How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  They’re not remotely impressed by this little parable, and much prefer the story about my being punched to the floor in the hallway by a girl the previous year. My wife doesn’t think either tale has much of a moral.

  “If someone wants to steal your phone, you give it to them,” she says. “It’s just a phone. It’s not worth it.”

  Actually, would-be muggers have so far always rejected their phones for being too shit, so they really aren’t worth it. Even so, most of the time my sons just lie and say they don’t have a phone, while never slowing their gait, and this usually suffices. They’re probably in the best position to know the difference between a bit of speculative bullying and a genuine mugging, and how to behave if one suddenly becomes the other. They’re out there every day, after all. It’s nothing to do with me, but I like to think they know exactly when a phone is just a phone, and when handing it over would be tying the shoe. I hope so because, although I hate to admit it, they’re on their own out there. It’s a sad fact of fatherhood that by the time your children are old enough to need it, all your advice turns to dust in your mouth. The opportunities to provide protection from the world diminish daily, or so I imagine.

  In the autumn of 2009, on the afternoon half term started, the oldest one, half a dozen of his friends, and his youngest brother went to the park over the road with a football. When I next looked out an upstairs window an hour later, they were playing a jumpers-for-goalposts-style match with some other kids who happened to be out there. With the sun setting, it looked from where I stood an idyllic scene. When my wife called me back to the window half an hour after that, things had changed.

  “There’s something going on out there I don’t like,” she said.

  Evidently the game had ended, or was ending, in dispute. In the charged, not altogether wholesome half-term atmosphere of the crowded park, other kids were streaming over to take sides. Even from a distance, it was clear that my son and his friends could count very few well-wishers among them.

  By the time I got outside (I spent a long time looking for my shoes, half hoping the situation would resolve itself) everybody was gone. The oldest one, the youngest one, and the oldest’s friends had sought sanctuary in the corner shop at the park’s edge, where upward of thirty other children—most of them quite young, it has to be said—had gathered outside. More were arriving all the time, drawn by a sense that something was happening. When I arrived they were all busy looking bored, but there was a definite crackle in the air, a palpable sense of menace held in abeyance. It was like that playground scene at the beginning of The Birds.

  Before I could go in, a clutch of nervous boys in white school shirts stepped out of the shop, the oldest at the back, and headed down the pavement for home, an evening stroll of less than a hundred meters. The crowd of children turned as one to surge after them, and I fell behind. For a few moments I was in the uncomfortable position of being part of the mob following my children.

  As I picked my way to the front I could see that they were doing the right thing: walking slowly and deliberately, ignoring the front row of the mob, who were diligently kicking them in the calves as they went. But I also realized events might well come to a head before we reached the front door. In my mind the unknown thing I had lain awake so many nights dreading—a scenario which promised an unpredictable combination of fear, failure, and embarrassment—had arrived. My big test as protector, the one I was beginning to imagine I’d dodged, was here. I had no idea how I was meant to deliver us from the situation, but the time of intervention, it seemed, was upon me. I held my breath and took one large, final step forward.

  I was still more embarrassed than angry, given my strong disinclination to put myself in any position where I might have to address a large group. I insinuated myself directly behind my children, turned so I was facing the mob, spread my palms, and said, “That’s enough.” I’m not sure they heard me at the back. The mob continued to press.

  “You can’t fucking touch me!” said a kid at the front.

  “They’re my children,” I said, lamely. Any illusion I might have harbored about having a lot in common with Atticus Finch as played by Gregory Peck deserted me at this point.

  Just as I was beginning to regret my lack of prepared remarks, a boy of about fourteen rode up on his bike, hopped off, pulled his hoodie tight over his face by the drawstrings, and punched me in the mouth. I experienced a soundless, frozen moment. A car stopped in the middle of the road and the driver opened his door. I touched my mouth and looked at the blood on my fingers. The boy got back on his bike and rode off, without my ever grasping the nature of his involvement. The crowd evaporated. The driver got back in his car.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I led the children back to the house in a calm, unhurried fashion.

  Another parent who heard the whole story told me I’d done the right thing, but I don’t recall making any choices. I touched the spot where my tooth went through my lip and thought: at least you didn’t have to give any sort of speech.

  For a time, I treated this incident as the ultimate squaring of the demands of fatherhood with my personal fear and embarrassment thresholds: painful but necessary. I figured I’d done what I could in the circumstances, had been found wanting, and yet it had all worked out in the end. With some relief, I decided to let this serve as parenting’s worst-case scenario.

  More recently, however, a chunk of ice about the size of a beach ball fell from a cloudless sky and crashed into an artificial pitch where my son was playing football. I was standing on a Tube platform when I received this news, and two tears escaped my brimming eyes as I stepped onto the train, even though I’d also been told he was unhurt.

  I called him when I got off the train and he explained that the ice chunk had landed right in front of him and exploded on impact, whereupon a tennis ball-sized fragment had flown off and hit him in the chest. The other players were racing up the pitch at the time, while he, having just disappointed himself in defense, had dejectedly paused to tie his laces. The ice, he said, had probably broken off an airplane, although I later learned that the Civil Aviation Authority disavowed this theory, cataloging the event as an unexplained icefall of the kind that were reported long before the advent of commercial air travel.

  I think it upset me so much because, in spite of twenty years of hand-wringing, hyperventilating, and health and safety paranoia, the incident reaffirmed my conviction that the fundamental experience of fatherhood is one of bottomless responsibility alloyed with total impotence. You spend eighteen years holding on to collars, patrolling the beaches, strapping on seat belts and helmets, purveying tiresome homilies, and inventing new dangers to worry about. And then one day ice falls from the sky. It’s hard to be “there” for your children under those circumstances, but to be honest I’m glad I wasn’t standing on the touchline when it happened. Who knows? I might have shouted at him not to tie the shoe.

  19.

  Misandry—There’s Such a Word, but Is There Such a Thing?

  One of the greatest things about being a man is that you come with a certain level of empowerment as standard. If you’re a white, Western, straight male, you tick virtually all the empowerment boxes. Even if you can’t lay claim to the full slate, you’ve still got a decent head start. While you may experience some lack of empowerment from being a minority, or because you suffer from one or more unattractive phobias, being a man—just by itself—leaves you remarkably unencumbered by the need for self-validation. Any path in this world not open to you because of your maleness is . . . wait—there aren’t any! All right: you can’t give birth, a privation which, for my money, is a lot like someone denying me the right to bungee jump from a helicopter. I’ll cope.

  Given the way the world currently works, it’s almost impossible to discriminate against men for being male. Or is it?

  I recall some years ago watching The X-Factor with my children, and being obliged to
explain the difference between sexy and sexist.

  “Sexist,” I said, “is being prejudiced against someone because of their gender. But actually, only women.”

  “Is that true?” asked the oldest one.

  “Well, I can’t think of an example where it works the other way round,” I said. “Can you?”

  “Yes!” he shouted. “Sheilas’ Wheels!”

  This was a cause of his at the time. Adverts for Sheilas’ Wheels insurance were all over the telly—we’d probably just watched one—and he felt very strongly that offering discounted car insurance exclusively to women drivers amounted to a gross injustice.

  “That’s slightly different,” I said. “The simple fact is . . .” I stopped there, because as a father I have always reserved the right to abandon sentences that have no future—kids forget these conversations instantly anyway. I realized that simple facts didn’t come into it. As far as I knew, there was no written rule about when one’s basic human rights could be trumped by actuarial tables. I had no idea how we as a society came to accept that certain bonzer car insurance deals could be off-limits to men simply because statistics proved they had way more accidents. And being sexist against men—that wasn’t even a thing.

  The boy, it transpired, was right, or at least not alone. The European Court of Human Rights subsequently ruled that car insurance premiums have to be gender-neutral. So effectively women drivers are now required to subsidize accident-prone males through higher premiums. But that’s not fair either. There is no “gender-neutral” position to take on this ruling; it’s sexist either way.

  Of course, one might simply blame men for being such terrible drivers. Personally, I’m not going to lobby on behalf of my gender over something that we, as a group, ought to be ashamed of. Maybe we can’t help it—perhaps it was a sudden surge of testosterone brought about by the act of purchasing shelf brackets that caused me to drive into the bollards in the Homebase car park—but to be honest, the idea that I could be unfairly treated just because I’m a man has never occurred to me. And I’m always looking for new reasons to feel hard done by.

  Recent years have seen the rise of two novel terms: “masculism” and “misandry.” At first glance they seem to spring from nothing more than a tit-for-tat desire for lexical fairness: there is misogyny, so there must be misandry; we have feminism, so we might as well have masculism.

  It’s fine to have the vocabulary at hand, should a need ever arise. But where is the need, unless you’re desperate to use “sexism, but against men” as a crossword clue? Is not the world as we know it, as we have always known it, already a giant lobbying group for men? Who calls himself a masculist? Why? In opposition to what?

  In February 2013 the Twitter hashtag #INeedMasculismBecause began circulating, encouraging men to enumerate the injustices that made men’s rights activism such a timely necessity. As a parody of the popular #INeedFeminismBecause hashtag, it had all the hallmarks of a “calling all morons” piece of provocation—and the hashtag was quickly appropriated by Twitter users who deployed it to illustrate the absurdity of the whole notion of masculism. “#INeedMasculismBecause women have had it too good for too long” was a typical example. My favorite ended “. . . just because I’m handsome doesn’t mean my name is ‘handsome.’” Even the sincere tweets were difficult to distinguish from parody: “#INeedMasculismBecause the American feminist movement fights for superiority not equality.”

  #INeedMasculismBecause was, in fact, a deliberate attempt to troll feminists. There were no actual masculists involved in its creation—some sexists, maybe; some dickheads, certainly—but nobody who really believed that men needed a movement to further their struggle. The windup was itself a derisive parody of masculism, constructed to provoke a feminist reaction against contentions nobody was making.

  If the hashtag achieved anything at all, it served to reinforce the notion of men’s rights activism as an online backwater where angry losers who can’t spell “privilege” complain about having to pay for dinner all the time. It certainly did the trick for me. You won’t catch me calling myself a masculist.

  Mind you, I don’t often call myself a feminist either, if only because I don’t think I could turn up to a meeting without someone pointing at me and shouting, “What’s HE doing here?” I’m a man—a small cog in the patriarchal machine—and therefore part of the problem. Back in the 1970s, when a male sitcom character said something like “Speaking as a feminist myself,” we were being asked to laugh at his wishy-washy liberalism; now we would probably laugh at his hypocrisy. When a male politician is asked if he’s a feminist, he will never have a short answer. If you pinned me up against a wall and asked me if I considered myself a feminist, I would probably say yes, but I would be very worried about any follow-up questions you might have: What feminist things have you done lately? Why haven’t you done more?

  Additionally, a lot of feminism’s current battle appears to be with itself—the media is full of feminists telling other feminists that they aren’t real feminists, or that feminism no longer means what it used to mean, or ought not to mean what it presently means. While I find all of this truly fascinating, gripping even, I know it’s not my fight. When it comes to the vexed question of what needs fixing about modern feminism, nobody is asking my opinion. And if women are struggling to qualify as feminists in the eyes of other women, I’m certainly not about to jump the queue.

  So while I’m happy to be counted as a supporter, to uphold the basic tenets of feminism and, where relevant, to retweet them, I couldn’t start a sentence with “Speaking as a feminist” any more convincingly than I could say, “Speaking as a small-business man.” Both might be true by somebody’s generous and inclusive definition, but I’d only be fooling myself in the end.

  Conversely, I am only nominally a member of the patriarchy, the male-dominated social system against which feminism struggles. Let’s put it this way: they don’t send me their newsletter, and if they have a Christmas party, I’ve never been invited. For all the advantage the patriarchy has conferred upon me because of my gender, I strongly suspect the bastards are still holding out on me. As far as I can tell they appear to be running the world for the exclusive benefit of people who own more than one helicopter.

  This is, of course, an oft-cited reason for men to seek common cause with feminists: the patriarchy is fucking with us too. Men don’t necessarily refer to the overarching system that runs the show as “the patriarchy” among themselves. We just call it The Man. And while I admit to being a man, I don’t tend to think of myself as The Man,* so from my point of view a men’s movement that was allied with feminism, against The Man, would be, in theory, a cool thing.

  The trouble with the men’s rights movement (MRM) is that it’s mostly—actually almost exclusively—an antifeminist movement. It seeks to lay the problems facing the modern male at feminism’s door, which is simply not my experience. I can’t think of anything bad that’s happened to me that I can blame on feminists. Robots, yes; feminists, not really.

  The MRM is also largely—and perhaps fortunately—an Internet thing, confined to drab corners of cyberspace most of us never visit. It’s sometimes collectively described as the manosphere, which makes it sound pretty inclusive, but it doesn’t appear to include very many happily married men. In fact it’s largely an online refuge for aggrieved ax-grinders who tell anyone expressing a positive view of modern gender relations to “keep taking the blue pills.”

  Unless you haunt the right online forums or follow a particular subset of people on Twitter, it’s unlikely the concerns and provocations of the men’s rights movement are keeping you up at night. They certainly aren’t talking about misandry down at the corner shop, and you don’t have to read too many blogs about First World governments controlling the masses through “aggressive gynocentrism” to see why.

  MRAs, one soon discovers, aren’t even particularly concerned with helpi
ng men. They don’t tend to build, fund, or even campaign for domestic violence shelters for men; they just keep pointing out that there aren’t any, even though there are loads for women (thanks to feminists), in what amounts to nothing more than a point-scoring exercise. Men’s rights activism isn’t a cause; it’s just a hobby for misogynists. Their primary concern appears to be able to complain, apparently without a shred of irony, that men are the real victims of victim culture.

  They don’t necessarily mean all men either. They don’t, for example, mean gay men, who they see as having cast their lot with special-pleading feminists and the nonmales that comprise the LGBT community.

  One of the MRAs’ ongoing gripes is the negative image of men put forward by the media—in films, adverts, sitcoms, and newspapers—where males are routinely portrayed as incompetent parents, useless husbands, or clumsy, immature, untidy morons (I should probably declare an interest here).

  I’m all for moaning about stupid ads and witless sitcoms, but to attempt to dress this sort of thing up as discrimination—to say, “if they did it to women, all the feminists would be outraged”—is deeply misguided. An ad in which a male cyclist ogles a passing woman and then smashes into a postbox is not feminist propaganda, nor is it an example of violence against men.

  Masculism and feminism aren’t, of course, opposing sides of the same coin. They aren’t even vaguely analogous. Feminists ask how we can tolerate a society where women still face discrimination and misogyny in the course of an ordinary working day. MRAs get exercised because girls are allowed to join the Scouts, but boys can’t join the Girl Guides. Feminists seek solutions to problems that are concrete and specific (I’m being paid less than male colleagues; legislators wish to control my body). The tragedies befalling the modern masculist, meanwhile, remain woolly and impersonal (his traditional role is being usurped, or something). If, as a man, your biggest problem is your ongoing struggle to forge a positive gender identity in a changing world, then you don’t have enough problems. If you need to be kept busy, you’re welcome to some of mine.