When my friend had her first baby, her best girl friend gave her a few weeks to settle into the new normal, then went round to see the new mother and baby. They had a few minutes of happy chitchat over coffee and of cooing over the beautifully cared-for infant, and then this friend looked up the new mum’s GP and booked her an appointment to get treatment for post-natal depression.
Only months later, once she was on the road to recovery, did the new mum think to ask her friend how she knew she needed help. “You were wearing a pastel jumper,” the friend said.
I think about this often, this pure and shining example of female friendship. How we do it so easily and well that we can look at a completely inoffensive item of clothing and know to call a doctor. Because my friend is not a pastel jumper person. She just isn’t. Never has been, never will be. Some people are, some people aren’t, but you don’t move from one category to the other overnight. Doesn’t happen. We, women, know this.
I have been thinking about it even more often than usual, however, since last week when I watched a documentary by broadcaster James Blake, entitled Men of the Manosphere. In it, Blake interviews a variety of young straight men (aged from 16 to their late twenties) who are involved – if not yet fully immersed – in the online, cult-like world created by male influencers like Andrew Tate, who offer them a wildly toxic but tempting vision of “true” masculinity based on physical strength and power, especially over women. It’s called “red pilling”, and that pill is poison.
But what is striking about Blake’s documentary is what the men (boy, really, in at least one case) have in common. Most of them – including Blake himself, which is why he decided to make the film – turned to the manosphere in the wake of breaking up with a girlfriend. And without a girlfriend, they are clearly deeply – and some use the word themselves – lonely. They may have mates (though the 16-year-old has, after being bullied at school, “none in real life”), but they seem to have nothing that any woman of the same age and situation would call a friend.
Imagine that. Imagine going through life without anyone who really knows you. (Apart from perhaps your family, though this is by no means a given. And even at its best, being honest and open with family is complicated.) Imagine going through life without an emotional support network. I cannot. Or rather, I can and I do not want to. I do not want to envisage the dismal quality of my life without the precious handful of people in it whom I can call on in any state at any time for succour, therapy, space, advice and of course, if necessary, alternative knitwear, without judgment, without panic, without expecting anything in return, just because that is what we do and what we know how to do.
But this is how men live. Without any such resources to hand. Not all men, obviously – God, am I sick of having to say this for morons, but we are where we are – but easily enough of them for us to be able to speak in such broad-brush terms and have them still mean something.
According to a new report by gender equality charity Equimondo, nearly two-thirds of British men say that they “have to look out for themselves because no one else has their back”. In other words, the majority of men live life – or at the very least feel they live life – without anyone who truly understands them, who can reliably prop them up in the hard times, who can offer perspective or advice or somewhere to vent their rage or upset. So what do you do? Where do you turn?
In the past, I guess, you turned purely inward and compressed, unexpressed feelings eventually emerged in violence, directed at others or against yourself. And that propensity hasn’t gone away. Male aggression (whether you think it’s a natural, ineradicable capacity or not, it can surely be aggravated or soothed by other factors) remains with us. And the fact that suicide is the leading cause of death – the leading cause of death – for men under 50 tells its own terrible story about how much is not taken out on others.
Now, thanks to the internet, men have this other option: to find friend facsimiles online. But if you’ve never had the real thing, how can you tell? It must feel like real comfort, like real understanding, like someone really looking out for you at last.
But it’s not. It’s a million miles away from anything healthy. Real friendship allows you to grow into your true self. The manosphere – incel culture, red pilling, call it what you will – twists men’s minds and distorts their better instincts with misogynistic lies and further exhortations to repress feelings and master the weakness they represent (and that women, the master manipulators that they are, of course seek to exploit).
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The feminist movement began, really, as an extension of female friendship. It built on our ability to support each other individually and in little groups, formalised things slightly and said “We can scale this thing!”. And we did. Men are in desperate need of a similar venture. As a viewer of this documentary, however – but more so as an experiencer of life and as the mother of a son and the wife of a husband – I suspect we can’t simply map our own paradigm onto them.
They need their own version that builds on their proclivities (whether natured or nurtured, we have to work with what exists right now). Maybe a points-based system at first to ease them into the job of building connections, a gaming structure that makes talking honestly to each other transactional and reward-based. Then once they’ve built the skills, you can remove the scaffolding and hope the structure bears up under its own weight.
I don’t know. I’m not being flippant. I’m flailing. Because they need something. We need something for them. Society needs something. Because the fact that it is ridiculously hard – and getting harder – to be a woman doesn’t mean it’s not also ridiculously hard – and getting harder – to be a man.
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