Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (11 page)

By the time we hit our late twenties, women and girls are expected to have their shit more or less together. We are expected to have chosen the people around whom our life’s work will revolve, to have made a plan and begun to put it into practice. The word ‘young’ stops being a prefix to ‘woman’ when we are spoken about in the third person. The women we see in the public eye, the women who are celebrated and held up as role models, are overwhelmingly very young, sometimes barely out of school. This is not the case for people living as men. Miley Cyrus is castigated for being a poor role model, but Justin Bieber can trash all the hotel rooms he likes. He’s young. He’ll learn.

I’m twenty-seven years old right now, and I’m barely a functional adult. I like ramen noodles and gin and staying up late having dramatic conversations on the Internet, and sometimes I just flip over yesterday’s underwear because the washing isn’t done. I have a tax-paying job and a blazer to wear to meetings and I’m grown up about contraception and healthcare, but that is no indication of any sustained ability to take responsibility for myself or any other human being. And yet family members are already starting to make worried noises about the time it’s taking me to settle down and warm my ovaries up, even though I’m clearly in no position to take care of a baby, a boyfriend, or both. I still leave bright-pink hair dye all over the bathroom as if some cartoon character has been horribly slaughtered, but apparently, it’s time to think baby.

Other women I know who write, make art or work in politics have begun to talk, in hushed and anxious tones, about the next ten years as a time of hard, adult choices in a way that I never hear from my male friends. None of us have the kind of high-flying jobs that would allow us to think in terms of ‘having it all’ – the man, the mortgage, the baby and the briefcase – and yet we still hear the ticking of the clock getting louder. The biological clock is a social idea. It is used to reinstitute a measure of compliance in women and girls. It tells us that any freedom we have is time-limited, that we can dance all night if we want, but midnight is approaching, and when the coach turns back into a pumpkin, we’d better make sure it’s dropped us somewhere safe. 

Whether or not we ever plan to have children, women’s professional potential and social value is still subtly measured along the timescale of our fertility. We are expected to slide quietly off the escalator of money and power in our early to mid-thirties, and if we refuse to do so, we are considered superwomen or cold, grasping bitches, or both. The same cultural logic that tells us that women are most desirable and exciting in our teens and early twenties, when we barely know how to order a drink, tells men and boys not to hurry – they have things to sell that aren’t based on their youth and physical charms. When they get bigger and uglier and happier, they will only be more powerful. Women fear that we will become invisible. We know that, like Cinderella, our time is running out. Men are told that there is time enough. 

Those ten extra years make all the difference. They are the ten years in which we get to fuck up, be young, damage ourselves and heal again and, if we’re lucky, try to build something out of the debris of lust and dreams we accrete like limpets clinging to the underside of time. Men don’t get told that the best years are over just as they’re starting to get the hang of being here. 

When I think of the lost young men I have known and loved, the ones who made it and the ones who didn’t, a fist of rage and sadness clenches and unclenches under my ribcage. When I think of all the brilliant, passionate, scared young men, mostly poor, many queer and of colour, who didn’t get the chance to make something out of the great gift of those years, I want to shake them in frustration. The tragedy of male privilege is that it is no longer a guarantee of health and happiness, if it ever was.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

How should we forgive men who have hurt us? Is it even possible? It is 2009. I’m in a chain coffee-shop, space that is not just neutral but nowhere, a rash of familiar decor infesting the walls, waiting for a man. Waiting for a particular man. People who ask why I like coffee shops so much usually haven’t had their arse grabbed in a bar. I’m particularly keen for that not to happen today, because I am maintaining a tricky equilibrium between loving compassion and the impulse to smack the next unsuspecting, undeserving male human I see in the face and shout incoherently until he develops some goddamn humanity. I buy a cup of truly appalling chain-coffee-shop tea, plant my feet on the floor in the corner, and wait.

The man I’m waiting for is late. When he arrives he apologises, although not too much. We talk about how he’s doing, how my boyfriend is doing, how his wife is enjoying her new job. Years ago, this man raped me after a party while I was passed out on his bed. I’m here to see what he has to say for himself, because I am pretty sure that he has chosen to believe that what he did wasn’t rape, because he’s a good guy, and good guys don’t do that shit to teenage girls. They don’t fuck them unconscious without a condom and infect them with something mercifully treatable. Did I go to the police? Did I hell. I thought I was a stupid slag who deserved it. I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed, by the law or by mutual friends, and that assessment proved entirely correct.

It is too late now to make amends to the damaged kid that I used to be. That girl is gone, and someone else is here instead, someone older and uglier and angrier. The friends I lost after I dared to speak of it the first time because he was a charming, respected older man and I was a drunk teen slut are not friends I wish to regain. Nor am I particularly concerned for his immortal soul. I just want to stop it happening again to somebody else, and now word has reached me of a similar incident, so here I am, stirring my tea like a cauldron and wishing I could do magic.

I make some tight-lipped pleasantries and arrive, via a circuitous route that ambles around gosh-that-was-an-interesting-night, at the point. It is remarkably difficult to tell somebody, in person and without prevaricating, that they have raped you. It is difficult to explain in an even tone to someone who likes to think of himself as a decent human being that he has probably hurt you, but you must keep your voice soft and steady, because something between fear and fury is boiling in the back of your throat and you’re worried about what might happen if you let it loose. For minutes that feel like months, he just doesn’t get it.

And then he gets it.

I have never watched a human face flush and alter quite so curiously as this man’s does when I explain why what he did was rape, and that it was unacceptable. He stammers that he is sorry. I thank him, and ask him not to do it again, and then I get to my feet, and push past the table, and walk away. For now, this man is sorry and ashamed, and there aren’t enough jails in the world to hold the hundreds of thousands just like him, perfectly ordinary chaps, a lot less clever than they think they are, who cannot contemplate that they, enlightened modern souls, could really do such harm. Rape, abuse and violence are something that evil men do, and they are not evil men.

Later that night, I receive an enraged email from his wife. I have done something terrible, something truly unforgivable: I have upset her husband. 

And that’s when I get it. The worst thing we can possibly do in situations like this is make men feel uncomfortable. Acknowledging the enormity of male violence, the staggering scale of entitlement, would require a change in perspective so massive that it’s easier just to shut up and not talk about it, and isolate anyone who does. We don’t want to hear it.

It can be terribly uncomfortable for men to hear about misogyny, particularly their own. Unfortunately for them, as soon as they start to think and speak about gender they often run into one awful, unshakeable fact: how much men as a whole have hurt women. That means that it’s hugely difficult for men to talk about masculinity without coming to terms with how frightening and aggressive masculinity in its modern form has come to be. It’s frightening. It’s going to hurt.

Here’s what hurts, too: 8 per cent of men admit committing acts that meet the legal definition of rape or attempted rape.
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 More than one in five men report ‘becoming so sexually aroused that they could not stop themselves from having sex, even though the woman did not consent’.
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Rape and sexual violence are routine. Ritualised misogyny is so normalised that we need a radical redefinition of how men and women relate, and the traumatic beginnings of that redefinition are causing casualties on both sides. When rape is raised in the press, the concern is always for the man’s reputation – which is considered of more value than a woman’s autonomy. Women ruin lives with their lies, we are repeatedly told – men’s lives, the only lives that matter. In fact, what is being ruined by women’s refusal to remain mute is the illusion of sexual equality. Those who are so invested in the status quo that they would keep women silent when we try to speak about power, privilege and violence should ask themselves what it really means to be a man.

There’s a playground legend that says that men think about sex every six seconds. For all that, they rarely get to speak about sexuality and what it means with anything approaching honesty. Men are supposed to fuck violently and on cue, to lust without reason, to barter crumbs of affection in exchange for access to sex with women, which they’ll take by force when denied. There is no language for softness, for searching, for play. Men as well as women are taught that male sexuality is toxic and dangerous – and at the same time utterly natural. Men learn that there is a deep well of violence inside them that is connected to sexuality, and it cannot be controlled, only contained.

A lot of men find this monolithic portrayal of their own sexuality extremely disturbing. Men who are gay or bisexual, of course, are used to not seeing their own sexuality represented or catered to in the mainstream other than obliquely, jokily, as a counterfoil to the violently identikit heterosexuality that dominates our visual culture. But men who are attracted mainly to the opposite sex are also offered only one way to express themselves sexually, and that is in the manner of a barely tamed beast. I regularly receive emails from men and boys who are completely unsure how to relate to that stereotype, but afraid of rejection, by their peers or their partners, if they don’t.

Here’s what I’d like to say to those men. It’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay not to know what you’re supposed to be, or how you’re supposed to behave. You’re not allowed to question what it means to be a man, or even raise the possibility that there might be a question to ask, because if you did, if anyone did, then we might get answers. We might discover that what we all liked to think of as ‘masculinity’ is in fact a front, that ‘masculinity’ is actually fragile, and vulnerable, and hurting, and nothing more than human.

Real men aren’t meant to ask questions. Real men hit things with hammers or blast them with lasers until the problem goes away. But what if the problem is your own heart? What if the problem is just a sense, deep inside you, that something is desperately wrong? Hammers and lasers are still an option, of course, but so is taking your own distress seriously, sitting with it, not trying to submerge it with chemicals or recreational misogyny.

It is, of course, not the job of women, or of feminist activists, to fix men’s problems for them. Even if it were, there are a great many women out there who are deeply traumatised by their interactions with men and want nothing more to do with them, and that is very much their right. I have compassion for the small school of feminism that believes that the only way to deal with male violence is to shout at men and boys until they stop, and I have, in the past, found myself part of that school of thought. No longer.

Thinking in a new way about sex, gender and power can help men to process their gendered pain. Unfortunately for them, as soon as they start to think and speak about gender they often run into one awful, unshakeable fact: how much men as a whole have hurt women. Realising the full extent of male violence against women comes as a painful shock to any man of conscience. That means that it’s hugely difficult for men to talk about masculinity without coming to terms with how frightening and aggressive masculinity in its modern form has come to be.

Being on the receiving end of prejudice is always hurtful, whether or not that prejudice is practical. Women understand that men are trained to see them as a category, as a social problem to be dealt with, rather than as individual humans. When men realise that women often see them in exactly the same way – to whit, as hostile territory – they often react with pain and anger.

Social heterosexuality has been allowed to remain a process of mutual dehumanisation. Hence the ongoing debate over whether men and women can ‘really’ be friends with each other ‘without sex getting in the way’. The truly telling part of this perennial non-controversy is not just that it is entertained as a serious prospect, but that sexuality is assumed to destroy any possibility of friendship. Thus, any person who you might want to see naked is on fundamentally hostile territory, to be conquered rather than understood.

What almost all men and boys want – in fact, what almost all human beings want – is to feel useful and needed and loved. One of the quiet tragedies of our age is that we’re still telling young men that the only way they can be useful is either by earning a pile of money and bringing it home to a grateful, pliant wife who rewards you with dull, dutiful sex and home-baked brownies in return for a lifetime of financial security, or by fighting – and possibly dying – in a war very far from home. 

In the real world, most men have never had lives like that, and today more and more of the wars are being fought by robots that can set wedding parties on fire without flinching and, should they fail to return, will leave no widows behind. But men still want to feel useful, needed and loved.