At my last public engagement of 2018, after the other boys had left the gym where I had presented, a young man approached me. Hesitantly, hands in pockets, tears pooling in his eyes, the 16-year-old said: “I have done those things to girls you talked about. I don’t want to be that kind of man. I want to change. How can I make up for what I’ve done wrong?” The acknowledgement of his guilt, his desire to make amends, moved me deeply. Tim and I talked a while longer. I understood his desire to change was real.
This encounter represents a shift I have noticed taking place over the past year: more boys wanting to break out of harmful patterns, narrow expectations and deforming cultural messaging that they should be dominant and entitled to take what they like from girls.
Earlier in the year there was Steven, also 16. He leapt to his feet, passionately castigating his classmates at a Tasmanian public school for laughing at images of violence against women during my talk. “How dare you laugh,” he said. “This is serious, you can’t just laugh it off.” And then there was the 17-year-old Pacific Islander at a school in Melbourne’s west who said he intervened to stop the molestation and filming of a drunk girl at a party.
Later there was Canberra student, Braden, aged 16, who, at a Catholic youth festival in the Homebush arena attended by thousands, publicly said he was sorry to any young women who had ever been hurt by a male. The place erupted in thunderous applause and cheers.
Another time, at a WA secondary school, a boy at the back of the room stood up and told of how he had no friends, how he was bullied every day at school, how his brother had lost his life to a drug overdose. He broke into sobs. A student in the front row arose, walked to the back and hugged the first boy in a gesture which took my breath away. I had to step outside to pull myself together.
The faces of these young men came to mind when I watched the now notorious advertisement We Believe: The Best Men Can Be, released by shaving company Gillette. These faces of good boys; sorry boys; boys who stepped out of the pack and did the right thing, said the right thing, at the risk of disapproval; boys who felt the sting of ostracism for calling out bad behaviour, but knew their integrity was intact. The boys who recognised there was something sick at the heart of aggressive versions of masculinity and didn’t want to adopt its codes. The boys who are now part of what could become ― were we to allow it ― a cultural tipping point in dismantling and transforming harmful cultural attitudes about the way men and boys should be.
3 Responses
It is interesting that all women who have commented on this ad (that I have seen) see it as positive. Opinion is divided amongst men.
There is a feeling that the content is fine but the tone is off. Men do feel that they are being lectured at by a company that depends on them for their custom. Most men are good men who do the right thing and who hold their mates accountable.
There are jerks, and there are men who are truly violent, This ad won’t fix that. But equally it doesn’t show any kind of respect to the good men who sincerely try to live an honourable life.
It comes down to the values instilled into children. And given that too many boys are raised by single mums, perhaps we could have an ad criticising their efforts at producing broken men, No I thought not.
This is an advertisement for men’s razors. Is there really an expectation that this ad (or any ad) will ‘fix’ men’s violence? What it can do, and arguably does do, is encourage men to challenge the longstanding notion that manhood is equated with aggression, dominance, callousness and controlling women. If men are upset by this message, they should spend some time considering why that is.
Keith, do you know what qualifies a woman as a single mother? It’s an absent father. Your contempt for women who are doing their best to raise children in extremely challenging circumstances and without support, financial or otherwise, from the men who walked away, is nothing short of misogyny.
Do you know what’s really great about single mums Keith? They didn’t abandon their kids. Not like the Dads did. Women don’t make babies on their own Keith. So no, I won’t be criticising single mums, but I will condemn the men who walked away. The absent Dads are the ones breaking their children’s hearts and ultimately producing broken men. It is the women who are left with the difficult task of nurturing and mending broken hearts caused by absent Dads. It’s the single mums who work hard to raise happy and healthy children, even while those children carry the burden of abandonment by their fathers and their mothers carry 100% of the workload raising children whose fathers abandoned them. Thank God for single mums, without them these children would be orphans.