How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

He can’t quite keep his wife in line: when he puts up a Conservative election poster in their bedroom window in 1974, Mum puts a Labour one in the window of the room next door

she doesn’t have to find Mr Darcy. She just has to avoid another bloody Heathcliff.

it starts with having a family who loves you and someone who inspires you to read. Not because reading makes you smart, although it helps, but because to involve yourself in a story is to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. Generally, boys aren’t much encouraged to do that.

To be well enough to reject suicidal thoughts is not the same thing as being well enough not to have them in the first place.

It’s no coincidence that this is the language frequently used by men who believe that we live in a ‘feminised’ society where men (particularly white men like themselves) have become the victims of discrimination.

It’s everywhere: a system of thought and a set of invented and discriminatory practices in our laws, culture and economy that feminists call the patriarchy. Feminists are not out to get us. They’re out to get the patriarchy. They don’t hate men, they hate The Man. They’re our mates. The patriarchy was created for the convenience of men, but it comes at a heavy cost to ourselves and to everyone else.

Feminism is not about men versus women; it’s about men and women versus The Trick.