How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

Other people have covered this ground much better than I could – what with being scientists – and so this would be a good moment to recommend Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine and Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot. 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.3 In the above-mentioned Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine cites a study from 2000 in which . . .

Which The Endless Steppe may well be – I don’t know,

In my part of Lincolnshire we had The Unfinished Feud set in Viking era Iceland which I enjoyed

I thought it would be easy, or, in the Lincs teen parlance of the day, a massive doss.

Surely, a big skive.

the girl picked up the bill when the boy turned fear and grief into anger.

cost to ourselves and to everyone else. To put it childishly, if you want a vision of masculinity, imagine Dr Frankenstein being constantly bum-raped by his own monster while shouting, ‘I’m fine, everyone! I’m absolutely fine!’

One day he says, ‘Robert, I get this from students all the time, especially the male students. Yes, of course there is always someone worse off than you. But imagine you’re in a doctor’s surgery with a broken arm. The person next to you has two broken arms. The person next to him has two broken arms and a broken leg. This is all very well, but the point is that you have a broken arm and it hurts. The others may indeed be worse off. But they aren’t here this morning. You are. So . . . tell me about your broken arm.’