If you know anything about me, have read any of my books or even digested the introduction to this blog, you should be under no illusions that I am a bloke.
I like doing blokey things, acting in blokey ways and speaking in the language of bloke.
And I love blokey stuff. For me, the Screwfix catalogue is nothing less than ‘man porn’ whilst one of the highlights of each and every month is the sound of ‘Bike’ magazine dropping on my mat.
And the older I get, the more blokey I become. Some would say this manifests itself in a lack of tolerance, impatience and my moaning about anything and everything however I prefer to regard it as increasing awareness of what’s going on around me and commenting accordingly.
But the truth is, I don’t actually see any problem with intolerance and since I’ve passed the big 5-0, I don’t really see why I should be patient about anything or anybody if I don’t want to be. After all, my times running out so it’s an extremely valuable commodity.
Sadly, it seems that I am a dying breed and the only people I blame for that are other men because we, as a sex, have allowed this to happen to us. We’ve sat back and done nothing whilst a relentless anti-man campaign has been waged against us and are now at the stage where the only real man to be seen anywhere is Jeremy Clarkson. That in itself, is horrific.
The troops at the forefront of this campaign against us are of course, women. Now for the record, most of my best friends are women and I far prefer the company of females to males. In the main, they tend to be funnier, far sharper and certainly more intelligent. But they can also be vicious when provoked. I know this, because I have a habit of provoking them. Sometimes on purpose admittedly, but mostly by accident.
There can’t be many men who know the power a steely gaze or stony silence can wield more
than I because I experience them with alarming frequency. They can be terrifying. And since the ‘easy life’ element of a males DNA is one of the more influential, we quickly learn that in most cases it’s far better and safer to put up and shut up.
Woe betide any man who for example, points out to his partner that being on her period is no excuse for turning into a world class pain in the arse and since she has one every four weeks, by the age of 30 she should kind of be used to it. Similarly, were a man to point out to his other half the simple truth that whilst child birth might well be painful, it was actually what the female body is designed to do so continually referring back to it as something ‘you don’t have to go through’ is kind of pointless because we can’t possibly go through it as we don’t have a womb.
However, not poking our heads above the menstrual parapet does have its repercussions. Not least because by allowing the female sex to carry on unchallenged with what is often totally unreasonable behaviour, we almost reinforce it.
But of course the dreaded cycle only occurs every four weeks and whilst hugely powerful, it can by its very definition only be used at specific times. And so women have a far more controllable weapon system at their disposal. One which can be brought into action at a seconds notice and employed in all kinds of situations ranging from getting her what she wants to stopping him enjoying what he has.
It’s the well honed stick with which all men will be beaten at some point or another and is of course, the guilt trip. And the engine which drives the guilt trip is oppression. Centuries of it.
Now I’m the first to admit that the control exercised over women by my forebears has bordered on criminal but my generation has done more to facilitate sexual equality than any other so could someone please explain why I’m still paying for what my grandfather’s lot got up to? Yet pay we do. Me seemingly more than most.
Yet in spite of this, I have to say that I actually consider the guilt trip to be a phenomenal thing. Not simply because of its flexibility, but because if we dare accuse a woman of using it, her inevitable denial will, more often than not, actually make us feel guilty for making the accusation in the first place. How on earth can you compete against that? The simple answer is you can’t. Which takes us back nicely to ‘put up and shut up’.
As if that isn’t bad enough, these days women aren’t the only troops we have waging war against us. Oh no, these days they have allies.
The first and most dangerous are gay men. Now I’m in no way shape or form homophobic but come on. Better dressed, usually richer and more often than not happier (mostly I suspect, because they don’t have to deal with women on any kind of sexual level) what chance do we have against that lot? It’s a horrible admission to have to make but it is a fact that I rarely meet a gay guy who doesn’t have some attribute or other I’m not jealous of. A sentiment I doubt is reciprocated!
Yet it is also a fact that their mission to undermine the heterosexual male by making us look and feel bad in front of the female sex has been relentless and phenomenally successful. Not only does it show no sign of slowing down, it actually appears to be gathering pace. A prime example of this assaulted my senses last week when Gok Wan ‘did’ a male for the first time (sic) on his TV show ‘How to look good naked’. Quite where they found the 35 year old sap who featured in the show I do not know but if anyone ever utters the phrase ‘and with the final addition of a man bag…..’ to me, they will be heading for A&E before the final syllable has tailed off. And please don’t get me started on the idea of male make-up. I’m still of the opinion that any man who use hair gel is a bit suspect.
Women of course, think very differently. They throw themselves behind the teachings of Gok and the gay Gestapo so forcefully that it becomes their mission if not their duty to impose this thinking on ‘their’ men.
Sadly, there are plenty of males who do fall for all this gumph and this leads us nicely into the other army determined to make us blokes look bad. They are the middle men, The Metrosexuals. Or as I prefer to call him, the hetrogays.
If you Google metrosexual, you come up with all kinds of definitions. They are, apparently, comfortable with the concept of male grooming and up to speed with the latest fashion trends. Understanding, sympathetic and above all, more considerate of his female brethren, they are at the very least within touching distance of their feminine side and have at the bare minimum, some concept of the impact both the menstrual cycle and the menopause have on the female of the species.
They also seem keen to wear a cloak of ambiguity when it comes to their sexuality. ‘To cause confusion’ is a sentence you will often stumble across when looking for a reasonable definition. I’m not even going to think about that let alone explore it.
Now speaking as a bloke, we used to have a word for males like that. It is, to quote the great Del Trotter, tart. I’m sorry, but any man who uses moisturiser or actually believes that he needs let alone deserves paternity leave needs taking out and beating. Oh and so we a clear, if you call yourself a house-husband, all you’re really saying is that your wife is cleverer than you.
Yet such is the arrogance of the hetrogays that they do not see this. Instead, backed up by the women and the gay movement, they perceive themselves to be better than we mere men. To them, we are nothing less than inferior because we have not adopted ‘their’ ways.
What a croc of shit.
The problem, as I see it, is that there are just too few role models for the average man these days. Aside from the aforementioned Mr Clarkson, I can count on one hand the number of men who work in either the media or music I would fancy a night out with and even football, for so long a sport which provided society with a steady stream of hard drinking, womanising gentlemen, now seems to be little more than a conveyer belt of bland, stupid or moronic.
But this demasculinisation of men cannot continue and therefore it’s left to the rest of us to set an example and call a halt to this. We have to start encouraging our fellow males to man-up and be what they are supposed to be; men.
I’m not suggesting for one second that we need a return to pre-suffragette (or even 1950’s)
values and I’m certainly not advocating any kind of sexism. But what I would like to see is a degree of fairness and equally, some kind of recognition that it is actually ok to be a heterosexual bloke. Because actually, it really is.
So come on men…. let’s have you. Let battle commence.
For more insight into the mystery of the female psyche, please read my novel Billy’s Log. It’s full of them!
*This blog was originally posted in 2010 but amongst other projects, I’m currently working on the sequel to Billy’s Log and so it came back to mind. Sadly, it’s as current now as it’s ever been which is a bit sad really.
writing, writer, screenwriting, sex, sexism, men, women, love, romance, football
men, women, author, screenwriting, top dog, green street, martin kemp, battle of the sexes, sexism, racism, football, lads, soccer, guys
I am by nature, staggeringly lazy. Yes, I know the evidence provided by my catalogue of work might suggest otherwise but the fact of the matter is that I am not one of those people who are driven to write, desperate to write or who have something they simply have to say so will labour long into pretty much every night in the hope of setting the world to rights. Indeed, I know this will upset some people but I’ve never really understood all that sort of nonsense. But then again, I’ve never really considered myself to be part of the literary world and to be fair, that’s reciprocated.
