How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

But the point stands: if Huckleberry doesn’t like the colour pink, he wasn’t born with that idea in his head – somebody put it there.

I don’t know what the words ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ have to offer. Avoiding them, we still have a massive language of more precise words to describe individuals and their behaviour which somehow manage not to come pre-loaded with a steam tanker of gender manure from the last century.

You can get away with some amazingly bad behaviour, it turns out, as long as your predecessors were complete shits. And no matter how bad the poetry is, she now has a boyfriend who writes her love poems, and becomes silly when drunk instead of physically threatening.

Men in trouble are often in trouble precisely because they are trying to Get a Grip and Act Like a Man.

Feminists are not out to get us. They’re out to get the patriarchy. They don’t hate men, they hate The Man.

Men don’t have ‘me time’, you understand: they just have ‘time’.

What I’m after is extending that awareness to the half of the population who might still be under the impression that gender conditioning didn’t happen to them because they’ve got a Y chromosome.

the Mood Tyrant can be just as scary as the guy throwing crockery around.