Stand by Your Manhood (21 page)
Read Stand by Your Manhood Online
Authors: Peter Lloyd
Tags: #Reference, #Personal & Practical Guides, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Men's Studies
When author Hanna Rosin wrote
The End of Men,
even her young son got the hump – which says it all. The American journalist claimed men were on a one-way journey to the scrapheap, with women rising up the ranks to replace us in a new, utopian, female future. Yep, apparently we’d been blagging capability for centuries and those nifty technological/medical/industrial advances were just flukes.
Needless to say, it wasn’t the happiest of reads. For those blissfully unaware, the polemic mainly involves
Rosin talking with other women – and a few nodding men – about the prospect of a bloke apocalypse, which surely can’t be good for anyone, not least the women left behind to pick up the slack.
Thankfully, there was a happy ending, although not in the closing pages. Instead, it happened when her nine-year-old son saw the finished product and, justifiably offended, sent her a note saying: ‘Only bullies write books called
The End of Men
.’ Good lad!
To be fair, he had a point. Something attitudinal has certainly shifted with the perception of boys in recent decades – and it isn’t good. Thirty years ago we were made of slugs, snails and puppy dogs’ tails. Now, we’re medicated for ADHD at twice the rate of girls.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram can set fire to a school dormitory killing fifty-nine sleeping boys – the third tragedy of its kind in just eight months – but we don’t hear a peep from anybody important, including Michelle Obama, who’s usually on red-alert with a marker pen, an A4 jotter and the White House Twitter account. Instead, we get radio silence and crickets. Yet, two months later when the same terrorist organisation kidnaps a group of schoolgirls, the world shows impressive unity and compassion, mounting a viral campaign in minutes. What gives? Why is boys’ life worth less – or worthless?
Even Z-list personalities are getting in on the act. Josie
Cunningham – who, like a cast member of
Shameless,
infamously had a £4,800 boob job on the NHS to launch a ‘career’ as a glamour model – hit the headlines when she offered to abort her baby for reality TV bosses because it was a boy. Now that’s shameless.
Obviously, this isn’t to say that she’s sexist because she’s from an under-privileged background – such ‘boycotting’ isn’t just a lower-class thing. Let me clarify now or forever have Owen Jones throwing copies of the
Socialist Worker
at me in the street. Actually, it’s evident across all castes.
Esther Walker, the middle-class wife of Giles Coren, celebrity food critic for
The Times,
once wrote in the
Mail
: ‘I know very little about boys, but what I have seen I really haven’t liked. Boys are gross; they turn into disgusting teenage boys and then boring, selfish men.’ She added that she’d ‘die’ if her baby was born male and claimed she was ‘deeply, deeply suspicious of little boys’, before describing them as the ‘dreaded gender’.
Even the royal family felt first-hand the micro-aggressions of fashionable boy apathy. When Kate Middleton delivered Prince George, there was an audible groan from the left who clearly wanted another female monarch because we haven’t had one for … oh, wait a minute, never mind. One critic even used the word ‘unfortunate’ to describe this poor rich kid’s arrival.
Gentlemen! This is a new low and, as former boys, it’s our duty to sort this out.
As it stands, these kids are drowning, not waving. They’re also being circumcised, vilified and rendered semi-literate in a school system in which white, working-class lads are the worst-performing demographic in the country. In fact, studies have seen school teachers actively underestimate boys’ capabilities before they even start, with psychologist Michael Thompson declaring that: ‘Female behaviour is the gold standard in schools, with boys treated like defective girls.’
This, we are told, is progress. But, if current trends continue, the last male student will graduate university – a place where men are now a minority group – in 2068. That’s just five decades away.
Given that this has been repeatedly flagged up but remains unchanged, a cynic might say it was designed this way. That, perhaps, the resentment traditionally reserved for men has slid down the life continuum scale to boys, who are the target in a long-sighted plan to smash the patriarchy from the inside out – slowly making men an unemployable, uneducated underclass to redress the balance.
An elaborate theory or the truth? Who knows. But boys need intervention, both socially and academically, now.
Ask yourself: how would the world react if Hanna
Rosin’s book was called
The End of Jews,
or
The End of African Americans,
or
The End of White-Collar Workers,
or
The End of Immigrants,
or
The End of Gays?
The world would go berserk. And rightly so. But men are all of these things too.
They are also the sum total of their combined experiences of youth, which is precisely why boys need buoying, not bashing.
Men are brilliant.
Being a man is brilliant. Seriously, it is. We invented football, secret intelligence, beer, the internet, philosophy, architecture, cars, trains, helicopters, submarines and the aeroplane. Not to mention email, the jet engine, Polaroids, IVF, parachutes, electricity, solar power and remote controls. We developed modern medicine with the birth of anaesthetic. We’ve led all the industrial revolutions and sent rockets into space. We’ve fought in bloody wars with tin hats and bayonets – and
still
won.
The world we live in would be nothing without Alan Turing, Alexander Graham Bell, Sigmund Freud, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway and
Albert Einstein. Oh, and Jesus was a man. Assuming he existed, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Oh – and then there’s
you
. The most advanced, finessed version of mankind to date. So don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
Currently, deconstructing men is every fucker’s business. It is the fashionable fascism of a million different women – and many, many men. But don’t be fooled. This isn’t something we should ever adopt or partake in, because it’s borderline self-loathing.
The driving force behind it all – the disposability of men across the board as thinkers, fathers, soldiers and leaders – is at the core of our issues and, like a game of reverse-psychology, keeps us locked in a cycle. In one way we want to prove our worth by overstating our utility as cannon fodder or cash generators. Yet, we also secretly believe the suggestion of worthlessness, so don’t bother to challenge it – or the countless other issues that affect us. We don’t believe we deserve to.
To counteract this you will need a zero-tolerance to stiletto sexism.
Trash TV guru Dr Phil himself nailed it when he said:
You either teach people to treat you with dignity and respect, or you don’t. This means you are partly responsible for the mistreatment that you get at the hands of
someone else. You shape others’ behaviour when you teach them what they can get away with and what they cannot.
If the people in your life treat you in an undesirable way, figure out what you are doing to reinforce, elicit or allow that treatment. Identify the payoffs you may be giving someone in response to any negative behaviour. For example, when people are aggressive, bossy or controlling – and then get their way – you have rewarded them for unacceptable behaviour.
Because you are accountable, you can declare the relationship ‘reopened for negotiation’ at any time you choose, and for as long as you choose. Even a pattern of relating that is thirty years old can be redefined. Before you reopen the negotiation, you must commit to do so from a position of strength and power, not fear and self-doubt. The resolve to be treated with dignity and respect must be uncompromising.
And that, in a roundabout way, is how to be a Suffragent. It is a blueprint for modern men at ease with the personal occasionally being political.
From here on in, the rest, as they say, is up to you.
For although these words mark the end of this book, they also represent a potential new chapter of masculinity because, according to industry opinion, they
shouldn’t exist. Literary agents across London told me a product like this could never happen.
Should
never happen. That men don’t complain, don’t feel pain, anger or frustration, and that, even if they did, they were too restricted to do anything about it.
I was also warned that it would be professional suicide. That men wouldn’t buy it and a ‘feminist mafia’ would label me misogynistic, ensuring I never work again.
Still, I did it anyway.
See, at the end of the day, none of this shit really matters. Even if I’m sofa-surfing for the rest of my life, unable to pay the rent, this book will still exist and you will still have read it. If this happens with enough people to create even minor critical mass, or the smallest communal response, that is change in the making.
This humble connection – caffeine-driven words on paper and some willing, open minds – is the grassroots beginning of a potential revolution. Perhaps even the ultimate game-changer.
What’s genuinely exciting is that it
is
possible. There really can be a future where all the conundrums of contemporary masculinity are solved because the solution is already within us.
After all, we are brilliant. We always have been and we always will be. Then again, you already know this.
In fact, you live it. We all do.
FIRST AND FOREMOST, THANK YOU
to Iain Dale for his vision, courage and belief. Oh – and for the advance.
Special gratitude to the entire Biteback Publishing team, especially James Stephens, Phillip Beresford and my editor, Olivia Beattie. This book found the perfect home.
Heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Jean and Peter, who – along with my sisters; Jane, Beth and Jenny – have always been brilliantly supportive, even when I had bad
hair and a brace. Apologies once again for that awkward adolescence. I love you all.
Ditto to the kids and in-laws, plus those I can no longer thank in person: Uncle Al, Uncle Jim, Jimmy Mac, Nancy, Peggy, Nog, Jean, Dinah and Anna.
Additional credit goes to each of the experts I interviewed along the way, plus the entire editorial team at the
Mail on Sunday
and MailOnline, including: Barney Calman, Sarah Hartley, Andrew Pierce and, most notably, Deborah Arthurs, who first allowed me to have a voice.
I’m also grateful to James Eppy, Lucy Pullin, Emma Dally, Richard Ehrlich, Tim Sigsworth, Sean Smith, Matt O’Connor, Erin Pizzey, Paul Elam and, of course, Luke, for the crucial introduction.
Last, but not least, a special thank you to my best friend, Bill.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Biteback Publishing Ltd
Westminster Tower
3 Albert Embankment
London SE1 7SP
Copyright © Peter Lloyd 2014
Peter Lloyd has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the publisher’s prior permission in writing.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
ISBN 978–1–84954–852–6
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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