Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (8 page)

This generation is lousy with lost boys, and loving one of them means hollowing yourself out to make a space for them to crawl inside. So you do that, because that’s what girls are supposed to do, and because it’s so good to be needed. Just for a little while. Just until your boyfriend gets a job and your best friend stops trying to kill himself.

I learned the truth at twenty-two: you can’t save the world one man at a time.

Watching these young men growing up into a very different world from the one they were promised, my first reaction has always been sympathy. It’s surprisingly easy to sympathise. For two reasons.

Firstly because so much of our culture is set up to make it easy to sympathise with white, middle-class cis men, who get to be the heroes of almost every story. We are not encouraged to understand the suffering of women or the very poor in quite the same way. They are unlike us, even when they are us, these people shut out by prejudice and austerity and fighting for a voice at the edge of what is considered relevant discourse.

And secondly because the disappointment of young white guys is so very raw. They grew up expecting the whole world in a lunchbox, and now, too often for comfort, they can’t even get themselves a sandwich. At least, that’s what I pick up from the number of anonymous men on the Internet who seem so desperate for me to make them one.
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When you were anticipating power and ease, not getting it stings like a slap.

There has been much discussion of the cohort of young adults born around the fall of the Berlin Wall as a ‘lost generation’, their dreams of prosperity dashed by the global recession. But let us be clear. When we talk about the young people who became adults after the dream of perpetual neoliberal expansion had died, after the jobs had disappeared and the funding had run out and the police had come out of the inner cities on to the main streets of every capital city to smash heads, when we talk about kids who suffered and imploded under the pressure of unmet expectations, we’re talking about men. When we talk about the ‘lost generation’, we are talking about men. 

It is men’s dashed dreams that seem to matter most. And it is men’s resentful rage that makes their frustration fearful.

NO MORE NEVER NEVER LAND

For people who have grown up relying on privilege without even having to think about it too much, the sudden loss of that privilege hits you like a fist to the stomach on a sunny day – it’s the punch you weren’t expecting. Suddenly all of the things you thought were just going to happen to you when you reached a certain age, along with pubic hair and tax returns, don’t; it turns out that being part of the dominant half of the human race, being sexually and socially superior to women, being first in line for jobs and promotion, being taken seriously at work and at home, having your ideas listened to on their own merit precisely because you are a man – none of that is encoded. It is not your genetic inheritance. And it can be taken away.

How are men supposed to cope with this loss of power in a society that still insists that the only way to be a man is to grab as much power as possible, to be rich, to be capable of extreme violence, to dominate other men physically and to dominate women sexually and emotionally? The received wisdom is that they’re not supposed to cope. Without power over others, particularly over women, men are supposed to crumble, to lash out, to collapse in an extravagant welter of identity implosion that leaves a suspicious mess on the carpet. If this is really the case, then men must be fragile creatures indeed.

Books and studies like Hanna Rosin’s
The End of Men
have concluded that men’s loss of power is women’s gain. As we will see, the opposite is the case.

THIS IS GOING TO HURT

The great obstacle to women’s progress is not men’s hate, but their fear. The ‘Men’s Rights Activists’ who organise to drown out and silence women on the Internet are usually fearful, lonely creatures who are desperate to speak about gender, but only able to do so as a way of shutting women down. That expression of fear comes from a profoundly childish place, a posture which is as fascistic in its policing of gender roles as a playground bully, and which uses words like ‘Feminazi’ with apparent seriousness. Because fighting for equality was what the Nazis were really known for.

It is as if by talking about the hurt women experience, often because we are women, we are somehow preventing men from speaking about the painful pressures of masculinity. Interestingly, for many men, the only time they do feel able to talk about their own suffering is when they are trying to stop women talking about theirs. In every other context, men and boys are discouraged from talking about their pain. Thinking in a new way about sex, gender and power – call it feminism or ‘masculism’ or whatever the hell you like as long as you do it – can help men to process that pain. But it’s far easier just to blame women.

As more and more women and girls and a growing number of male allies start speaking out against sexism and injustice, a curious thing is happening: some people are complaining that speaking about prejudice is itself prejudice. 

Increasingly, before we talk about misogyny, women are asked to modify our language so that we don’t hurt men’s feelings. Don’t say ‘men oppress women’ – that’s sexism, just as bad as any sexism women ever have to handle, and possibly worse. Instead, say ‘some men oppress women’. Whatever you do, don’t generalise. That’s something men do. Not all men, of course, just some men. 

This type of semantic squabbling is a very effective way of getting women to shut up. After all, most of us grew up learning that being a good girl was all about putting other people’s feelings ahead of our own. We aren’t supposed to say what we think if there’s a chance it might upset somebody else, or worse, make them angry. I see this used as a silencing technique across the social justice movements with which I am associated: black people are asked to consider the feelings of white people before they speak about their own experience; gay and transsexual people are asked not to be too angry because it makes straight people feel uncomfortable. And so we start to stifle our speech with apologies, caveats and soothing sounds. We reassure our friends and loved ones that of course, you’re not one of those dudes. You’re not one of those racists, or those homophobes, or those men who hate women. 

What we don’t say is: of course not all men hate women. But culture hates women, and men who grow up in a sexist culture have a tendency to do and say sexist things, often without meaning to. We aren’t judging you for who you are, but that doesn’t mean we’re not asking you to change your behaviour. What you feel about women in your heart is of less immediate importance than how you treat them on a daily basis. You can be the gentlest, sweetest man in the world and still benefit from sexism, still hesitate to speak up when you see women hurt and discriminated against. That’s how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother. The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that unfair system is to listen, rather than turn away or yell, as a child might, that it’s not your fault. Of course it isn’t your fault. I’m sure you’re lovely. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to do something about it.

Society tends to discourage us from thinking structurally. Pondering upsetting things like poverty, racism and sexism as parts of a larger architecture of violence does not come easy in a culture that prefers that we all see ourselves as free-acting individuals. But the body politic is riddled with bigotry like an infection: you can’t see it or touch it until it breaks out on the skin. But it’s there, under the surface, bursting and suppurating in individual wounds that suggest something else is going on under the surface. Your friend is raped by another friend at a party; your colleague has to leave work because she can’t afford full-time childcare; your daughter comes home sobbing that she feels fat and refuses to eat dinner. It’s simpler and less scary to imagine all of these things as individual, unrelated experiences, rather than part of a structure of sexism that infects everyone. Even you. 

Dull gender stereotypes about multitasking aside, it’s relatively easy to hold more than one idea in the human brain at a time. It’s a large, complex organ, the brain, about the size and weight of a cauliflower, and it has room for many seasons’ worth of trashy TV plotlines and the phone number of the ex-lover you really shouldn’t be calling after six shots of vodka. If it couldn’t handle big structural ideas at the same time as smaller personal ones, we would never have made it down from the trees and built things like cities and cineplexes. It should not, therefore, be as difficult as it is to explain to the average human male that while you, individual man, going about your daily business, eating crisps and playing BioShock 2, may not hate and hurt women, men as a group – men as a structure – certainly do. I do not believe that the majority of men are too stupid to understand this distinction, and if they are, we really need to step up our efforts to stop them running almost every global government.

Somehow, it is still hard to talk to men about sexism without meeting a wall of defensiveness that shades into outright hostility, even violence. Anger is an entirely appropriate response to learning that you’re implicated in a system that oppresses women but the solution isn’t to direct that anger back at women. The solution isn’t to shut down debate by accusing us of ‘reverse sexism’, as if that will somehow balance out the problem and stop you feeling so uncomfortable.

Sexism should be uncomfortable. It is painful and enraging to be on the receiving end of misogynist attacks, and it is also painful to watch them happen and to know that you’re implicated, even though you never chose to be. You’re supposed to react when you’re told that a group you are a member of is actively fucking over other human beings, in the same way that you’re supposed to react when a doctor hammers your knee to test your nerves. If it doesn’t hurt, something is horribly wrong.

Saying that ‘all men are implicated in a culture of sexism’ – all men, not just some men – may sound like an accusation. In fact, it’s a challenge. You, individual man, with your individual dreams and desires, did not ask to be born into a world where being a boy gave you social and sexual advantages over girls. You don’t want to live in a world where women get raped and then told they provoked it in a court of law, where women’s work is poorly paid or unpaid, where we are called sluts and whores for demanding simple sexual equality. You did not choose any of this. What you do get to choose, right now, is what happens next.

You can choose, as a man, to help create a fairer world for women, and for men, too. You can choose to challenge misogyny and sexual violence wherever you see them. You can choose to take risks and spend energy supporting women, promoting women, treating the women in your life as true equals. You can choose to stand up and say no, and every day more men and boys are making that choice. The question is – will you be one of them?

NAMING PATRIATCHY

For many centuries, money, power and the ability to create large amounts of random bloody carnage has been concentrated in the hands of a few white European men, usually the richest and most well connected. Between them, these men represent only a fraction of the total male population, and yet every man and boy is expected to aspire to be just like them, and every woman is expected to aspire to be in their company. There’s a simple word for this system. The word is ‘patriarchy’. ‘Patriarchy’ does not mean ‘the rule of men’. It means ‘the rule of fathers’ – literally, the rule of powerful heads of household over everybody else in society. Men further down the social chain were expected to be content with having power over women in order to make up for their lack of control over the rest of their lives. 

The word ‘patriarchy’ is a particularly hard one to hear, describing as it does a structure of economic and sexual oppression centuries old in which only a few men were granted power. Patriarchy: not the rule of men, but the rule of fathers and of father figures. Most individual men do not rule very much, and they never have. Most individual men don’t have a lot of power, and now the small amount of social and sexual superiority they held over women is being questioned. That must sting. Benefiting from patriarchy doesn’t make you a bad person, although it does very little to help you be a better one. The test of character, as with everyone who finds themselves in a position of power over others, is what you do with that realisation.

Patriarchy, throughout most of human history, is what has oppressed and constrained men and boys as well as women. Patriarchy is a top-down system of male dominance that is established with violence or with the threat of violence. When feminists say ‘patriarchy hurts men too’, this is what we really mean. Patriarchy is painful, and violent, and hard for men to opt out of, and bound up with the economic and class system of capitalism. I’ve found that when I speak to men about gender and violence, the word ‘patriarchy’ is one of the hardest for them to bear.

Modern economics creates few winners, so a lot of men are left feeling like losers – and a loser is the last thing a man ought to be. Women don’t want to be with losers. Losers aren’t real men, desirable men, strong men, and if neoliberalism is creating more losers, it must be because men aren’t being properly appreciated, and it’s probably the fault of feminism, not fiscal mismanagement. Neoliberalism may have set up vast swathes of people to fail, but the real problem cannot be a crisis of capitalism, so it must be a crisis of gender.

Across the global north and south, people are realising how they have been cheated of social, financial and personal power by their elected representatives and unelected elites – but young men still learn that their identity and virility depends on being powerful. What I hear most from the men and boys who contact me is that they feel less powerful than they had hoped to be, and they don’t know who to blame.