Sometimes good advice is irritating because it makes you want to point furiously in the other direction. This happens when you read a sign saying “pickpockets operate in this area”, or when a keen young police officer taps on your window in a car park and reproves you for leaving a sweater on the seat because thieves might think there were valuables under it. Offered this sort of wisdom, your instinct is to snarl, “So clean up the pickpockets! Fix that CCTV! Don’t make it our fault!”
A version of this feeling is common in us women. Alison Saunders, a director of public prosecutions struggling with collapsed rape cases, complained that women being assaulted should be more vocal at the time. Otherwise, “you can see why, even though the complainant may think they were raped, there was a reasonable belief that they had consented”. Women attacked within earshot of their sleeping children, or frozen in shock, took exception to this breezy advice. Just as they do when judges plead that if you were incapably drunk and can’t remember a thing, your evidence in court may be useless. True. Yet something in us howls: “We’re not the problem! Men are!”
Advice to women on staying “safe” is perennial: civilisations and religions have kept us in seraglios and harems or veiled us into invisibility. Artfully, this does not always look like contempt: telling someone she’s a “precious treasure” is a handy excuse for locking her up. My grandmother’s generation, even to some extent my mother’s, looked more lightly on sexual assaults without injury if the girl was not a virgin. Younger readers may faint, but I have to tell you that even in the Sixties there were censorious old bats who reacted to the rape of unmarried girls who were not virgins with, “Ah, what’s a slice off a cut loaf?”
They did say this stuff, you know. Women can internalise even the crassest male opinion, and it has served us ill. Otherwise liberal mothers told my generation not to dress “provocatively” or walk alone at night; so we went on Reclaim the Night marches chanting, “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no!” But always a small inner voice murmurs that, OK, there is such a thing as immodesty, provocative self-advertisement, “asking for trouble”. Even I found myself thinking that the black dress protest at the Golden Globes would have been more convincing with fewer flashing thighs and side-boobs.
The time has come, though, to let our irritation speak, and throw this minatory stuff out. Predatory men, not slit skirts, are the problem. Many older ones — gropers, exploiters, workplace sexual bullies, downright rapists — are set in their attitudes. They can probably only be governed by fear, and that is happening now with many being professionally ruined. Too many, actually; a troubling lack of nuance has punished some men too hard.
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Yet if we want a better story in the future, we should focus on boys from the very start. They each start out innocent, loving their mothers, less emotionally vocal than little girls but often actually more sentimental and vulnerable. Growing up, they look around for role models, wondering what it is to be a man? And here the trouble starts, as the culture offers them something belligerent, bullying, glorying in male strength and prestige, with sexuality focused on conquest and trophy, not shared joy.
That strand of maleness has always been there, but three things feed into it today. One is screen heroics, with girls depicted as rewards, and its darker cousin, porn. Another is a general culture of grabby materialism, whether in mega bonuses and showbiz overpayment or in the political-commercial revolving door. That erodes old ideas of honour and chivalry: the courtesy of the strong to the weak. How can it not spill over into human relations? The concept of courtship, which any sensitive teenage boy instinctively understands, is eclipsed by a general approval of forceful, selfish exploitation. Education is part of the answer, but that too is corroded by competitive exam-mill values. Boys probably learn more about how to be a gentleman from their English teacher, given a chance, than in preachy PHSE lessons.
There’s a third thing. Simply encouraging gentleness in a growing boy is harder if at the same time you starve him of the hard, exhilarating excitement of physical adventure, risk and triumph. His very muscles crave it. Organised sport helps, but has its limits (you’re never far from a shower and a physio, and predation in some professional sport is an established cancer). A lucky few adolescents get to the mountains or the sea, beat discomfort and fear, and exult in mastery that way.
Other boys create their own hazards in skateboarding, parkour or, regrettably, dangling over bridges with cans of spray paint. The need for muscular, risky self-proving is there in young men. Without other teaching, such adventure is no guarantee of gentle behaviour, but it does at least teach them about bodily fragility through fearing for their own.
However, many, with their riotous manliness slapped down and deplored, have no outlet for that fierce male energy except in thoughtless, loveless sexual encounters, with the female a mere object. If affirming your power in that way becomes an addiction, years later you too may end up at black-tie dinners with the rest of your wolf pack, fondling some unhappy hireling your daughter’s age just to affirm that, hell, you’re a man! Better, and these days far safer, to be a gentleman.