11 minute read
Masculine Toxicity
Some very hesitant reflections on teenage toxic masculinity
Theo Hobson (1985-90) reflects on sexist attitudes and behaviour.
Advertisement
This article was prompted by the news story earlier this year about toxic masculinity in certain schools. The ‘Everyone’s Invited’ website catalogued alleged sexual harassment by boys at various schools, mostly private ones in London, and St Paul’s featured highly. Some commentators argued that all-male private schools inevitably breed a culture of entitled misogyny, a ‘rape culture’. Others wondered whether this narrative was unfairly demonising all boys educated in this way, when only a small minority deserved censure.
My response was mixed. Of course all serious incidents of sexual harassment must be taken seriously, I felt, but I also felt that, in the context of teenage silliness, and awkwardness, it is amazingly difficult to say what counts as serious. The fragile bragging of teenage boys should surely be ignored rather than investigated. Surely it is a wilful misreading of teenage culture to suggest that young men are preying on young women, like apprentice Harvey Weinsteins, when the vast majority are just nervously trying to have their first snog. But I also wondered whether I knew what I was talking about. Maybe things had changed since my day, the late 1980s. Maybe today, for various reasons we will come to, the culture of sexist banter has become more harmful, and more likely to lead to abusive behaviour, especially at an all-boys school. Any treatment of these issues is going to be utterly full of bias, so one might as well drop any pretence of objectivity and offer some personal reflections.
I was raised to assume that boys were…not better than girls exactly. But we were plainly the more serious, effective gender, the gender that got things done, things like winning wars and winning at sport and saving the world from super-villains. I had no sisters to tell me otherwise, and my mother was from the traditional mould. She is the same age as Germaine Greer but I am guessing they have different star-signs.
What inkling did I have, in the mid 1980s, of another perspective? On TV, I saw a bullish prime minister, but she was sui generis (thank goodness). And I saw lots of feisty pop-stars: Blondie, Madonna et cetera. But they were close
Maybe things had changed since my day, the late 1980s. Maybe today the culture of sexist banter has become more harmful, and more likely to lead to abusive behaviour.
enough to Bond girls. They strutted around very confidently, but unthreateningly: the implication was that men would easily rise to the pleasurable challenge of subduing them.
I became dimly aware of something called feminism. One of my aunts sometimes spoke up for it with sincere passion, but the vague scepticism of my father, her older brother, seemed the more measured approach. It was hard to separate the word ‘feminism’ from the words ‘shrill’ and ‘strident’. It all seemed a bit of a joke: stern-faced women in dungarees, and younger ones concealing their prettiness in order to protest about the harmless fun of Page Three girls. But I gave it almost no thought.
I did not pine for the company of girls. I was happily homo-social, and my involvement in the Christian Union underlined this. It was all very innocent, and spiritually enriching, but human frailty exists even among teenage Christian boys and a few crushes were known to occur. In fact that gives the wrong impression: there was a general crushiness mixed in with a thirteen-year-old’s admiration for a seventeen-year-old rugby star and maybe vice-versa. Anything wrong with that? Hmm? Luckily a friend had a sociable Paulina sister, and aged fifteen I started going to a few parties. It was all a bit stilted and timid, at least for me. I soon knew a large handful of teenage girls but only rather superficially. Was there a culture of ‘toxic masculinity’? Toxicity was outweighed by timidity. For example I loved the Rolling Stones, but my behaviour at parties did not greatly resemble Mick Jagger’s. ‘Under My Thumb’: that’s where I mentally placed the girls I did not dare speak to.
My studies did not greatly challenge my gender assumptions. English Literature felt like a male domain. None of my A Level texts was written by a woman. I especially loved Hamlet. I nodded wisely at the prince’s dealings with a weak, enigmatic mother (“Frailty, thy name is woman!”), and a clingy or perhaps duplicitous girlfriend (“Get thee to a nunnery!”).
It seemed an ideal education, and a pretty ideal adolescence more generally. Yes, there was a gap in my all-round education, but it was a gap that perhaps enabled a sort of abstract intellectual intensity. I had a dreamy-romantic idea of women, but so what? So did generations of »
artistically-inclined young men before me.
But university challenged. Those previous generations of artistically-inclined young men were not faced with the laddette culture of the early 1990s. Nor with the rise of academic feminism, and other forms of identity politics. Poor little privileged Old Pauline, discovering that there was a downside to being an expensively-educated straight white male! I gradually acknowledged that my education had been a bit limited. Thanks mainly to my wife, my residual sexism was largely banished. Now it is eroded further by the presence of two teenage daughters (and a son). But on another level, I remain wary of the new orthodoxy espoused by large pockets of the media: that women are the true inheritors of the ideal of human virtue (the shadow of sin falling elsewhere).
Back to the issue, of Paulines today. The problem, of sexist attitudes and behaviour, ought to have lessened. For surely the progress of feminism in wider culture, including their families, has led to more enlightened young teenagers turning up on day one. And yet, instead of smooth progress, certain cultural pressures seem to have created pockets of turbulence.
Maybe the progress of feminism in wider culture makes an all-boys school feel embattled, insecure. In the past, the school’s vague sexism was in tune with that of culture in general. Now it is counter-cultural, which makes it more self-conscious and more prone to prickly defiance (rather like a religious tradition in decline). Bright teenage boys can be semi-excused for seeing feminism as a bossy orthodoxy that should be challenged. They know they must pay lip-service to it, but they pride themselves on seeing through it, refusing to be cowed. This reflects a wider double-think: they know they must espouse equality, so as not to seem like ghastly snobs, but deep down they know they are the elite. Their mothers have told them not to be brutish sexists, but on some level they sense that this is an orthodoxy that does not really apply to people like them.
And maybe – you knew it was coming, didn’t you? – the Internet has changed things. Despite the influence of their feminist mothers and sisters, teenagers are imbibing misogyny on a more visceral level, with every visit to a naughty website. And maybe social media heightens peer-pressure – though it surely also makes teenagers nervous of leaving their bedrooms, for fear of doing something embarrassing that gets broadcast. I will not pretend any further to know what I am talking about in this regard.
And maybe the rise of identity politics plays a role. In my day, a teenager could try on different hats, wallow in ambivalence, and perhaps in extended semi-innocence (at fourteen I was learning magic tricks rather than posing on Instagram). Today there is more pressure for teenagers to define themselves. Especially in terms of sexuality. I suppose I felt some pressure to ‘get off’ with girls, to show I was one of the lads, but it was pretty mild. My hunch is that this pressure has intensified in recent years. Instead of simply seeking kudos as a jack-the-lad, the average teenage boy feels obliged to define himself as heterosexual. And, because identity is at stake, this is more likely to mean going all the way, which ‘getting off’ with someone did not used to mean, at least for innocent me.
As I say, I have a limited idea of what I am talking about. Maybe my daughter, who is now at university, but was recently frequenting teenage parties in West London, can help. I emailed her. “Thanks for asking!” she cheerfully replied, perhaps with the implication that I ought to have kept a closer eye at the time (but would she have liked that?). She said that toxic masculinity is a pervasive problem, both within schools (if they are mixed, like hers was) and outside. There should be more teaching about consent, and the difference between flirting and harassing someone. Even boys she considered friends often got it wrong. Better teaching about boundaries would be particularly beneficial for boys, she said, as they were vulnerable to being vilified and shunned if they got it wrong. I wondered if she could be more specific. Were there pockets of aggressive frat-boy culture, especially in all-boys schools? It is more pervasive and blurry than that, she replied. The blame cannot be placed on particular gangs of bad boys. But yes, there are some individuals with a reputation for being ‘a bit rapey’, and they have friends who normalise it, tolerate it. “Obviously there are some boys who purposefully make girls feel unsafe but there are also boys who feel insecure at parties and do uncharacteristic things because they feel like they’ve got the right to, or get a bit drunk, or are egged on.”
I thanked her, and asked her to canvass a few friends for any Pauline-specific stories or reflections. But then I wondered if that was good journalistic practice: was I looking for negative stories? It is a bit unlikely that a friend would reply and say she went to a party full of Paulines and they were nice but dull, but she had a useful conversation about Ucas applications. My point is that the whole narrative is skewed towards the lurking of male violence.
Theo Hobson with his children
Yes there is some truth to it, but who is to say how much that bit of truth should dominate the conversation, colour perceptions?
I decide to seek another view. James Park (1969-74) is a former psychotherapist who set up Antidote, a ‘campaign for emotional literacy’ in the late 1990s, with Susie Orbach (therapist to Princess Diana) and others. “I don’t remember being invited to question our assumptions about masculinity”, he tells me. “There was a taken-for-granted sexism among some teachers. Ricky Williamson (English Department 1965-70), for example, urged us to find wives who would stay at home, so that there could be full employment for men!” It was a protected male environment, no one gave much thought to girls or women. There was an annual dance with Paulinas, which led to a lot of macho banter. “And among the more outgoing boys there was some competitive screwing.” He was not one of them, he hastens to add.
I wonder whether he thinks that an all-boys school will necessarily foster a sexist, even toxic, culture. “I don’t think so really. Much more significant is whether the school counters the tendency of a competitive culture to encourage the ‘othering’ of people who are different. Nothing we did at school – and I don’t have any reason to think this has changed – emphasised the importance of working together in teams, forming relationships, learning to value differences. It was all about autonomy, becoming a successful individual. So I think whether a school is singlesex or mixed is not the real issue. The issue is whether it teaches people to be open to others. And that involves getting people to describe their experiences and perspectives, to learn from each other. Including about sex and relationships. The curriculum provides plenty of opportunities for this wider learning. It bewilders me looking back that the people who taught us Catullus and Propertius were not also thinking about how we could learn to love well. That evasion was never ideal, and nowadays I think it’s even more problematic, because there are such warped views of sex in the wider culture, and they must be confronted.” Hmmm. I know I am prudish, but I am not sure that more open discussion about sex is always so helpful. It is never all that ‘open’; some bossy know-it-all will dominate, some assumptions will be approved. Maybe Paulines should be given space to grapple with these issues for themselves, at their own pace. I feel a bit the same way about my daughter’s notion that there should be more teaching about consent. Yes, there should be some such guidance. But if it is overdone, boys might feel hemmed in by a feminist orthodoxy that casts them as villains-in-waiting. All such teaching is subtly politicised, however neutrally enlightened it supposes itself. On the other hand, maybe a proportion of boys are allowed to develop complacent sexist attitudes, and need challenging. But such challenging must be attempted with care.
James Park
