How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

I take a more cautious approach to the outdoor life and I don’t do it with other children. Unless, of course, you count the Guy-Buys. The Guy-Buys are my imaginary gang of friends. I am the Captain of the Guy-Buys, obviously, and they are my twelve – yes, twelve, like the apostles – men. One day, my wife will put this together with what she knows of my sexual history and come up with one of her favourite ways of taking the piss. ‘What were they called again, your imaginary friends? The Gay Boys?’ ‘The Guy-Buys.’ ‘The Gaybo’s?’ ‘The Guy-Buys.’ ‘Not the Bi Guys.’ ‘No, dear. Not the Bi Guys, the Guy-Buys.’ Let me tell you, there is nothing gay about the Guy-Buys. If there were girls in the Guy-Buys, that would be different and, indeed, gay. If I understand two things about masculinity at the age of seven, it is a) the Sovereign Importance of Early Homophobia, and b) the Paramount Objective of Despising Girls. Nobody wants to be a gay and only gays play with girls – this much has been made clear. As I hold the door open for the Guy-Buys and count them into the kitchen, I remind them that to play with girls would be lunacy.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine and Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot.

And in September, a new school – Coningsby Junior School – where you’re seven till eleven. Bigger boys. And some of the teachers are men. WH Smith’s have already put their ‘Back to Skool’ signs up. Why do they spell it the easy way that’s wrong, instead of the hard way that’s right? Maybe they’re just trying to be nice. Nobody really likes this time of year, do they? Just one long Sunday teatime.

While I pretend to have my own wee (having a real one is impossible unless completely alone), I can’t help being fascinated by the way Roger pulls his whole foreskin back on these occasions. It’s not something I’ve been inclined to try for myself yet, just in case it’s only my foreskin that’s keeping the whole thing in one piece. I have visions of the round bit on the end just falling off. You can’t be too careful about this kind of thing.

Have you ever seen a nine-year-old boy who’s just shat himself doing star jumps in a white PE kit? I have. Poor, blameless Matthew had been getting away with it until now. It’s fragile, and you wouldn’t want to found a major religion on it, but there is a level of honour among schoolboys. There are some places we know we just shouldn’t go.

I understood what I was supposed to think: that playing with people was better than playing with a computer. And that outside was better than inside. And that real friends were somehow healthier than imaginary ones. It’s just that all this wholesomeness made heavy calls on my very limited supply of courage. How much easier to forget all this ‘growing’ business and just stay at home getting better and better at Jet Set Willy.

It doesn’t occur to me that the reason why Jenna wants to talk about our relationship is that it really is looking quite peaky. Neither do I consider that, as a girl and then a woman, she has been told about five times an hour that care of personal relationships (wrapping presents, among other things) is her job. I, on the other hand, am quite certain that care of personal relationships is basically none of my business. I wouldn’t know where to start. I mean, I’ll read the stupid book and everything, but the stupid book just gave me a massive pass. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just do my ‘listening’ and then play Civilization II because that’s precisely what I feel like doing with my time. Men don’t have ‘me time’, you understand: they just have ‘time’. And now, rather marvellously, spending large portions of it alone doing something enjoyable isn’t being selfish, it’s fulfilling the basic psychological needs of my people: the Martians.

‘It’s not bloody right,’ Dad says angrily into his pork chops, sausage, bacon, leeks, mash and cauliflower cheese, ‘they’re only little old boys. They can’t help it if they’re shirt-lifters, bless them.’ He can do this, our dad. He can come out with statements so fantastically wrong and fantastically right in the space of one sentence that all I can do is prepare the next forkful of sausage, bacon and cauliflower. ‘Not bloody right at all,’ he repeats.

Dad made exceptions for me just as I made exceptions for him. His views on snooty, Champagne socialist, metropolitan, formally pan-affectionate, middle-class Oxbridge luvvies had to take a step back when he noticed he had one for a son. And my views of baby-boomer, non-college-educated, slightly racist, deeply sexist, angry white working-class Tories were tempered by having one as a dad. This is the kind of forced empathy that villages, not just families, are rather good at. Given the divisiveness of the Brexit vote and the Trump presidency, I think it’s worth saying that it’s precisely these exceptions, these accommodations we have to make with each other, that create cracks in the wall of mutual suspicion and make possible a politics of civility – cracks which the algorithms and self-policing identity groups of Facebook and Twitter hastily try to paste over.