends are, like, scared to get girlfriends. Because of the whole #MeToo thing. What if, in 10 years, the girl comes back and makes trouble?”

“It is completely right that society makes an effort to get women involved in the STEM subjects, in history, in politics,” Joel says. “Because for so long women have been excluded from these sorts of things. But it leaves, um, a gap. In my opinion, and from what I’ve heard from others, there’s nothing – no voice of that for young men. There’s no person saying: ‘You can be this, you can be that.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”

So many young men tell me something along these lines that, yeah, I think I do start to understand what Joel’s saying. I’ve tried to let them speak for themselves in this article – not to overinterpret, or patronise, or apologise for them; only to ask their views and pay attention to their answers. A lot of them feel threatened. The most engaged know they’re part of a historical steering correction; some, like Jesiah, have the perspective and personal experience to appreciate this as a necessary correction. Others admit more selfish feelings.

One young man describes a visit to a bookshop. “And the first thing you see? ‘100 Female Inventors’, or whatever. Or Michelle Obama’s book saying: ‘Have high hopes for yourselves, girls.’ I guess there’s this idea that young men will already have high hopes for themselves?” But Clement in Northumberland thinks those of his peers who expect otherwise are unrealistic: “If anyone tried to do a similar thing, a male-empowerment thing, it would be seen as empowering sexism and the whole lad culture.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dan from Hull: ‘I hope I survive college, get the job I want and become a youth worker.’ Photograph: Jillian Edelstein

Still, Clement says, he can see signs of trouble brewing. “There’s been a reversal. The attitudes towards women that were acceptable 30 or 40 years ago are now, like, the worst thing you can say. I feel like that’s left a lot of young men in the dark. Because they hear their fathers and grandfathers repeat these attitudes, and they don’t know how to react. They’re faced with women who are stronger and more confident. It’s confusing. It scares them.”

“I think it’s a serious problem,” Joel says. “A lot of young men are becoming angry and disenfranchised. You know the rise of the far right that’s gone on in recent years? I think that’s partly because there’s a lot of young men who’ve come out of working-class families, like mine, and they don’t have anyone to look up to. They don’t have anyone saying: ‘This is what you as a person can do.’ Maybe that’s where the drift comes in. Young men join these groups that have the typical far-right message, ‘You should be fit, you should be strong, you should provide’, because they’re not given anything else to look to.”

There does need to be a place to be able to say that masculinity’s a good thing. That masculinity can be admirable

Jesiah wonders if he’s seen something similar. “With the stabbings and the killings, people are quick to blame social media, as if it’s the root cause of all these problems. I personally believe it’s that young men aren’t being listened to. They don’t have a voice – even down to Brexit – [in] what’s going on. The legal age to vote should be lowered, because we know what we want. Being young and having no say in your future is completely mad. We’re seeing everything go by us. So yeah, I think that contributes to some of the anger out there, the hate.”

Some say they feel ignored and generalised-about when it suits the wider world. At the same time, they feel they’ll be held to obscure account for wrongs that happened in the world when they were children, when they were babies, when they hadn’t been thought of at all. So that now, some young men get the impression they’re seen as a bit gross, a bit distasteful, as problems-in-waiting. William in London: “We’re seen as mindless testo drones.” Matt in Manchester: “We’re seen as manipulative and sex-obsessed.”

“I think a lot of mainstream politicians are afraid to really touch on masculinity,” Joel says. “In case of maybe saying the wrong thing. And I can understand that. It’s a very difficult thing to talk on, even now, even to you. But I think there does need to be a place to be able to say that masculinity’s a good thing. That masculinity can be admirable. Otherwise we’re just, sort of… just…”

Stranded? “Stranded,” Joel says. “Yeah.”

****

When I was their age, my sense of what it would mean to be a man came first through my family and friends. In that, I was lucky. But an idea of masculinity also trickled down via illicit VHS viewings of Trainspotting and Tarantino, beery images of Knebworth, news of England fans lobbing patio furniture around Europe. What I knew about being manly, aged 16, I’d learned in part from watching Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, revenging himself on his enemies with a samurai sword; from the bi-weekly outrages of the Gallaghers and Gazza; from the Bill Clinton scandal; from OJ’s trial; from Renton robbing Begbie of his heroin money.

I remember having a hazy but comforting sense at the time, that men’s men could be reckless, hold their nerve, get away with it. This felt a long way from where I was at that age, determinedly following in David Beckham’s wake away from centre-parted hair. I tried to stay in the kid cocoon as long as I could. If I looked forward into manhood at all it was to wonder, vaguely, how I was ever going to enjoy heroin if I was still only pretending to like lager?

Adult realities come to find young men more proactively today. And as much as I feel frustrated for them, part of me envies them. Aged 16, I was unengaged with the wider world to a degree that strikes me now as sort of disgraceful. What mattered was getting enough hours in on Mario Kart, and eating toast by the eight-slice stack, meanwhile imagining it was someone else’s (someone older’s) job to worry about the big-picture stuff. Looking back, I see the determining factors, invisible to me then, that allowed for this sense of blitheness. Race, socioeconomics, postcode luck, the happenstance of meeting certain norms. And my gender. It would take decades for me to start untangling the mess of my thinking on masculinity. These boys have got under way on this much earlier.

At the end of one conversation, with Hamish in Lanarkshire, he tells me he’s grateful. “For actually being asked my opinion. Nobody has before.” He lives in a remote rural spot, where he has been thinking a lot about masculinity lately.

Hamish is physically imposing. He’ll stand up for himself in school corridors. But, he says, he’s always hated being told to “Man up”. He’s bored by “meathead” trips to the football. He wants to be able to admit to having emotions. There’s a little group of them, Hamish and his mates, quietly rebelling against the herd on this. They’re not quite comfortable talking about their worries out in the open yet, but they have a code they use in the corridors whenever they’re feeling shit, or they want to show each other support. They tell each other, slyly, “Man up.”

• All photographs from Sixteen, a portrait of British boys and girls by 15 photographers, a group project on show at Format19 international photography festival in Derby, 15 March – 14 April, formatfestival.com. See more of the images in this gallery.

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