How Not To Be a Boy Quotes

“Yes of course there's 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.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“One way of imagining life is that it’s a competition between love and death. Death always wins, of course, but love is there to make its victory a hollow one. That’s what love is for.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“The great thing about refusing to feel feelings is that, once you’ve denied them, you don’t have to take responsibility for them. Your feelings will be someone else’s problem – your mother’s problem, your girlfriend’s problem, your wife’s problem. If it has to come out at all, let it come out as anger. You’re allowed to be angry. It’s boyish and man-like to be angry.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“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.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“Men's rights activists tend to make a series of valid observations from which they proceed to a single, 180-degree-wrong conclusion. They are correct to point out that, worldwide, suicide is the most common form of death for men under fifty. It's also true that men are more likely than women to have serious problems with alcohol, that men die younger, that the prison population is 95 per cent male and that the lack of support for our returning frontline soldiers is a national disgrace. So far, so regrettably true.

They are incorrect, however, to lay any of this at the door of 'feminism', a term which they use almost interchangeably with 'women'. [...]

No, sir. No, lads. No, Daddy. That won't help us and it won't help anyone else. Men in trouble are often in trouble precisely because they are trying to Get a Grip and Act Like a Man. We are at risk of suicide because the alternative is to ask for help, something we have been repeatedly told is unmanly. We are in prison because the traditional breadwinning expectation of manhood can't be met, or the pressure to conform is too great, or the option of violence has been frowned upon but implicitly sanctioned since we were children. [...]

We die younger than women because, for one thing, we don't go to the doctor. We don't take ourselves too seriously. We don't want to be thought self-indulgent. The mark of a real man is being able to tolerate a chest infection for three months before laying off the smokes or asking for medicine.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“And yes, women do it too – of course they do. The difference is that they haven’t been encouraged since childhood to wear a total lack of self-awareness as a badge of pride. On the contrary, the message they’ve been getting is that they are ‘intuitive’. They are ‘nurturers’ and ‘good listeners’. They’re there to intuitively tell men to go to the doctor and to nurturingly sort out the laundry. Luckily, they can also ‘multi-task’, so they can do both at the same time, as well as booking their kids’ dental appointments and making a lasagne. Sadly, men can’t ‘multi-task’ apparently, which must be the reason we tend to take a step back from all that.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“And you can sometimes tilt the playing field in your own favour. You don’t discreetly lift the surface of a game of table football (or foosball) unless you’re an outrageous cheat. It’s acceptable to do so, however, if your opponent is the one in your mind who keeps saying ‘stop being alive’. Going for a brisk walk or having a cup of tea are a couple of harmless ways to change the chemistry of your body enough, maybe, to change your frame of mind. At least, it works for some of the people some of the time. If your opponent wants you dead, tilt the table. Tea, exercise, talking therapy, meditation, prescribed anti-depressants . . . different things tilt different tables. Whatever works for you.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“Self-respect and kindness to others: that's it. That's how we restore freedom to the galaxy …”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“Will patrols his heterosexuality like a prison guard who has recently lost faith in the penal system. Or maybe one who favours reform of the penile system (thanks and sorry . . .).”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“You might think I had a massive advantage when it came to acquiring confidence because, as a white boy in a rich, free western country, I was under the heavy impression that this was my world and I was the default human. But that’s not confidence, that’s just a wrong-headed sense of entitlement.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“If you want us to remain friends, then I think you need to get used to the idea that other people are real”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“I’ve settled at the disappointing end of clever or the hopeful side of dim.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“One way of imagining life is that it’s a competition between love and death. Death always wins, of course, but love is there to make its victory a hollow one.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“You can get away with some amazingly bad behaviour, it turns out, as long as your predecessors were complete shits.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“That's the thing about kind people: I can never live up to them.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“The Trick is a stupefying waste of everyone’s time. It creates barriers, not just between men and women, but between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons. To oppose it has been the cause of feminists for many years. It’s a cause I share.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“He bangs his hand on the table. ‘I knew it! You like a bit of both, boy! Fair enough, mate. You just like shagging and you’re not fussy! It’s not my scene, but God knows, with women, even I’ve sometimes nearly put it in the wrong hole, so to speak. Good old boy.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“Of all the things I currently want these Cambridge people to think I am – witty, clever, sophisticated, ambiguous, sexy, ironic, exciting, artistic, self-possessed, self-aware – it doesn’t occur to me that ‘kind’ should be at the top of the list. Nor ‘brave’ or ‘honest’ or even ‘reliable’. I think, at this time, that these virtues are too obvious, too boring and too typical of some kind of normal man.
No, as long as you’re very serious about not being like your dad, you don’t really need to be ‘good’ at all. What is ‘good’ anyway? This is the method by which I give myself permission to start acting like a liar and a sleazebag.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“You’re not going to pinch this, are you?’
‘What? I mean, sorry?’
‘You’re not going to add this one to your collection?’
‘Oh, Christ no!’ Ooh. Am I allowed to say Christ? The panic makes her smile and then she takes a beat for herself, scanning the shelves.
‘Pity,’ she says, ‘nobody steals from the library any more. It’s a bad sign.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“What do you want to be when you grow up then, boy?’ he asks.
I do the usual. ‘Computers.’ It’s the fastest way to close down this sensitive line of enquiry. Nobody over twenty has the faintest idea what a job involving computers could possibly mean, so it works well.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“At the birthday parties of friends I wait for the moment when someone’s mum clears away what’s left of the Angel Delight and says plaintively, ‘I wish they were all like you, Robert.’ Which is to say, ‘I wish they were all as quiet as you, Robert.’ I’m almost indignant if I don’t get that compliment at some stage. But then, I’m also uneasy, because I know that boys are not supposed to be quiet.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“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.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“In children, it’s about as easy to find conclusive evidence of a ‘male brain’ or ‘female brain’ as it is to find conclusive evidence of an immortal soul.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“Communal showering is a fresh hell that concludes every Games lesson the way an awkward exchange of details concludes a car crash.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“I don't mean to bum you out but... we're all going to die. The thing is, very few of us actually believe it. We look at pictures of people who have died and marvel at the pathos. 'Ah, there's Jean all smiling. She didn't know she'd be dead in three months.' Well, maybe Jean knew and maybe she didn't. But what she didn't do was go around hoping to provide someone else with a satisfying sense of dramatic irony. Nobody lives like that and it's odd that we do it to the dead sometimes.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be A Boy

“It will be some time before I realise that in acting, as in many jobs, a) you get better results when you collaborate instead of compete, and b) given the choice, only cunts prefer to compete.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy