Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  Similar (and similarly exhausting) backlashes occurred after the 2015 release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and then its 2017 follow-up The Last Jedi. Set approximately thirty years after the defeat of the Empire in Return of the Jedi, this new Star Wars universe appeared to have had an upgrade. Instead of there being only one woman and one person of colour in the entire galaxy, there were multiple examples of both. Princess Leia was now General Organa, and the new band of plucky Rebels aiming to take down the next Big Bad was more radically diverse than anything the original trilogy had featured in its entirety. White dudes loved it, and for once the comments section became a really positive place to hang out.

  Just kidding! They hated it!

  It was almost as if they didn’t know what to be more aggrieved about—the fact that one of the two new heroes, Rey, was a woman or that the other, Finn, was a black man. Both, according to many of the naysayers, were ‘unrealistic’, which is a fair enough point to make about a fictional world that includes an entire species of warrior teddy bears. Rey (a young orphan plucked from her home planet of Jakku and drawn into the Rebel fight) was dismissed as a ‘Mary Sue’, a term used in pop culture to denote a female character who is too good at too many things and therefore functions as a kind of wish fulfilment for the girl or woman writing her. This sledge was aimed at her because Rey shows an early affinity with the Force and proves to be skilled with a lightsaber, and good lord we have never ever seen that before, no sir. #fakenews

  As the heroes, Rey and Finn disrupt the parameters set out by the dominant white male gaze. Women and black men aren’t supposed to be the heroes. They can be heroic, but the ultimate hero is still supposed to be a white guy. Or, as Jennifer Kessler was taught, ‘the people the audience paid to see’. The addition of Rose Tico in The Last Jedi (played by Vietnamese American actress Kelly Marie Tran) inspired yet more horrendous backlash and absurd accusations that Disney was forcing a ‘feminazi SJW [social justice warrior] agenda’ down the throats of the franchise’s most loyal fans. Tran was subjected to vile racist abuse, with one person even changing her character’s entry in Wookieepedia to read: ‘Ching Chong Wing Tong is a dumbass fucking character Disney made and is a stupid, autistic and retarded love interest for Finn. She better die in the coma because she is a dumbass bitch.’

  And they say women are sensitive.

  Do these kinds of stories cut too close to the bone for men who’ve never been expected (let alone forced) to fight for representation? White men in particular are raised with an abundance of heroes who look exactly like them(ish) and whose adventures are tailored as perfect aspirational fantasies. For some of them, the thought of sharing that space with the people to whom they’ve traditionally been encouraged to see themselves as superior is akin to some kind of assault. It’s ironic really, because the irrational nature of their response puts them closer into the story than they think. As Kayti Burt wrote on Den of Geek, ‘The Last Jedi is filled with male characters on both sides of the dark/light divide who cause and endure suffering because of their inability to deal with their emotions in healthy ways.’

  An inability to ‘deal with emotions in healthy ways’ is what toxic masculinity is all about. And, in most cases, what this really stems from is fear. They’re afraid of the world changing, because then they might have to actually work a bit harder to be seen as important within it. So they shit on women and people of colour and anyone else fighting for political equality alongside them and screech about ‘SJWs’ and feminism being ‘cancer’ and think this is enough to mask the stench of fear that rolls off them in waves. But as any true fan of Star Wars can tell you, fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

  I find myself wondering how it is that men who align themselves so strongly with hero narratives can be so unaware of what side of the story they sit on. The men lashing out at women online, the ones who use misogyny and racism and abuse to fiercely protect what they see as their territory, consider themselves to be the good guys. But it’s like they don’t realise that racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and all the other bigoted views they uphold and gleefully enforce are, you know, what the baddies do. They spent their youths daydreaming about being Jedi Masters, and they haven’t yet realised that they’ve grown up to be Stormtroopers, mindlessly doing the bidding of whichever evil leader they’re acting in service to. The funniest thing is that, in the real world, they would dismiss all their heroes as cucks and white knights. Ha ha Skywalker, you fucking soyboy!

  Like the texture of the iconic hair rolls sprayed to within an inch of their life on the head of Princess Leia, the irony is extremely crisp.

  I love stories. As a girl, I grew up watching movies that predominantly featured male characters. Men being heroes, men being villains, men being funny, men being serious. Men—so many men—navigating the world with purpose and adventure, while women flitted in and out of the scenes around them until they were needed again. At the time, I didn’t know how much I was missing out on and it didn’t occur to me to ask for anything more.

  But it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve realised just how different the experience of watching movies must have been for me and my brother, even as we sprawled next to each other while watching the same ones over and over. It was never a stretch for him to imagine himself as Luke Skywalker or Peter Venkman. He could be Marty McFly or Doc. There were five Goonies for him to choose from, not just the two tagalong girls. I asked him recently what Star Wars meant to him when we were kids. He told me he couldn’t remember watching it for the first time, but he recalled the very strong feeling of awe he had about the world it depicted. He was drawn to the idea of being a Jedi Master, the battle between good and evil and the operatic tones of the whole story. More than anything, he felt incredibly moved by Yoda’s explanation of the Force—that balance between light and dark.

  I liked listening to him speak about it, and I was glad he’d experienced something that offered such wonder to him. I wouldn’t want to take that away from him. But his is just one of many similar experiences that are provided to boys in a world that insists on always making them the heroes of the tale. I am a thirty-seven-year-old woman, but I didn’t get that full slam of feeling until I sat in a darkened cinema in 2015 and watched women, people of colour and political ideas I can relate to finally become part of a universe I have always found magic in but that hadn’t, up until that point, ever found me.

  We have to demand better. Maybe it starts by changing the pronouns in the books we read to our kids, but then it grows into having conversations that encourage critical engagement and reflection. Why don’t more people talk to their children about the stories that are shaping their lives? Become conscious consumers, and teach your children to do the same. Seek out content that doesn’t reinforce regressive stereotypes about gender or present the world as a sea of white men with a few supporting characters added ‘for balance’. We are not helpless, even if stories have always made us believe otherwise.

  I don’t want my son growing up in a world that tells him he deserves a greater, more important role than the women he knows just by virtue of his being a boy. I don’t want him to think it’s normal to always speak twice as much as women, or to take up twice as much space, or assume his opinion carries more weight. I don’t want him to punish women when they refuse to fit into the boxes in which he’s told they belong. And I especially don’t want him to become so unconsciously self-entitled that he lashes out when women—or, indeed, any marginalised group—push back against this.

  Surely we can all tell a better story than that.

  * Thanks to Chris Wade from Vulture for compiling footage to demonstrate this. I trust you were as depressed by it as I was.

  * ‘Shut up feminist, men are the ones who watch movies so it’s basic sense to give them what they want!’ Wrong again! The Motion Picture Association of America’s Theatrical Market Statistics report for 2016 reveale
d that 52 percent of movie-goers were women. Additionally, Asian Americans/Other Ethnicities represented the highest per capita purchasers of movie tickets, with an upswing as well in the number of African Americans going to the movies.

  4

  NOT ALL MEN

  Shhhhhhh.

  Do you hear that sound? I’m not talking about the clock ticking in the background or the passing cars in the distance. I don’t mean your heartbeat, or the soft brush of your thumb against the page.

  I’m talking about that persistent buzz in the background, the one that seems to be getting louder and more intrusive. You first noticed it in the middle of the introduction, and you put it down to the tinnitus that sometimes flares up when you’re tired or anxious. But no, it’s definitely still there. A buzz that turned into a whine which has now morphed into a full-on cacophony.

  It’s the protest cry reverberating around the world, the one with the power to tune into any conversation that even obliquely references patriarchy, harassment, social hierarchies of gender or the institutionalised protection of abusers. Listen. Can you hear it now?

  Nooooooootttttt aaaaaaallllllllllll meeeennnnnnnnnnnn.

  *headdesk*

  Friend, you have purchased a book about toxic masculinity and how it’s weaponised in particular ways to harm both women and men. Naturally, you must be made to pay for your conceit. How dare you just assume that there’s a problem with men! Don’t you realise that not all men are rapists, wife beaters or [extremely Dolores Umbridge voice] sexists?

  Also, women rape men too.

  There’s something sinister about the lengths to which some men will go to make sure they are never held accountable (as individuals and as a class) for the indignities and rampant abuse women are subjected to on a daily basis. It’s just gobsmacking that when so many of these guys hear stories from women who’ve been brutalised, humiliated and/or violated in horrifying ways, their first response is to demand that the speaker acknowledge first and foremost that most men are great.

  Unfortunately, the petulant retort of #notallmen has become part and parcel of any attempt to have public conversations about masculinity and the damage caused by patriarchy. There are even internet memes mocking the trend, like the still shot from 1975’s Jaws which shows the killer shark launching itself onto Captain Quint’s boat only to intone, ‘Not *all* men.’ Or Matt Lubchansky’s comic strip about an everyday dude who, after seeing the Man Signal beamed into the sky (‘Someone must be doing reverse sexism!’), transforms into Not-All-Man, ‘Defender of the defended! Lone protector of the protected! Voice of the voiceful!’ Donning a fedora and brown leather waistcoat cape, he races to a nearby diner, where he interrupts a woman as she’s confiding to a friend, ‘I’m just sick of how men—’

  ‘May I play devil’s advocate?’ he says.

  The potential for #notallmen to be lampooned in meme format has been eagerly taken up by literally thousands of people, if not millions. But while the ridicule certainly tastes sweet, it doesn’t make up for the insidious thinking behind the phenomenon’s existence in the first place. ‘Not all men!’ isn’t just a mating call for the lazy and aggrieved, it’s also a diversionary tactic used to shift attention away from the substantial issues of discrimination and oppression that impact women’s lives and channel it instead into men’s feelings. Worse, it demands that women temper our complaints, that we frame our discussions of the violence we’ve experienced at men’s hands in a way that doesn’t implicate any of the men we know or work with or sit next to on the bus or even just casually pass by in any one of the infinite numbers of corridors on the internet. Sure, you may have been raped or beaten or grown up with a violent father or been groped by a colleague—but the important thing to remember here is that not all men are like that, and unless you acknowledge this then aren’t you kind of just as bad as those men out there who hate women enough to kill them?

  Short of falling into a vat of mercury and developing super-powers that turn my brain into a calculator, there is no universe in which I could even hope to count the number of men who’ve insisted I give them a hall pass when it comes to caring about this stuff. Day in, day out, reports of women being terrorised by family violence, sexual assault or just good old-fashioned gender inequality abound, and still the cries of ‘not all men’ roll in. It happens with such alarming regularity that I could set my watch by them.

  Oh, look, here’s an article about how unpaid domestic labour is predominantly performed by women.

  Yeah, but here’s some anecdotal evidence about my house and how I help my wife out heaps!

  What’s that, you say? Three-quarters of victims of family violence in the state of Victoria are women and girls, with a quarter of all male youth offenders under the age of nineteen being boys who bash their mums?

  This is just more misandering against men! Why don’t you acknowledge that 99.9 percent of us are amazing and wouldn’t dream of hurting our mums?!

  Really? One-fifth of all Australian girls over the age of fifteen will be sexually assaulted at least once in their lifetime, and the vast majority of their assailants will go unpunished.

  Stop saying all men are rapists, you she-wolf!

  Sigh. It must be 3 pm on a Tuesday.

  If you plan to introduce the ideas and case studies discussed in this book into your broader community (and I very much hope you will), you’ll have to be prepared for the various guises of Not-All-Man when he turns up. In my experience, there are a few basic types you’ll find demanding disclaimers in things like comments sections, interpersonal discussions or forum audiences. They use different methods and approaches, but the central message remains the same: Stop making me feel bad, you bitch.

  1. THE ‘WELL, I’M NOT LIKE THAT’ MAN

  We’ve all met a guy like this and felt the spray of his anger because we haven’t bent over backwards in our critiques of patriarchy to make sure he knows it’s not about him.

  Oh hey, here’s proof that 90 percent of all sexual violence is perpetrated by men and that this is reflective of a system that considers women’s bodies the property of patriarchy and can therefore be exploited as vessels for male rage, entitlement and aggression. This is what feminism is fighting, and this is the reality that we need allies to be conscious of.

  Well, I’m not like that and nor are 99 percent of the men I know. Why didn’t you introduce this information with the careful acknowledgment that most of us are great?

  Yep, you’re sounding pretty great there, Not-All-Man. You triumph against evil again.

  You don’t need to worry too much about how to spot ‘Well, I’m not like that’ man. The most reliable thing about this kind of guy is that he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen just how very much not like That Guy he is. You can find a smorgasboard of Not-Like-That guy all over the internet and media landscape. He hosts talkback radio shows on networks that only hire other men who look exactly like him, all of whom are paid whopping great salaries while they talk occasionally about how career advancement ‘should be about merit’. He’s working in local government and federal parliament, voting to defund women’s shelters and ‘stop the boats’ while proclaiming Australia the greatest country on earth. He camps out in the comments section of online news sources, regulating the flow of information whenever it veers too dangerously close to anything that could be seen as ‘pro-woman’. He makes sure women are held accountable online for the brazen misandry they show when they link to articles about domestic homicide, sexual assault, men’s violence against women and even (or perhaps especially) that mythical wage gap. Like thigh rub in summer time, he’ll find you. Babes, if you need to tell women all the time just how ‘not like that’ you are, then you’re probably more like that than you actually think.

  2. THE ‘MALE CHAMPION OF CHANGE’ SELF-SAUCING PUDDING

  You may already be familiar with the cookie monsters who loiter in the cloisters of feminist communities. These men have all the lingo about intersectionality down pat, and ar
e always the first to call out other people whose activist vocabularies are a little less sophisticated. They may be mostly motivated by a genuine passion for social justice and equality, but there’s no doubting that the gratitude with which they’re showered for their feminist statements is a nice little bonus.

  Feminist men are generally received quite differently from feminist women, and this includes them being expected to do significantly less work to earn significantly more praise. Think of the response any time a man does something vaguely feminist, especially when he’s in the public eye. Astonishment! Wonder! Ticker tape parades! The keys to the city, engraved with both his name and the honorific ‘Best Feminist Ever’!

  People who are conditioned to expect adoration for doing what basically amounts to the right thing tend to get a little bit shirty when their minimal efforts are treated as exactly that. Sometimes, they feel the need to remind you of their allyship and point of difference from the Bad Men you speak of, the men who don’t deserve to hear a thousand grillion women talk about how amazing they are and how they just get it and how the world needs more men like them or (because sometimes words just aren’t enough to adequately portray our damp gusset gratitude) be digitally serenaded with just a string of heart-eye emojis.