The fear of women
A mishap with my daughter leads to reflections on male privilege and the importance of challenging toxic behavior.
A few days ago I was playing with my ten month old daughter on the sofa. She’s in a very tactile phase and loves grabbing things—typically my glasses—and swinging them around. She reached over and grabbed the TV remote control and happily waved it around her head.
Suddenly she flicked her hand backwards and whacked the remote into my top lip, swiftly followed by her own head. “ARGH!” I yelped in pained surprise as blood began to pool on my lip. There was a brief pause of complete and total silence, and then she began to howl.
It was my yell of pain: the volume of it, plus its unexpected and angry arrival – she was terrified. She sobbed and shook, her little limbs shaking as tears poured down her face. I pulled her close to me and stroked her little head and spoke soothingly, cursing myself for reacting so strongly (while trying not to bleed on her hair).
It was an uncomfortable realisation, holding her as she cried, that this was going to be the first of many times an angry man made her feel afraid and at risk. I didn’t feel much fatherly pride in being the first man to instil this pure, primal fear in her: my booming voice, my quick strength as I snatched the remote off her. I soon felt as bad as she did.
That dodgy bloke across the street
It’s a pretty awful feeling in general to discover you’re the source of someone’s fear, justifiable or not. I’ve occasionally walked home late at night on a quiet street, daydreaming or listening to music, and looked up to realise there’s a young woman walking alone ahead of me who keeps glancing back and quickening her pace. When she surreptitiously crosses the road away from me I suddenly feel guilty: was I giving off bad vibes? Was I inadvertently walking too close to her? She’s taking the safest option available to her and I can’t fault her reasoning: but the reminder that you’re a potential threat to people—even if you’re as mild-mannered and conflict-averse as David Attenborough—is a grim one.
Play the world’s smallest violin for me here: poor men, feeling bad about themselves because women have to live in a constant state of alertness due to our male brethren who are unable to leave them alone. I have nothing to complain about, do I?
The only way to fix this is for men to call out other men (and take ownership themselves) when we see someone obviously making women feel afraid or uncomfortable. This is one area where I actively try to use my male privilege: I’ll loudly challenge men who park their cars on pavements blocking access for prams and wheelchairs. Yay me! Give me a medal, I’m dismantling the patriarchy! Of course, the reality is that I have no easy answers or pithy solutions to the patterns of male violence and hidden abuse. Raising an eyebrow (verbally or literally) when that one slightly odd guy you know says something, well, slightly odd… is there more we could be doing? Self-evidently.
I don’t want my daughter to grow up in a world where men shout and snap and she dissolves into tears (or worse, has to laugh in order to avoid things escalating further). But even more so, I don’t want my son to grow up to become a man who’ll make anyone feel like that (or stay quiet when someone else does). Perhaps that’s the only real change I can implement here, and set that example for him. The first step might be confiscating the remote control…
Mini-feels this week
Train in vain
I was in London for work yesterday and caught a late train home with a couple of colleagues, one male and one female. We grabbed a bottle of wine to share on the train to accompany our hastily-grabbed Burger King meals.
“I write a newsletter about being a man… what do you both think being a man is all about?” I asked them as we passed Milton Keynes. Before my male fellow traveller could stop to consider the question, my female teammate was already diving in.
She launched into an impassioned, soul-searching discussion about men paying for dinner on first dates, and her own dichotomy about whether she should even be expecting this as a feminist, versus her desire to be treated well by a man in lieu of all the scenarios where women are worse off.
I had no idea where she’d go with the question or what a woman’s perception of being a man in 2024 might be, but it was a great insight into something I’ve basically never thought about. Men: ask your women friends what they think being a man is like. And then listen.