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Epub ISBN: 9781473536043
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Published by Century 2016
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Copyright © Tim Samuels, 2016
Tim Samuels has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Century
Century
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Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781780894997
Tim Samuels is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, broadcaster and journalist. He has won three Royal Television Society awards and best documentary at the World Television Festival.
He started out as a BBC news trainee, becoming an investigative correspondent for Newsnight – where he won Young Journalist of the Year – before moving to documentaries.
His films have been broadcast across BBC One and BBC Two. Tim hosts Men’s Hour – the manly counterpart to Woman’s Hour – on BBC radio 5 Live, and regularly makes programmes for Radio 4.
Born in Manchester, he is now a soft southerner living in London.
Dedicated to:
---------------------------------------------------
(Fill in when commitment embraced)
It’s the adult equivalent of wetting the bed.
In the vague, vast open-plan office at the BBC, it began as a robust creative exchange with a boss about a documentary that they wanted me to make – and I, self-righteously, considered a flawed concept. (I was, of course, entirely wrong – and to this day people still cite the stratospheric viewing figures the film later attained with a less-stroppy film-maker.)
Two adults having a forthright exchange over a film. The everyday stuff of which broadcasting is made. The boss’s voice began to rise. The tone became more personal (something about who did I think I was?); typing across the office dropped to a light, intermittent tapping as the collective decided that this could be a juicy one. The voice rose, the tone changed – and something just shifted inside.
As I stood my corner – this really is a cynical film people will see straight through – I could detect a catch developing in the back of my throat.
You don’t know you’re born.
A stinging started to form at the back of my eyes.
Keyboards silent.
Who the hell do you think you are?
Holy shit.
Are these tears forming?
Male tears have no place in the office. In fact, I’ve never seen a man cry at work. Over the years I’ve probably seen half a dozen women run to the loo, friends in tow – returning a few minutes later to sympathetic nods and encouraging smiles; slightly bloodshot but with no damage to their status. Really, no big deal.
But for a man to burst into tears at work and remain unscathed? He might get away with it if he’d just taken a call saying that his entire family (and the dog) had been swallowed by a sinkhole. Or if he’d just been given ten minutes to live by a consultant.
As I willed the tear ducts to desist immediately, the mere prospect of a couple of tears popping out in the middle of the second-floor brainstorming area invoked the same full pants-down shame not felt since the summer of 1983 on a Scouts-style trip – when, unable to fathom out how to undo the fastenings on a tent during the night, I mortifyingly had to release the contents of my bladder into the sleeping bag, whilst the other boys slept.
But I wasn’t an eight-year-old trapped in a tent. I was a journalist who’d worked undercover in Northern Ireland, faced up to fascist skinheads in riots, accused drug dealers in Jamaica of being involved in murder. I was from Manchester and still doing my best to approximate the Liam Gallagher swagger. I’d been punched in the face twice – by bouncers – and laughed it off. And here I was on the verge of actually crying in front of fifty-plus colleagues who by now had given up any pretence of looking at their screens.
Male tears are not on the office menu. Reckoning that I was probably about one more sentence away from the dam bursting, I reached deep for the inner Mancunian.
Fuck this shit.
And stormed off, with an over-exaggerated Liam flounce that bordered on the simian – off outside to suck in some testosterone from a bummed cigarette.
To this day, I still shudder at what would have happened had I not pushed the Northern male ejector button in time. Would it still be whispered about at office parties? That time that Tim removed his own gonads and left them in a neat pile by the brainstorming whiteboard.
As I – still awkwardly – re-dredge the incident, could there have been something in that moment that encapsulates the tightrope balancing act of being a man these days? Looking at the scene forensically, I’d point out that it was telling that it took place at work – something that has become damagingly over-dominant in our sense of worth and identity. That the geography was an open-plan office – itself an unnatural source of emasculation that sends our flight/fight hormones haywire. That these days work often takes place in the head with none of the satisfying physicality that comes from doing something that brings you out in a healthy sweat, having achieved something tangible. I’d look inside the mind to investigate what my general angst was at the time – sleep patterns, relationship (or not) stress, how big the particular gap was between my life expectations and the reality. And, being thorough, I’d chalk an outline around the fact that the boss yelling at me was a woman. On some level, could there have been something particularly emasculating – or emotion-inducing – about being shouted at by a female boss? And if we’re warily veering off PC-piste to explore a cliché, yes, it was one of those women bosses who out-mans any man in sight.
A trivial incident, which thankfully didn’t end in tears, but which speaks of the wider state of modern man. There’s no way my dad, who became a teenager during the Second World War, would have ended up biting his lip during a work tiff. I imagine that his father, who served in the Great War, might just have had better things to get upset about too.
But to go back a mere generation or two is to venture into an unrecognisable male landscape. My father was born a mere three years after women over twenty-one were given the vote in Britain. His father was alive when women were not allowed to be politicians, lawyers, accountants or vets. My great-grandfather was born into an era when married women weren’t even entitled to have their own possessions. And all of them lived in times when careers were for life and a man’s place at home and in society was solidly fixed. Ten thousand years of total male certainty and dominance since we went all agrarian (apparently we were quite PC on the gender front when hunter-gathering) have collapsed in a matter of decades.
And rightly so. Along with twenty-four-hour pharmacies, the great leaps in equality around gender, sexuality and race are some of our proudest achievements. There may have been oodles of male certainty a hundred years ago, but there also happened to be racial segregation in the US, imprisoned gay men in Australia, and rampant slum housing across England. We’ve come a long way (though a KKK chapter claiming that black and gay ‘wizards’ may join them isn’t quite the desired paragon of parity).1
Forgive men if, at times, we are a little unsure of our footing. Not just because of the comparatively sudden shift in gender relations, after 10,000 years of having our feet up in those cosy dominant slippers, but also the other breakneck social changes afoot, which affect man and woman alike. The media barrage filling our heads with unattainable expectations. Technological intrusion into every nook of life. Work that demands more of our time and our souls than ever, but offers less and less security. Few obvious answers from organised religion. Living longer: marriage and monogamy must have been a completely different kettle of fish when life expectancy was forty-five. And a general bewildering array of choice.
In five mindless minutes of swiping on Tinder, I can view more single women than my great-grandfather would have seen in his entire lifetime in his village. Quite what ten minutes on YouPorn would have done to the sexual satisfaction of the stern-looking sepia man married off to his portly-looking cousin is open to speculation.
Of course, what’s not changed during these societal upheavals is us. Men. Our bodies have barely evolved since we were cavemen. The same synapses and hormones fire today as were triggered to keep us safe from lions wandering over the prairie. But our bodies now seem way out of kilter with how we live. The hormones that flood our body to warn of that lion heading our way now kick in when a hostile email lands in our inbox – and keep on being released well beyond the point at which they’ve achieved their goal of heightening our senses. Fight, flight or reply all.
Have we over-evolved? Is this way of living – this advanced capitalist Western life – the best way for man to be? Are we really meant to be going to offices each day, hunching over desks, endlessly chasing higher increments of status and money, coming home to an aspirationally monogamous relationship having successfully navigated the modern minefield of dating and the toxic mind pollutant of porn, whilst filling our heads with so much pointless micro-information from the devices we’re plugged into that we never give the brain a moment to dwell on the awkward question of what’s it all about or wonder whether we’ve been a bit too hasty in chucking away those bizarre religious rituals that seemed to serve man perfectly well since he could first start to draw on cave walls?
Have we become Man Zero? A low-testosterone, diet version of who we’re meant to be? Or is the latest recipe – for all its flaws – the best yet?
Man Zero is a subtler, less predictable taste compared to previous male incarnations – the bold strutting of Nineties’ New Laddism and the vapid sheen of freshly moisturised Metrosexual Man. We’ve become discerning consumers, shopping around for our ingredients. From female friends and colleagues we’ve seen some positive traits, and we rather like the look of them. If metrosexuality was about raiding your girlfriend’s toiletry bag, today it’s about raiding her emotional drawers – pilfering the prized capacity to say what’s on your mind.
(It’s a two-way exchange, of course. To borrow now from that other shitty soft drink: stick on a blindfold and take the Pepsi Gender Challenge – who can tell whether any given behaviour at home or work today comes from a man or woman?)
We scrutinise how our fathers lived – their values, what ultimately made them happy or not – and wrestle with what to cherish or chuck out in the way we bring up our own children. We can be far more tolerant, supportive, non-judgemental than ever before – but there’s an underlying restlessness. A dark note, fuelled by the gnawing pressure to become the man we thought we were meant to be, and on schedule. Bitter-sweet, capable of greatness and magnanimity – yet prone to crassness and being led by our delicate egos. Untethered by the traditional anchors at home/work/beyond, so as free to fall far and deep as to radically reinvent overnight. Age no predictor of mindset. Contradictions as standard.
We are a peculiar concoction. Yet still bottled in that same hunter-gathering body.
Maybe we men are at our best when faced with a fight for survival (an abyss many of our fathers and grandfathers peered into), when dealing with the fundamentals of life, when there are real consequences to our actions – beyond earning a few more quid to re-do the bathroom.
Sure, we might be richer, safer, healthier and possibly more emotionally sophisticated than ever before – but has today’s man lost something in the process?
This isn’t a sappy tirade for men’s rights. We are the dominant gender and don’t have many glass ceilings to push through. And before any women club me round the head with a rolled-up Guardian, I’ll spell it out myself.
Seven reasons not to write a book about men’s rights
I hear – and support – you. There is no zero-sum gender game here. It’s a no-brainer that any man should demand that his sisters, female friends and any other woman has the same freedoms, rights and opportunities that he has.
As I say, this isn’t a call for a male uprising.
When people talk about a men’s rights movement – or meninism – it just doesn’t sound like a party you’d want to go to. There’s something inherently un-cool when the dominant group whinges about its plight – whites feeling discriminated against or the English being overlooked in the UK. Deal with it.
If this isn’t a plea for men to form a movement and burn their grundies en masse, it is a call to recognise that these are challenging times to be a man. Those roles and certainties cemented over millennia have fallen away. The core male values that were applauded through time – heroism, aggression in the face of conflict and stubborn individuality – are increasingly frowned upon the more civilised we get (though, confusingly, still idealised by Hollywood). Gender lines are shifting and blurring; rites of passage have fallen by the wayside; bringing up boys has become a crapshoot of contradictions; and it’s tough out there to live up to the expectations knocking around your head.
Sure, men are the undisputed dominant gender – so much so that they can be called an ‘invisible’ gender not worthy of academic study9 – but there’s a big difference between male power across society and the individual experiences of men. To conflate the two, as some are wont to do – what have men got to complain about – is to simplistically miss the point.
Something really has gone pear-shaped for men in particular areas.
Nine and a bit reasons to write this book
A Bit. Anesh, from the Indian village of Barshitakli, who was jailed for a year for having an affair with a shepherd’s wife.20 Under Indian law, a man can be jailed for adultery – whereas a woman can’t.
For all of this statistical doom and gloom, and Anesh’s incarceration, these can be great times to be a man. There’s never been so much freedom to be who you want to be. Hedonistic fixes abound. And yet: it’s not straightforward being a man. Nor is it the end of man, as some feminists have gleefully proclaimed, to shift a few ropy books. It’s just the latest evolution.
But we ignore the ‘invisible’ gender at our peril. When under threat, masculinity has a habit of morphing and resurfacing throughout history. It doesn’t go away, but resiliently pops up in different guises – like the old arcade game Whack-a-Mole. And it’s often not pretty. In the decades before the First World War, when changes at home and work had left men ‘soft’, tellingly there was a surge in celebrating the martial idea – that war could be good for man. Today, beyond the individual examples of male self-destructive behaviour – such as drinking, getting kicked out of school, not seeking mental health help – I’d hazard that the rise of IS/ISIS is partly rooted in suppressed masculinity. A terrible toxic fusion of male alienation and a bastardised form of religious extremism. When a young man swaps his Primark uniform in Portsmouth for military fatigues in Syria, and leaves behind his suburban nine to five (and no doubt sexual frustration) to wield a weapon alongside a band of brothers, surely there’s an illusion of masculinity being chased here. Across Europe, extremist parties are thriving in countries where men have little economic means of proving themselves to be men. Whether in individual homes or on the world stage, when masculinity is in short supply, there are consequences.
Some fine female writers – from Elizabeth Gilbert to Caitlin Moran – have brilliantly captured what it’s like to be a woman today. It might be useful to put a male experience out there, to be totally transparent about what it’s like to be a man today – no matter how personal (or at times puerile) that may seem. And see how our innate masculinity can be indulged without causing havoc.
To be honest, it comes with a certain degree of buttock-clenching trepidation. What can be liberating for a woman to write about might be misconstrued as lewd, offensive or even sexist in the hands of a man.
And, of course, it is a male experience – of a straight, white, Western man. I’m pretty sure I won’t be speaking for a Yemeni chap weighing up whether to let his Mrs out to the shops, or the middle-aged bloke in rural Nigeria about to marry a child bride.
But it just feels like there’s a need to try and articulate what it’s like to be a man. To share with other men – and women – what’s going on in our minds, to greater understand ourselves, to widen what men can talk about, to challenge some of the barely one-dimensional media portrayals of men as buffoons incapable of loading a washing machine, and to see what underpins some of those shocking statistics.
To look up from our phones for a minute, question the very norms we’ve come to take for granted, and ask: ‘Is this how a man is meant to live?’
To explore how beholden we still are to our animal instincts (can the relative size of our testes to other apes ever be an excuse for straying?) – how we’re really meant to work, find a mate, hold down a relationship, keep sane, punt for some sort of spiritual fulfilment, bring up kids, handle the explosion of porn, deal with how we look, see if other guys around the world have got any better ideas and find ways to spend enough man time with our ‘pack’. And, in modern jargon-speak, maybe to change the conversation around men.
So, for all the times over the years a girlfriend has asked, ‘What are you thinking?’ only to be met with a Gallagher-style monosyllabic shrug, here’s the answer. Probably wished they’d never asked now.
It used to be easy to know when you’d finally become a man.
If you happened to grow up amongst the Setere-Mawe in Brazil, it was a simple matter of sticking your hand in a glove made of bullet ants – and not wincing during the ten minutes of continuous stinging from the most painful ant in the Amazon. Sure, you might spend several days compulsively shaking afterwards, but at least you’d know you were a man by the time your paralysed arm had come back to life. For a Vanuatan lad, the rite of passage to manhood was a more straightforward circumcision then being thrown off a makeshift 100-foot bungee tower. Your seventh birthday might not be one you’d look forward to if you’d grown up a Sambian in Papua New Guinea. Instead of a cake and a few presents, it would have been a sharp stick up the nose – till the blood flow became profuse – then fellating the men in the village, to drink up their ‘male spirit’.1
I’d say I got off pretty lightly. The ritual amongst the assimilated South Manchester Jewish tribe in the late 1980s was to force the thirteen-year-old male to learn a portion of incomprehensible Hebrew off by heart then sing it out loud in a synagogue packed with women wearing big hats and men talking business – whilst truly praying the voice didn’t actually break just as Noah was getting busy on the ark – followed by a buffet of smoked fish-based products. The ritual was sanctified by a plethora of Parker fountain pens. For higher-status members of the tribe, a mildly ostentatious disco would be thrown in the evening, to afford the pimply young man an awkward opportunity to see if any of the girls wanted to ‘go for a walk’ and navigate mouths full of orthodontic metal.
But for me this momentous day – cementing my lineage to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – culminated not in a newfound sense of manliness, but throwing up in some shrubbery in the car park of Safeway’s in Hale village. A strange start to manhood.
To be fair, though, I spent more of my childhood in Safeway’s than in synagogue. And whilst I can’t recall a single word of my Bar Mitzvah portion, I can still visualise the Safeway’s shopping basket with total clarity. Sliced brown bread (white was for other people), tasteless tomatoes that were guaranteed to turn any school sandwich rank by lunchtime, limp lettuce that could never dream that one day it might be paired with olive oil instead of a dollop of salad dressing, own-brand instant coffee, tinned fruit, frozen mini pizzas the size of a CD harbouring trace elements of cheese, and a dented tin of whatever happened to be on the reduced items shelf no matter how unlikely it was to ever be consumed. Oh, the uncontained envy of going to friends’ houses where there were actual M&S food items in the fridge – I swear I once spotted hummus. Not to mention the confusion of being served an artichoke at a friend’s one day: an artichoke, in the late 1980s, in Manchester. So nouveau quiche. We might have been light years away from harnessing the chickpea, but no matter: our austerity Safeway’s diet was idiosyncratically augmented by a) the health food shop that did an unparalleled line in meat-free mince that wilfully resisted any attempt to absorb flavour, and b) whole industrial-size boxes of broken biscuits from Longsight market.
In retrospect, surviving my childhood seems like a minor nutritional miracle. Barren, leafy-green-free years spent subsisting on kilograms of cornerless Custard Creams, during which anything that ended up on the plate was first thrown into a vat of solidified oil that never left the top of the stove and was never changed. I can’t directly blame my dad for the deep-fried diet. His duties extended to hapless foraging at Safeway’s and dealing in the Mancunian underworld of broken bourbons. Manning the vat was a rotund Irish lady whose sole qualification for providing mine and my brother’s entire teenage nutritional needs was having once run a truck drivers’ café with her truck driver Elvis-impersonator husband. Each day, she came, she fried, we coagulated.
Just a few months before my big coming-of-age day, my cardiac prognosis had been looking decidedly healthier. There were proper family meals around a table, bowls of salad, and puddings that didn’t come from tins. But the fruit and veg copped it one turbulent day. In the months beforehand, I could detect a rising strain seeping through the house. Lying in bed at night, I could hear the muffled arguments between my dad and stepmum. They became less muffled. I’d turn up my stereo – but there were always gaps between songs. As a twelve-year-old, though, I had no sense that anything tangible was actually going to result from the arguing. It was a non-specific unpleasantness to be blotted out. So, it came as an utter thunderbolt when one day my dad said, ‘We’re leaving, pack your bags.’ I kicked my bedroom door in rage, but never slept in that room again.
The bags were packed, and a rocky two-and-a-half-year marriage between my dad and stepmum came crashing down. Bruised and confused, my dad, my older brother Mark and I relocated that night to a two-up two-down terraced house, and I drew the short straw on the camp bed. The inventory for that divorce was pretty costly. I seemed to lose a stepmother I had dared to call ‘Mum’, three older stepbrothers I totally looked up to, Claude the cat, the piano, a nice house in a posher part of Manchester and several core food groups.
The resilience of youth is remarkable. I remember calling a friend when we got to the terraced house and having a little cry on the phone as I told her my parents were divorcing – but there were no other moments. It almost became a (reduced) family joke – that Dad had made such a balls-up to marry someone he’d known for six weeks. Two summers before, Mark and I had returned from a long holiday staying with family in the US, been picked up from the airport, taken straight to some random family’s house, bizarrely made to pose for a group photo, asked if we liked them in the car on the way home, then told, ‘That’s good, as I’m marrying her and we’re moving in there in a few weeks.’ Six weeks . . . such an uncharacteristically rash, albeit well-intentioned, decision by a man who’s happy to wait six months to time the Costco winter jacket sale to perfection.
Sure, it was something of a blow to lose an entire new family and a house that had a bidet, and to rack up a small future fortune in sympathetic nodding professionals, but at the time for a thirteen-year-old it was a golden ticket not to be wasted. You have just won first prize in a school sympathy contest, please take as much piss as you can possibly get away with.
And for the aspiring teenage rebel, Manchester in the late 1980s was the dream place to cash in that ticket. The city was the swaggering, cocksure centre of the universe – sticking two Northern fingers up to London and anywhere else that fancied itself. Where T-shirts proclaimed On the Sixth Day, God Created Manchester and a cartoon cow mouthed Manchester: Cool as Fuck. Football, music, fashion – anything that was important to young men – we owned it. The soundtrack of home-grown bands coursed through the city’s Victorian streets and pre-gentrified canals. The Smiths, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, New Order, James, Inspiral Carpets, Charlatans, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, The Fall – all ours. The Hacienda was pumping out house music to the world. Quiffs, baggy jeans, smiley faces – borrow our hand-me-downs if you want, London.
There was also an industrious line in menacing violence. But in a city dubbed ‘Gunchester’ by the tabloids, as rival drugs gangs from Moss Side and Cheetham Hill fought a bloody turf war on the streets, the scope of rebellion would be somewhat more modest for a thirteen-year-old from a family that brought brown bread and made him publicly recite a portion of the Torah to accrue fountain pens.
Especially when he went to the poshest school in the city, Manchester Grammar – a meritocratic school that took kids regardless of wealth and turned them all into a bunch of stiffs, which made them wear highly identifiable owl crests on their blazers, and which just happened to be on the doorstep of Moss Side and in literal spitting distance of the scally school that Liam and Noel went to. Manchester Grammar was churning out the best grades in the country whilst really teaching pupils how to slip into the scalliest accent at the drop of a hat, or – more often on the number 50 bus – the drop of spit aimed at the poor owl. During those years I got away lightly and was only robbed twice. One time was somewhat farcical, when my assailants ran away after a nearby dog barked; the other less so – when two lads pulled a full-length kitchen knife on me and got away with my wallet, seven quid and my bus pass.
So, you had to know your place in the pecking order when it came to bad-boy late-Eighties rebellion. Fuelled by divorce – and constrained by going to the grammar school and having once had access to a bidet – I managed the following in my thirteenth year:
James Dean it wasn’t. But amongst the South Manchester Jewish community, it was a level of teenage insurrection to be feared. After word somehow spread amongst the mums of Hale Synagogue – during a momentary pause in hat judging – that I was ‘doing drugs’, my friend Rob was told to keep his distance from me. Grades naturally tumbled at school, academia was shunned in favour of the age-old boyish delight of drawing a phallus on someone else’s textbook to see what they could creatively turn the cock and balls into (NASA space rocket and boosters was the default option), and I managed to drag my friends Rob and John down enough that we all got summoned to see the Middle School master.
As the three of us lined up in his office for a major-league bollocking, he asked if any of us had anything to say for ourselves. From nowhere, like a young Charlie unwrapping a Wonka bar, I caught a glimpse of my golden ticket.
Sir, it’s been really hard since my parents got divorced.
Rob saw a lifeline flash before him.
Me too, sir. Mine got divorced too.
Yeah, but that was eight years earlier and he now had the most lavish home any of us had ever seen. A technical pass.
Poor John had nowhere to go. His parents were the epitome of marital stability.
Erm, sir, you know, it’s been erm, it’s not always great . . . sometimes . . . er . . . lately. Sir.
Luckily, it seems my ticket was a group one – and we were all sent back to class rather than home for a couple of ignominious weeks. John’s parents remained blissfully married for forty-nine years. The rebellion faded – and even the owl reverted to the right way up.
I look back on those times at school with an almost painful nostalgia. The sheer exhilaration of being around your closest mates, day in, day out. A constant maelstrom of pisstake. Bestowing simple yet physically literal nicknames: Goofy Deaf Twat, Forest Forehead, Egghead – and Tribal Warfare for the friend who was one day deemed to have three testes despite any lack of supporting evidence. The Trio biscuit advert could still be heard until he made it to uni.
A blizzard of Sherbert Dip-Dab fights, jostling in airless bus queues, ducking from sprays of ink and hot tea, dead arms, football arguments, industrial wedging, and aggressively nudging anyone who deigned to talk to a girl. Should a nudge not do the trick, repeated kicks to the back of the knee normally saw off any chance of pulling.
The pisstake was merciless, but never caustic. Silly buggers was the glue that bonded a brotherhood together. Airtight friendships – underpinned by a real affection and supportiveness – that bordered on the familial. And for me, at the time, I’d take familial wherever I could get it.
I had my dad, my brother, and my surrogate family of rock-solid mates. And they’d all be at my Bar Mitzvah party – unlike me.
There was no toxicology test carried out in Safeway’s car park. I suspect my body was reacting to a vitamin in the buffet it had never encountered before.
The morning had passed off without event. I’d spent weeks after school learning my portion of the Old Testament off by heart. When my time came, the heavily bearded, barrel-chested rabbi called me up before the congregation. The Smiths T-shirt and cardigan had been swapped for a navy blazer and beige chinos, the Doc Martens replaced by brown brogues. A thirteen-year-old with John Lennon glasses, spiky hair, voice teetering on an octave change, just two months and twenty-two days away from his first bra strap – and now being declared a man in front of his community.
Passing the threshold of manhood didn’t feel monumental at the time. But seminal childhood events rarely do when they occur. The obsession at the time was less about the coming of age, and more about the coming of coming. The kudos that was gained from being able to come was immeasurable. You could see the swagger of the hairy-bollocked class members swanning around the changing rooms. I was desperate to join this club by the time I was thirteen. Willing the testes into action, I’d stare down the urethra for any sign of upcoming life – like peering for a distant headlight when standing on the Northern Line platform. Alas, trains never ran on time in the Eighties.
So, I sang some Hebrew before the community, was blessed on stage by a rabbi, given some presents, had a medium-sized buffet, and missed a small party. Hardly the stuff of knee-trembling anthropology. Yet, this was a rite of passage that’s endured unbroken for several thousand years. Since the days of desert-wandering, through every historical twist and turn, young males in my ‘tribe’ have experienced a Saturday when the community came together and declared them to be a man. No matter how irreligious I may be, there’s something powerful about that lineage. Something that adds extra ballast to being a random organism floating around a spinning planet. I guess at the time I may have taken subliminal succour from the message that hey, you might be struggling with a lost sense of nuclear family but here’s a wider community you’re part of. Who knows what resonates with the young psyche – but I suspect it can’t have harmed in keeping me on the straight and narrow.
Who knows how crucial it is to a healthy male psyche to mark that transition from boyhood to manhood. Fellating village elders might be a step too far, but maybe we have lost something intangible yet important in no longer celebrating a boy’s passage to being a man. In our rush to become a rational secular society, there’s no space for idiosyncratic rituals. Yet, for so many cultures, it has been deemed an essential part of a boy’s development – often involving elaborate ceremonies to emphasise the responsibilities and values expected of a nascent man, and stressing his relationship to the older males in the group.
The Native American Latoka (Sioux) young man fasts alone on a hilltop until he sees a vision that becomes a spiritual guardian for the rest of his life.2 The Hopi Indian twelve-year-old boy is taken to spend six weeks in an area with the older men and is then kept from his mother for a year and a half.3 The young male Nilotic, from the semi-nomadic cattle herders around the Nile Valley, is taken to the elders’ area and allowed to consume the ghamunga sacred honey mead. His ‘birth’ to adulthood is further symbolised by his wearing women’s skirts and jewellery, whilst eating and acting like a pregnant woman.4 Whereas getting the seventeenth-century English boy out of a skirt and into breeches was seen as the first step to adulthood, with sizeable chunks of a family’s income spent on the big breeching ceremony.5
Colourful, bizarre and at times borderline brutal, yes – but rites of passage have been shown to have a positive psychological impact. AIDS orphans in Botswana displayed improved mental health and social integration after being taken into the wilderness for sixteen-day rituals that mimicked that country’s traditional coming-of-age ceremonies.6
‘Despite the absence of any established initiation rite, young men need one,’ author Mark Gerzon lamented of American youth back in 1982. Young men need to prove their manhood, he said, and without any rites on offer all they have is violence (a pale imitation of war), sexual conquest and generally going out of their way to demonstrate that they are in no way feminine.7
What are the rites on offer these days? Maybe some form of hazing (if not just plain bullying) in the military and American fraternities. Losing your virginity at the earliest available opportunity. And getting a driving licence – generally followed within months by wrapping the car around a tree whilst showing off. Unless you happen to cling on to some sort of religious identity, that’s probably about it for most in the Western mainstream. For others, it might be sending the first paycheque back to the family you’ve left back home, or even committing sexual assault to mark initiation into a gang.8
In the decade after Gerzon decried the lack of rites to mark manhood, the rate of murder committed by US teens – aged fourteen to seventeen – increased by 172 per cent. Gun killings by juveniles quadrupled. And this explosion of violence was all amongst young men.9 Of course, it’s not to say that if only there’d been a Western version of the sacred honey or agonising ant glove then some kid wouldn’t have taken a semi-automatic into school, or shot up the local liquor store. Role models, family, education, economic opportunity and mental health all have huge bearing (which we’ll explore).
But it’s all set against the wider problem of society not catering to the particular needs that boys and men have. Not marking the transition to manhood is one of the missing pieces in this wider jigsaw. After all, there does seem to be a universal male urge for boys to prove themselves as they become men – whether they live in a wooden hut on a nomadic plain or an Ivy League frat house. And that Whack-a-Mole masculinity ensures that some boys will prove their manhood by whatever means is on offer – and if violence and getting laid is all that’s in reach, so be it.
By not taking a moment to mark boys becoming men and harnessing their innate urges – rather than them just drifting into manhood – we are missing a trick. Not least for the huge number of boys growing up in fatherless homes – some half a million in the UK and more than seven million in the US.10 Some groups are getting smart to this. A Band of Brothers, based in Brighton, says there’s an 80 per cent reduction in reoffending amongst the young men who go through their initiation Quest weekend and mentoring schemes.11 Pathways, in Australia, takes thirteen- to fifteen-year-old boys and their fathers or a male mentor into bush camps for five days. Boys to Men run adventure-based weekends in parts of the US and beyond for boys to choose the man they want to become – citing the words of Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist: ‘It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.’
But these sorts of programmes are often geared to at-risk boys. Why can’t there be a rite of passage that all boys go through? To drift into tree-hugging fantasy land, wouldn’t it be something for the school curriculum to schedule a ‘becoming a man’ camp? Where teenage boys go away for the weekend to lodges with the older males in their extended family (and/or male role models), get busy on the camping and fire-making front, carry out some physical challenges, hear candid stories and wisdom about relationships and life from the elders, all culminating in some moving moment around the fire. Just to take a beat out of the mania of life to say, now you’re a man.
Thanks for the pens, though.
And thanks for the girls, too.
Well, at least thanks for herding me into the same space as girls – a dance-floor and the cruel whiff of arbitrary rejection – courtesy of the odd Bar Mitzvah disco. Nonetheless, it was a huge competitive advantage at an all-boys’ school where most fellow pupils were still collecting Panini football stickers rather than life lessons in how to snog a girl whose mouth is a Venus flytrap of steel and elastic bands. All necessary coursework to master for GCSE Dating, which hopefully then graduates into some degree of relationship proficiency as adulthood kicks in.
So it’s bizarre, to say the least, to recently find myself in Miami, in a room of 150 grown men earnestly taking notes in exercise books, jotting down the words of the teacher at the front – who is instructing them how to pull women. What has it come to that men are paying serious money to learn how to talk to women? Is this a prime case study of Man Zero in his castrated habitat?
‘Why on earth would you need an excuse to talk to a girl?’ the teacher thunders from the front of the room. Scores of baseball caps nod, pencils scribble. There’s no type to the guys present, apart from their ages, roughly twenties to forties. White, black, Latino, preppy, sports-shirted, caps forward, caps back, handsome, geeky, menacing GI types – they are all here. And each hanging on every word.
‘You’ll hear that. “What is an excuse to approach a girl?” Why the fuck do you need an excuse? The excuse is you’re a man, she’s a girl [mimics finger into hole action ]. Isn’t that enough? You don’t need a fucking excuse.’1
The Messiah delivering salvation from emasculation is Julien Blanc, one of the most renowned pick-up artists in the business. The guys sat in a nondescript hotel conference room in the basement of one of the plainer hotels in Miami have travelled from across the US for the weekend bootcamp. Some have driven for days. They have paid up to $3,000 to be here on the course run by Real Social Dynamics. They’ve watched the videos, read the books, and now have a chance to rub shoulders with the likes of Julien and Tyler – a small, receding, introspective ginger guy who has defied visual stereotype to become a master at this game. The pick-up artists are afforded near rock-star status. A queue forms to have photos taken with Julien.
‘I don’t know what to say. But, like, you’re awesome.’ A young man in his early twenties has reached the front of the queue. ‘You’re actually my idol. You’ve changed my life, to be honest.’
He beams, poses for a photo, and slips away to sit back down with his sheepish, somewhat older girlfriend – whom he’s brought along so she can see how he was transformed into someone who was able to get together with her. What on earth are these gurus teaching that’s so life-changing, that inspires such a following?
The bootcamp is a mixture of pop psychology to slap the male ego back into life, with a near-military series of tactics designed to be used for approaching women with maximum chance of mission success. The pop psychology strikes a chord. Why are so many men afraid to go up and talk to a woman they like the look of? Why is it only the same overconfident cheese-balls that can just march on over while the rest of us promise ourselves that we will after just one more drink? It’s all symptomatic, the gurus argue, that man has lost his way – that we feel like we need permission to be men again.
‘Attraction has always been the same. What attracted a cavewoman back in the day is still what attracts a woman today. Is he going to help me survive, is he going to help me reproduce? Yes or no?’ declaims Julien. The crowd murmurs.
To tap into our inner cavemen, the pick-up artists espouse a series of behavioural tactics, designed to short-circuit into what today’s Wilmas and Betties are innately looking for.
‘You don’t need to be model-looking to pick up a girl or to make a girl attracted to you. They’re not looking at that. They’re looking at the behavioural clues, not the visual clues.’
Some behavioural clues to supposedly make you more attractive:
Some of it definitely makes sense. If I think back to moments when I’ve been on my supposed A-game, it’s normally when circumstances have conspired to produce some of these conditions: out with mates looking vaguely popular, not trying too hard, naturally being a bit teasing. The pick-up artists would argue that – like any other skill – this can be honed and deployed whatever the circumstances. Even sober. Just as you can become a better golfer or poker player, so you can become a more proficient puller – to the point where no woman should be beyond your reach. Just check out Tyler’s track record and look at him. It’s intoxicating stuff. The pencils haven’t paused for breath.
For men who’ve spent their lifetimes standing on the side of the dance-floor watching the cocky douche-bags swan over to the girls they like, this is manna from heaven. A revolutionary thought – that they don’t have to be that guy any more. Which is maybe what the young chap whose life had been changed meant. Viewed this way, it is almost a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. What’s the worst that can happen?what ifs