How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

Spend any amount of time with middle-class, liberal parents (and, speaking as a middle-class, liberal parent, I find these cunts impossible to avoid) and sooner or later you’ll find yourself talking about gendered play.

And ‘femininity’ – what is it? Having hair? I mean, long hair on your head but none on your legs, under your armpits or within a square mile of your Feminine Ladysecret. Taste in scarves? A sense of colour? The capacity to shut the fuck up when men are talking? What is this stuff?

In my view, no matter how hard it was for Esther Hautzig, at least she didn’t have to read The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig. In that respect she was laughing.

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.

‘If my father had hugged me even once I’d be an accountant right now.’

Like the centimetre of overhang on a standard two-ply loo roll that got itself out of sync – it’s a situation that won’t resolve itself.

When I was behaving like a useless arsehole of a husband and father, circa 2009–13, I would experience a temporary wave of guilt as, once again, I heard Abbie say something like, ‘I don’t want to be some whining bitch but . . .’ or ‘I don’t want to go on like some fucking harpy but . . .’ and I’d think to myself, ‘That’s unlucky, that. It’s really unfair that she has to negotiate the cliché as well as put up with me being next-to-shitfaced by 3 p.m. most weekdays.’1

On the side is painted the name of his business, which today looks less like an advertisement than like a rare flash of self-awareness: ‘Paul Webb, Ltd’.