Masculinity

The men in my life, at least at the beginning of it, were not the kind who loved fiercely. Ferocity, at least as a form of passion, was a feature that never managed to attach itself to love.

Theirs was a version of masculinity that mapped to the landscape. It was barren, scalding to the touch and capable of instilling great fear. If water flowed on the surface, it was something of a miracle. We told stories about the times we had seen great emotional floods, though they were marginal events in the broad acreage of our existence.

What these moments – these crackles of static interrupting usual programming – showed us was a glimpse of a way to be a man that had not been modelled to us in any substantial way. They came, too, accompanied by shame or espionage humour to disguise the many secrets of feeling.

I remember visiting my father during school holidays when I was around the age of eight. He was then managing Tambo station, in central west Queensland, and had become concerned about my behaviour. I wasn’t firelighting and getting into fights like Toby, my older brother, though Dad would have been happier were that the case.

Instead, I was what might best be described as pre-gay. Effete, a small child showing a distinct lack of interest in stereotypical boyhood. These were troublesome traits in the regions. Indeed, as I would come to discover, it was a problem all the way to the coast.

At some point during that school-holiday trip, Dad and I were sitting in the stark, hot living room of the homestead when he opened a box as high as my waist filled with softcore pornography magazines. It was tits for days.

‘You like them?’ he said to me, attempting to disguise what was an inquisition as a joke.

‘What?’ I said.

Look, I’m not an idiot. Even as an early-primary-school kid, I knew what he was getting at. I didn’t know I was gay, but I was aware that I didn’t quite fit in. In any case, I knew enough to make Dad articulate the precise point he was trying to make before admitting to anything.

‘You like those boobs?’

There is a version of the Turing Test for young queer kids in which they play the role of the computer attempting to befuddle the user into believing they are speaking with a real human: they have to convince their parents that they’re not destined to be gay.

I put another twist on it: to embarrass my father into submission.

‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I?’ I said.

You just can’t come back from this level of devastating riposte. It’s not like he had any evidence with which to confront me: no browser history, string of ex-boyfriends or even declarations of love for boys in my journal (which of course I kept – and kept hidden).

He had nothing and, so defeated, the box was sealed up again.

Despite my success, the incident rattled me. It was the first real example in my life that the men around me were bent to shape, as hot metal in a forge. Departures from the approved form were not just frowned upon but, in cases where it might reflect on the observer, they were to be feared.

Why?

I was vexed by this question over the years and decades that would follow. Dad’s intuition was right, as it happens, but it was not the question of whether he had a functional gaydar that kept me up at night.

This type of man, it now seems obvious, is terrified of those close to them being gay or appearing to be gay because it represents a crossing of boundaries. There is the old trope that a gay man must want to hit on the straight man, a situation which would render anew the usual interactions between men who hit on women. Suddenly, they might be dealing with other men who matched them in power and persistence.

No doubt this was part of the equation, but the bigger antagonist here is a built-in sexism that finds men who model female characteristics – no matter how subtle or even imagined – to be totally objectionable.

It is this hardwired notion of the primacy of the man above women, even the ones they profess to love, that drives disgust at homosexuality and femininity alike. They are, in the eyes of a particular fellow, one and the same.

Not everyone acts on or even feels these impulses, and you can find these men around the world living in the comfort of their own self. For those who feel it, unconsciously or not, the instinct is a prison that curtails much of who they could, or may want, to be.

Homophobia is just as damaging to straight men as it is to gay or queer kids.

Take a look at young boys playing with their male friends. Before society gets to them, they hug and kiss and cuddle. They hold hands, not because some interfering busybody has demanded it of them, but because they want to.

Even now, as I write this, I am at my friend’s house with her two-and-a-half-year-old son Hamish and his ‘mandatory best friend’ Declan – mandatory because the parents of both boys are close friends. The boys are brash and bold and can whack one another with the best of them, but they are also delicate, gentle and generous with their affection.

They have been taught and encouraged to hug, and will continue to, but even so I know deep down that as they grow older there will be external pressures on them to be less effusive in their affection, even as we ourselves grow more wise about the manacles of such expectation.

Doesn’t it make you mad?

In Christos Tsiolkas’s 2019 novel Damascus, a sprawling imagining of the early days of Christianity, he writes of Saul:

He had last known joy sitting in a circle of boys, listening to the recitations of their teacher. On becoming a man that had been stolen from him. He had to surrender to labour, and keep vigilant and futile watch over his disobedient body. Manhood had corrupted friendship and poisoned hope.

I underlined that passage as soon as I’d read it because it spoke of an irreducible truth about the lives of men. It told me something I had only discovered in my twenties: that we mistake unhappiness for duty.

That we are incarcerated by our disfigured understanding of masculinity is bad enough. To learn we also built the prison? Well, that just hurts.

And I don’t mean you or me personally, but men, all of us, over thousands of years.

This should not be read as a defence of men and the systems we erected in our honour. But nor do I hate men. Some of my best friends are straight men! I’m gay (well spotted, Dad) which means I am also somewhat a fan when they get it right.

Further, I am a man.

Perhaps these are obvious points, but we must concede I have several horses in this race. Perversions of masculinity, though, are at the root of so many cultural ailments that have women as their principal targets. In the war on women and other minorities, men become our own collateral damage. What, you think upholding the abusive and controlling apparatus of The Bloke is entirely without cost?

Look at it this way. We bear the costs of an appalling lack of imagination in applying the rules of masculinity. We are overrepresented in drug overdoses, suicides, injuries, premature deaths, all forms of violence except as victims of intimate or family abuse. The list goes on. And that’s with all of the structural advantages afforded to masculinity.

Pity is not needed here.

Surely, just maybe, reform of the worst aspects of being a man could do everyone a world of good. As Tsiolkas says of Saul, these butchered notions have stolen joy from us. And we have abused and killed or maimed, unleashed pain and trauma on ourselves and everyone else before allowing the repatriation of joy.

That’s a problem. A solution would require a collective investment.

I asked some of my friends what masculinity means to them and their answers were, predictably, amusing.

Without skipping a beat, Tom replied: ‘How many heavy things you can hold in your hands.’

Not to be outdone, Perry came through a few minutes later.

‘Pretending to dummy pass an item when you’re passing something to another man in the office,’ he said.

Mick’s was largely unprintable but started with a well-worn truism: ‘Not asking too many questions about your mates’ mental wellbeing.’

These were jokes but they are also instructive.

We don’t need to look far to find these tragicomic representations of manhood reflected back at us as serious propositions. Kleenex has marketed ‘man size’ tissues; and in the United States the laundry brand Bounce developed fabric softener sheets ‘for men and people who smell like them’; and, for a brief period, the yoghurt brand Powerful was labelled as ‘brogurt’ for its positioning as a protein-enhanced super treat for men.

In 2014, Unilever released a toothpaste for men, presumably because the science on whether women actually have teeth is still out. Colgate, recognising a new market segment among image-obsessed men who also still wanted to brush their teeth, did the same thing.

If a man wishes to bathe but not appear gay in doing so, he may wish to purchase a bath bomb shaped like a hand grenade and soak with a ‘hero’s explosive rush of black pepper and rosemary’. There are bronuts and bread for men, mancandles and cotton buds from Q-tips sold as ‘men’s ultimate multi-tool’ so that cleaning one’s ears cannot be mistaken for both having and enjoying penetrative sex with another man.

DudeWipes exist. Lint rollers for men have been developed. Mancan developed a wine in a can under the pretense that ‘we believe wine is for drinking, not pairing’.

‘And our “notes” are more rock than classical,’ the marketing copy reads. The tagline is a brusque, efficient: ‘Shut up and drink.’

Remember, if you’re a bloke and you talk, then you are probably a woman.

At the other end of the spectrum, but part of the same twisted universe of gender norms, objects considered to be ‘manly’ or simply utilitarian have been softened for the delicate sensibilities of women and girls. You can buy batteries in pink packaging, replete with unicorns, if your stored energy needs are more feminine. A tape dispenser ‘just for girls’ is also pink. Women who wish to write in ink have access to a ‘pen for her’, which appears to perform the same function as every other pen, though I confess to not having bought one on account of being a man.

Some of these products were too damn stupid to last very long, but the rest are still out there. They press on precisely because there is a market for them, of men and women so bound up in their own gender stereotypes that it would be unfathomable to use a soap product every day while having to yell ‘Not a homo’ at the shower head as it washes over you.

I’d like to say I was comfortable enough in my own skin back when I was at school and in my early twenties not to have gone along with any of this, but the truth is I was deeply afraid and ashamed of my own sexuality and what this meant in the eyes of everyone else, especially men.

Everyone and everything that was out of favour in high school was ‘gay’, with remarks ranging in severity from ‘that’s so gay’ to ‘you’re a fucken gay cunt’. I was never the target of this stuff, but I didn’t need to be to be affected by it. I knew what not to be – and that meant presenting as straight as possible. That meant being a man even when I scarcely knew what that was.

As I mentioned, though, this is not a problem peculiar to the gay kids in school. All the other boys were performing the same routine and some of them had come from broken homes, like me, or had fathers who hit them. Others had dads who never touched them, not even to hug them, and I wondered what that must do to a boy.

I remember one night in Year 8 when I stayed over at a boy’s house. I’m going to call him Greg, but that’s not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious.

On that Saturday, Greg’s dad questioned him about not putting the bins out earlier in the week. When Greg attempted to explain himself, his dad punched him right in the head for talking back. I was just standing there, mouth agape. It wasn’t a gentle tap in jest or mock anger; it was a bone-thudding whack.

Greg was straight. But I knew in that moment that even that wasn’t going to be enough to protect him. He, too, would have to be a man. And what better place to learn masculinity than at the end of your father’s fist?

So throughout high school all of us boys were acting out the roles as best we knew them, performing feats of manliness to establish our credentials as (a) not gay and (b) not a pussy. Pussies, in our understanding, were weak people, such as girls or boys who act like girls.

To the extent that the boys knew about lesbians, they were OK with them as long as they were classically hot and making out with each other for the benefit of other men. Otherwise, lesbians were an affront to men simply because these women excised men from their desires, pleasure or emotional attachment. The boys assumed all lesbians secretly wanted their dicks in the same way that all gay boys must have lusted after them, too. I guess you could be forgiven for thinking all roads lead to you when the roads were built to service you culturally, financially and personally. Still, get your hand off it.

In his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the poet Ocean Vuong writes about the prickly passion between Vietnamese-American ‘Little Dog’ and a whitebread, all-American ball of anger and hurt called Trevor.

There is no finer book, and his assessment of the trap of masculinity was a punch in the gut for me.

In his backyard, an empty dirt field beside a freeway overpass, I watched Trevor aim his .32 Winchester at a row of paint cans lined on an old park bench. I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.

Here’s what I think Vuong means when he speaks of a cage. It is not one put there by women or people with different-coloured skin, nor those with a galaxy of sexualities. The cage belongs to all men, put there by all the men that came before us, and blaming others for its existence can never free us from it.

Men, we need to get our own house in order.

What we deny ourselves in this strange, sad affair is love. Not the emaciated, sclerotic substitute we’ve been taught to accept, but actual, real love. For many men, even love is a contest. Vuong goes on to write:

To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration.

Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth . . . by then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love. Fuck. Me. Up.

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.

This was certainly how I came to collect the evidence of my own demise. When you see the real thing, tenderness, for the first time it is a cataclysm precisely because there is no escaping the horror that you have gone this far without it. Certainly, in my case, I was undone by that realisation.

I began to challenge my own aversion to vulnerability in my mid-twenties and it was almost impressive how much I was hewn by its absence. I almost had a panic attack about wearing a pink sweater to my eighteenth birthday drinks with my newsroom colleagues on the Gold Coast, for heaven’s sake. I’d bought it from the now defunct Roger David chain store (a store on the edge of acceptability for men and then only if you were going out clubbing or had a court date). It was the first item of pink clothing I had ever owned and I loved it. But I wasn’t out yet and I was steeped in the kind of bullshit culture that sells a pink Stanley knife to women so that others know they are neither men nor lesbians when they attempt middle- to industrial-strength craft or home improvement projects.

On closer reflection, I think the sweater was actually a sweater vest which meant I had bigger problems to worry about at the time, but I was consumed by the fear of being outed as gay. In this way, the clues my friends and I used to triangulate a person’s sexuality were next to useless. We were modern versions of shit archaeologists who unearth an ancient burial ground containing feathered jewellery and a rudimentary windmill before concluding the now dead inhabitants must have been really into the Moulin Rouge.

I wore the sweater and exactly nothing happened. I fell off a bar stool while drunk and had a good time, but I can still recall so vividly the stress leading up to that night. And that’s just one tiny example in a hall of fame chock-full of other accumulating stressors.

Like most of the other men in my life, I had shrunk myself to avoid social injury. We sharpened our edges to ward off approach, stooped low into ourselves and held this position with a laser-focus bordering on the deranged.

For me, this project was an overcorrection. It kept violence and embarrassment at the hands of other men to a minimum but it also made no room for love.

I was not loved and I did not love because that was not my experience of masculinity. The men around me were more or less on the same path, kissing and hugging their mates only on nights out when they were so ‘fucked up’ – remember, love is ruin – or after playing team sports and the notion of victory was so masculine in and of itself that it became OK to pat your friend on the bum or embrace them in ebullient relief at having won.

It’s not like they didn’t want these same things when they were sober. Rather, they were incapable of asking for them; they were so deeply afraid of being assumed gay or effeminate by reaching out in consolation or happiness that it was easier to stay rigid and strong.

We were all of us statues commemorating the wrong thing.

An analysis of two decades’ worth of data by researchers from Duke University and the University of Arizona and published in the American Sociological Review in 2006 found that white, heterosexual men have the fewest friends of anyone in the United States.

Between 1985 and 2004, the ‘discussion network’ for most people shrank from almost three people to slightly more than two. Most of the time, however, these were a person’s spouse or parents. This is particularly significant for men as they age.

You will have witnessed this in your own circles. The number of confidantes a married woman may have as she grows older will shrink, as it does for us all, but typically these will always include some other women or men outside of the marriage and her immediate family.

Straight married men, and I’m speaking broadly here, just do not know how to hold on to their mates. As the researchers note, they rely more and more on their wives for emotional support despite deriving less satisfaction from these relationships than they do from their friends.

A 2014 study released by Beyond Blue in Australia suggests one-quarter of all men in their middle age – that is aged thirty to sixty-five years old – ‘have no-one outside their immediate family whom they can rely on’.

This is an unspoken phenomenon: those experiencing it would rarely feel able to bring their ‘neediness’ up in conversations and it is rarely, if ever, a topic of public discourse.

These men often lack the skills, the pathways and frequently the drive to remedy their lack of social connection and instead tend to bear the misery and shame of their situation with a stoic, masculine pride.

It might never be said in these terms, but many men know this one thing better than they know themselves: it is weak to ask for help. Even calling a friend and asking them to catch up is an act draped in the silent oppression of gender ‘norms’.

Is it gay, and therefore ‘woman-like’, to ask a mate out for a drink? Is it gay to have good mental health?

For a particular subset of men, the corner pub or local and national sport are the only acceptable outlets for socialising, and even in those contexts it is generally forbidden to speak of personal troubles or loneliness. As one friend put it to me: ‘You go there so you don’t have to talk about it.’

You see this kind of thinking in pockets everywhere, but never so densely as among the working class and the working poor. These are the people I know best. Men who have shaped me, for better or worse, have typically come from these hard-knock backgrounds where their hands and backs were put to work and the work served a purpose and that purpose was unyielding in its purity – to have wife and child.

Whether it was a significant minority or even a majority of fathers over the last century, we’ll never know, but I think it safe to say many of them never knew enough themselves to teach their own sons that the needs of a family may yet stretch beyond food and shelter.

Those things are important, absolutely, but it would have been just as helpful to advise all sons who wished to be fathers: if you’re going to focus on, and even demand, the antiquated role of being the provider, than you’d best learn a thing or two about the provision of emotional and intellectual support, too.

In other words, you’d bloody well better learn how to love.

Times are changing. The arrow of time moves through its seasons. It just goes and goes and goes and throws upon its scrapheap the people locked so deep within themselves that they cannot be assured of progress. The recession in Australia that started in 2020 is unique in that it is the first in our history that has disproportionately affected the jobs of women. Manufacturing, for example, and its mostly male workforce has never accounted for such a low chunk of the economy. But in cafes and retail, the caring workforce of the aged and disability sectors, in offices, it is women who dominate. And more women are working than ever before in all types of jobs like accounting and law. This was their economy to lose; a unique state of affairs in the history of the country. It is fair to say, then, that the slow pivot away from manual labour in the West to a services and knowledge economy has liberated real estate in the male brain that was typically on ice on account of the physical exhaustion of its owner.

Adjusting to this new state of affairs and away from a role in the family dynamic where you might have been both too necessary and too tired to let your mind wander is no small thing.

John Steinbeck captures this tired desperation in his masterwork, The Grapes of Wrath, when a poor man called Black Hat is fighting with the equally destitute Pa about undercutting his already woefully inadequate salary. They are both starving men with other mouths to feed and the tragedy of their circumstances has driven Black Hat to anger before. In resignation, he says:

I dunno. I jes’ dunno. It’s bad enough to work twelve hours a day an’ come out jes’ a little bit hungry, but we got to figure all a time, too. My kid ain’t gettin’ enough to eat. I can’t think all the time, goddamn it! It drives a man crazy.

In the context of a survival situation, this rings true. It’s the constant figuring that grinds a person into the ground. But there are matters of mental bandwidth, too, for men who have come out of these roles without ever having been taught to sit with themselves and make friends with the person they discover there. We are not shown how to be vulnerable nor taught that the embrace of it is a kind of relief.

A while back I was having dinner with my mates, the aforementioned Tom, Mick and Perry, when we came to a discussion of therapy and its relative merits. We usually take it in turns to go through periods of distress and I can’t remember who was having a go this time (it was probably me), so Mick asked the obvious question: ‘But is it helpful?’

Perry, a boy from the Central Coast of New South Wales who still roasts a whole pig on a spit each year with lads from his high school, responded with a mixture of jest and deeply held belief. ‘Look, people who do it swear by it,’ he said. ‘But, again, it’s one of those things. I’ve never put Premium in my car either and it’s fine.’

(Perhaps six months after this episode I was driving Perry back to Canberra from Sydney where he had left his car because it had just stopped working. I’m not saying this incident was definitely related to the petrol issue because I honestly have no idea how cars work, but not quite enough time had passed for me to forget his argument and the episode didn’t reflect well on his credibility.)

The fact we were even talking about mental health, as three straight men and a gay guy, is something of a monument to the times, I suppose, even though we all dragged our own hang-ups to that dinner like four weary travellers with more baggage than places to put it.

Outside my friendship group there is a fragility among some men that I find truly confronting. An entry in this low-stakes hall of fame comes from a Snapchat user called Kevin who posted a picture of a deep pink sunset with the tagline: ‘I’m straight but . . . that’s incredible.’

I feel genuinely sorry for Kevin who, through his personal and broader social networks, has come to believe that finding beauty in the world is the sole preserve of women and gay men. As if only raw sexual energy can intuit the rolling charm of our reality. Of course, it is fun to imagine a world where that masculine fear is an actual physical law; where a straight guy cops one look at van Gogh’s The Starry Night and ends up sucking an acre of dick behind the bike sheds at a local sports ground.

Don’t come for their state-based beer, either.

As 2021 broke, I had finally made it home to Boonah in Queensland to see my mum. On a rare trip to the state capital, I was passing the XXXX brewery in Milton and decided it would be funny (jury’s out) to post a photo of me giving the building the finger. I have no particular feelings about the brewery one way or the other but it has been a feature of my upbringing in the state and I am fond, certainly, of its place in local lore.

The reaction from men – it was only men – was swift.

A man called Archie, whose profile photo is a vintage car, replied: ‘Keep going, show some respect.’ Others like Shane told me to ‘fuck off home then’, presumably to New South Wales where I am now based. Another said I was ‘quiet [sic] welcome to go back to plague city, champ.’ Nothing stings as much as being champed by an older bloke. Matt took a different angle, at least, commenting only: ‘That’s a fat hand.’

A fat hand! I pictured him sitting at home, shaking with rage, plotting his defence of the brewery’s honour.

It is strange the hills on which people will die, metaphorically and also literally. Just days after the beer skirmish, pro-Trump domestic terrorists staged an insurrection by storming the Capitol building in Washington DC on the day lawmakers were due to certify Joe Biden’s historic victory over the one-term demagogue who had occupied the White House since 2016.

The fascist mob scaled the walls of the Capitol, smashed windows and used makeshift battering rams to infiltrate the seat of American Congress. Security forces, objectively more sympathetic to the rioters than they have been to Black Lives Matter protestors, were overwhelmed – in part because of those sympathies and otherwise because few among their leaders had ever taken the threat of right-wing violence seriously despite its meteoric rise as the primary domestic threat in the years prior. Vision from inside flooded social media, posted by news crews and the proud men and women who had seized the building for a man who could not care less about them. One police officer died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. Video showed another being crushed in a sliding door, screaming for help as the mob bayed. One right-wing extremist, a woman, was shot and killed by the Capitol police.

This event was in part a disease of misogyny. That might seem an odd thing to say. There were women there! How could it be an example of misogyny?

Firstly, it is important to state upfront that much of this hysterical moment has its roots in a fundamental hatred of the other. Racism helped birth the conditions, most recently with the election of the first Black president in American history. That was perceived by racists as an injury for which the country needed radical surgery. As ever, though, there were other forces at play in the background.

The DNA of one of those constituent parts, Gamergate, turned up at the Capitol Hill riots. For those who live their lives blessedly offline, the 2014 Gamergate histrionics will mean nothing. But it is important to understand how a disgruntled posse of video game bros made life hell for women over the course of some months through a targeted online harassment campaign.

Gamergate started after Eron Gjoni, the ex-boyfriend of video game developer Zoe Quinn, wrote a blog post in which he falsely accused Quinn of an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with a gaming journalist. He was angry about their split and dishing the ‘dirt’ as payback. #GamerGate hashtag users picked up the baton, many hiding behind their gamer names but some in full view, and coordinated a harassment campaign.

However, to say Gamergate was solely about Quinn is a farce. Beneath the thin veneer of that excuse was a magma chamber of hatred directed at feminism, and progressivism more generally, and its influence on video game culture. These were bros who did not wish to account for their behaviour – or ever change it – threatening rape and death, revealing her phone number and residential address. They stole nude photos from Quinn in revenge porn quests as if it were one of the games they themselves played in a rich online fantasy world. But this was real life.

‘My breakup required the intervention of the United Nations,’ Quinn writes in Crash Override: How Gamergate (nearly) destroyed my life, and how we can win the fight against online hate, her memoir about the frenzy.

Others might draw a direct causal link between this episode of culture war violence and what happened on Capitol Hill, though it is no less powerful to look solely at the facts and understand how its core features bobbed around in the soup of shadowy online discourse before emerging more fully into the world with fanfare after the election of Donald Trump.

These were people who only ever wanted permission: to be their authentic grotesque selves without fear of consequence. Others helped pave the way before and after Trump’s ascent to the White House. The once in-demand alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos – now banned from most social media platforms and broke as a consequence – sensed an opportunity in Gamergate.

In 2013, only a year before the controversy, Yiannopoulos called gamers ‘saddos living in their parents’ basements’ in a column for the now defunct The Kernel, which he founded. He wrote: ‘There’s something a bit tragic, isn’t there, about men in their thirties hunched over a controller whacking a helmeted extraterrestrial?’

What these new-age reactionary grifters lack in humanity they also lack in ethics. They are exceptionally good, however, at monetising opportunities of righteous indignation. Gamergate was one of them. Yiannopoulos hijacked the ‘rebellion’ against political correctness in its infancy and helped catalyse its natural mutation into full-blooded right-wing monster.

He knew better than anyone else that this wasn’t about ‘ethics in video game journalism’ and gave the punters what they wanted: column after column putting pro-diversity ‘elites’ in the crosshairs, with his first column titled ‘Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart’.

If anyone wants to study how a conflagration such as the one on Capitol Hill in January 2021 builds, it might be useful to track the way language swiftly becomes physical violence under the right conditions.

The essential grievance of the Gamergate fallout was treated as a shocking flare-up in online hostilities and not, as it was, the inevitable consequence of an unedifying social refusal to deal with male violence against women.

The mountain moves in pieces. Stone by stone, apparently ‘reasonable’ people in mainstream media organisations began throwing around terms like ‘social justice warrior’ and ‘virtue signalling’ as a convenient shorthand for people who care about trivial things like violence against women and human dignity. It was deployed not just by extremists but laundered through the slightly more palatable mouths of opinion columnists and conservative networks like Fox News – and even, once similar terms gained traction, in more centre-right outlets and publications in the United Kingdom and Australia.

At the heart of this grotesque performance was perhaps a belief that language itself could never actualise the danger contained in the words. In the worst cases, however, those pundits and far-right actors wielding the words knew exactly what could come of it.

They just didn’t care.

And so this project of shifting the tone of ‘debate’ – the Overton window of what is acceptable – greased the wheels of Trump’s campaign for presidency. It allowed his very existence. Once that happened, the man himself became the ultimate proof that it is possible not just to survive while disregarding almost every decent convention of modern society but to become President of the United States of America.

Enabled at every turn, Trump spent four years stoking racist hearts and poisoned minds, having already bragged about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it. With each utterance and each failure to be penalised, his supporters grew bolder.

Yes, women stormed the Capitol. Yes, some people of colour have been among Trump’s most ardent loyalists. We have seen throughout civilisation the complex psychology of people who have been drafted to act against their own interests. We have seen, too, the refusal of members of otherwise disenfranchised minority groups to deal with hatred if they do so from a position of power. The ‘I got mine’ state of mind is a powerful one. But it is true, too, to say that there are those who have grown up in a world so steeped in the rituals of everyday woman-hating and an innate white supremacy that these people can’t or won’t see the yoke of their own captivity.

Gamergate is just one expression of this atmosphere. And, obviously, not all video gamers are fascist coup enthusiasts. I spent most of my childhood and early twenties playing console games like Metal Gear Solid and Battlefield. But there, in the Capitol and standing next to a Mr Tumnus look-a-like in a horned helmet, was a man with a tattoo on his hand from the video game Dishonored. He sports the ‘mark of the outsider’, which in the game appears on characters who have been chosen by the Outsider himself. Curiously, the storyline involves a corrupt leader who has presided over a deadly pandemic and is eventually overthrown . . . in a coup.

The Capitol Hill rioters, whether the rest even knew about this game or not, truly believed they were working to take back a ‘stolen election’. And who might possibly have given them that idea? Narcissus himself.

In mid-January, the United States House Judiciary Committee released a report in support of a resolution to impeach ‘Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanours’.

The report says:

Members of this mob also made clear that they attacked the Capitol because they believed the President had directed them to. One, individual, Jacob Chansley, who wore a ‘bearskin headdress’ and ‘carried a spear, approximately 6 feet in length,’ later told police that he came as part of a group effort at the request of the President.

Another, Derrick Evans, had posted on social media at 12:08 AM on January 6th that he was going to D.C. to ‘#StopTheSteal,’ in response to the President’s tweet. Similarly, a livestream video from inside the Capitol revealed an insurrectionist explaining, ‘[o]ur president wants us here . . . We wait and take orders from our president’.

So what we have here now is a far-right or alt-right nationalist movement taking orders from a man who has admitted to sexually assaulting women. These two things are not a coincidence.

Take this May 2019 report from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that notes that the terms ‘alt-right’ or ‘alternative right’ are a ‘contemporary description of white supremacy and white nationalism’. These movements are also, OSCE says, ‘often misogynist’.

‘Both men and women who are part of them hold the belief that women should primarily stay at home, raise children and care for the family,’ the report says. ‘Women may perform the role of “wife with a purpose” or that of “tradwives”.’

The OSCE cites studies from the International Centre for Counterterrorism, the UN Office of Counterterrorism and the Council of Europe, which all show that one of the causes that leads to violent extremism is ‘liberal societies with higher gender equality in which men feel intimidated by women’s independence, as exemplified by the “involuntary celibacy” (Incel) movement’.

Incels are men who quite literally believe they cannot get sex from women because the world has given the latter too much power. More colloquially, this is ‘blue balls’ as a radicalising force.

Mull that over for a second. Some men have gone to war over their lack of sex. In April 2018, Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd of mostly female pedestrians in Toronto, killing ten people. Before his act of fatal rage, he declared an ‘Incel rebellion’ and praised the 22-year-old mass murderer Elliot Rodger who killed six people in a 2014 shooting rampage in California.

Rodger was a virgin and he was angry about it.

Remember, the dangerous fury that fed Gamergate started with a man who felt aggrieved that Zoë Quinn, a casual partner, had allegedly slept with another man. A whole ocean of pain and misery was formed because Eron Gjoni felt that Quinn belonged to him.

The fingerprints of this malicious entitlement are the same that crop up again and again in family violence matters. Intimate partner abuse, as it happens, is also a reliable predictor of terrorism and extremism.

Misogyny is its own closed ecosystem, supporting the everyday bottom-of-the-food-chain diminishment of women all the way to the apex predators’ radical violence.

In 2019, journalist and author Jess Hill published the most important Australian book of the past decade. Resulting from a five-year study, See What You Made Me Do is an unnerving but deeply real portrait of domestic abuse in Australia and around the world. Hill is methodical in peeling back the many layers of abuse, none quite so alarming to me as the conditioning of boys to reject femininity in all its forms. This becomes not just a disease for men but, as Hill writes, the ‘ghost in the machine of our culture’.

In it, she quotes family therapist and masculinity expert Terrence Real, who says the principal medium of the message is shame.

The way we turn boys into men, so to speak, ‘is through injury’, according to Real. ‘We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.’

As Hill establishes prior to this quote, female laughter at the male is terrifying to men not because they can’t overpower women physically – that is a lesson taught to them in their bones – but because it makes them look weak in front of other men. And in a world where traditional masculinity rules, this is a very dangerous place to be.

The balance needs to be reset. In return, the anger meted out is righteous.

It is also so hopelessly pathetic when confronted.

Jacob Chansley, the most recognisable of the Capitol Hill terrorists with his bearskin shawl and horned helmet, was detained in custody after the riot. His mother, Martha Chansley, told ABC15 news that her son hadn’t been fed his organic food diet since the arrest.

‘He gets very sick if he doesn’t eat organic food – literally will get physically sick,’ she said.

In Melbourne, there is a house with some of my favourite people in it and it is to this house I make a pilgrimage whenever I am in town. The men who live there are all from regional New South Wales and they are all young and heterosexual, which seems a strange thing upon which to remark at all these days. They date women, but the gentle affection usually reserved for romance between men and women is unguarded here, allowed to roam free. It’s really quite beautiful.

When I visit and the door to their home is opened, I am smothered with hugs and kisses. We kiss on the cheek, on the lips. We hug for longer than commonly held convention would allow, plus another five seconds for good measure.

In Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together 1840–1918, David Deitcher writes: ‘[In the late Victorian period] men posed for photographers holding hands, entwining limbs, or resting in the shelter of each other’s accommodating bodies, innocent of the suspicion that such behaviour would later arouse.’

Viewing these photos is like watching the final footage of the thylacine. It sparks the acute sense this is a marvel of the past not easily reintroduced, if at all. It conjures a melancholy that this pure, decent thing was lost to successive generations. That suffering these men of the past endured in loneliness, cut off from the joy of male companionship, has happened and will never be undone.

There are things we learn in that desolation.

One of the Melbourne boys, a dear friend of mine I’m going to call Logan, was in Sydney while I was writing this chapter and I told him about it over a few beers at the Vic on the Park Hotel in Marrickville.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You need to write it.’

Unprompted, he proceeded to tell me about the relationship he had with his biological father, which was built on a foundation of ambient physical terror and the tension of unpredictable tempers. On one occasion in his teenage years, as Logan had begun to become stronger, he began firmly telling his father about the hurt his numerous affairs had caused both himself and the family. Logan’s grandfather was there, too.

‘You could see Dad just getting angrier and angrier,’ Logan told me. ‘His face was straining and red and I could see my pop looking at him to get him to calm down and looking at me to make me stop. He was trying to say, “Stop, he’s gonna fucken kill you,” but I didn’t. And my dad just grabbed me by the throat and lifted me over the balcony railing and held me there. I was screaming at him, “Just fucken do it, go on and fucken do it.”’

Logan’s grandfather knew well what he was dealing with because he had, in his own way in a different time, instilled that same male rage in his son.

‘Pop told me about my dad’s eighteenth birthday party. Dad had a bunch of his mates around to the farmhouse and they got fucked up. They were on a rampage and Dad thought this was the moment he was finally going to shape up to his old man,’ Logan said.

As he describes it, his youthful father was lean but rippling with muscle. He was drunk out of his skull and led the charge against his father.

‘Pop told me he thought he was going to die that night,’ Logan told me.

Logan has emerged from this kind of childhood teeming with big ideas about love and gentleness. He’s a musician and singer. On one of my visits to the Melbourne house he showed me his notebook, where he writes down snatches of lyrics and ideas for songs. He’d only ever shown three other people.

Here was a young man, then only twenty-one, who was justifiably at a loss when trying to figure his way through all the emotion and feeling of being so young. That is the price we children pay for the aberrations of fatherhood; we are left alone in a wilderness of spite and anger that can never bring us into the world, only away from it.

In John Williams’s novel Stoner, he describes the observations of the main character, a university professor, during World War Two:

He saw the classrooms emptied of their young men, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.

War is a singular experience, I believe, but Williams could just as easily be describing the trajectory of many young men who are spat into the cauldron of the world alive to none of its beauty, primed for its rejection of them.

Either way, the death toll mounts.

I do wish I could grab some of these more severe men and make them understand what I have had to discover by cutting away the confected, infected, parts of myself.

The work has happened slowly over the years but more consciously in the course of writing this book. It is difficult, of course, to confront the notion that many of these behaviours and artifices are hoarded for an imagined future. This is an illness and, like hoarders of stuff, all we have to show for it is a pile of rubbish, which offers no help, only harm. The collection serves only to obscure the person we are, underneath it all, and to keep others at bay.

I want to shake my former colleagues of this misery and tell them that it is worth the deconstruction. Everything else is bleak, and dangerous.

It is so easy for me now to cast my mind back and look afresh upon the disconnection that held my life together, like a single strand of spider’s web cut loose from its moorings on a gentle breeze. There was a period of about ten years there during which I didn’t cry at all. Not at my grandfather’s funeral, nor at any point in high school or the year after when everything felt so strange and uncertain. When I finally did cry, in my third year of university, it was explosive.

During the pandemic lockdown I was on a video call with my friend Candice, ruminating on the unique terrors of mind-bending isolation. I’m not sure how it came up, but as the conversation turned to emotional coping mechanisms I yelled at her through my phone screen: ‘You ever seen a man try and push a tear back into its duct? Welcome to the Morton family!’

When I wrote about them in my first book, I broke their number-one rule. By ‘them’ I mean the men, because they controlled everything. That rule is this: never, ever, ever show signs of weakness. That includes doing any number of ‘weak’ things. Dad, for instance, wore only olive green or brown jeans on the cattle station. Blue jeans, according to his honestly quite opaque logic, were for poofters. For formal events such as a race meet or rodeo (yes, formal), he would break out the dental-white moleskins which apparently did not feature on his jeans-Kinsey scale. To appear strong, one must also be willing to prove it by fighting other men, cattle (when provoked) and nature more broadly. Most significantly of all, however, the Morton categorical imperative dictated that we should never admit to having emotional problems. In fact, it was preferable to have no emotions at all. Except anger, which was the pig of emotions. It could be pork, bacon, ham, whatever the circumstances required.

I broke the rule when writing my book, but I didn’t do it to provoke anger. I felt a profound sense of loss for these men. Even the ones who hurt me.

Having since surrounded myself with better role models, the grief is all the more real.

‘The greatest strength I have ever witnessed is gentleness,’ Séamus told me once. He’s right, of course, and he has modelled this way of being for as long as I’ve known him.

In the animal kingdom, exposing our soft underbellies is often a sure path to death or injury. Some animals do it deliberately, however, to indicate submission. This, too, is a measure of the instincts coded in us. Softness is weakness. Actual death, social death – it’s all the same. We fear it.

The problem, especially for men, is that the rigid avoidance of this pain of exposure is itself a death and perhaps the worst one of all because it means you cannot live.

Not all vulnerabilities will be received well by all people. Some will be exploited. You may show your most true self to someone and be laughed at or met with disdain.

Still, choose to do this. There is liberty in it.

It struck me, while writing this book, that expressing myself and being open to the world was an inoculation. Suddenly, I didn’t care what other people thought about me. To be more precise, I didn’t care to the same crippling degree as before. The more of us who do it, the safer we are; a kind of herd immunity for the mind. There is a point, not too far down this path, where you will be greeted with the kind of knowledge that could move earth itself. Everyone else is the same as you.

Some people spend all their allotted time on this planet wondering what that freedom might feel like.