📑 About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny

Quote from Tim Winton
Bookmarked About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny by Tim Winton (the Guardian)

What I’ve come to notice is that all these kids are rehearsing and projecting. Trying it on. Rehearsing their masculinity. Projecting their experimental versions of it. And wordlessly looking for cues the whole time. Not just from each other, but from older people around them, especially the men. Which can be heartbreaking to witness, to tell you the truth. Because the feedback they get is so damn unhelpful. If it’s well-meant it’s often feeble and half-hearted. Because good men don’t always stick their necks out and make an effort.

In a speech about a new book The Shepherd’s Hut, Tim Winton says that it is men who need to step up and liberate boys from the culture of toxic masculinity that has come to mark Australian society.

In the absence of explicit, widely-shared and enriching rites of passage, young men in particular are forced to make themselves up as they go along. Which usually means they put themselves together from spare parts, and the stuff closest to hand tends to be cheap and defective. And that’s dangerous.

Toxic masculinity is a burden to men. I’m not for a moment suggesting men and women suffer equally from misogyny, because that’s clearly and fundamentally not true. And nobody needs to hear me mansplaining on the subject of the patriarchy. But I think we forget or simply don’t notice the ways in which men, too, are shackled by misogyny. It narrows their lives. Distorts them. And that sort of damage radiates; it travels, just as trauma is embedded and travels and metastasizes in families. Slavery should have taught us that. The Stolen Generations are still teaching us. Misogyny, like racism, is one of the great engines of intergenerational trauma.

Along with Molly Ringwald’s reflections on the problematic art of John Hughes and Phil Cleary’s post on the misogynistic subculture of football, they represent a challenge for equity.

It is also interesting reading these pieces alongside Kate O’Halloran’s article on the fear associated with women exercise.

One of the biggest issues for women was the difference between theirs and men’s “entitlement” to space. At 53, [Lisa Schuppe] is a keen surfer, but has only recently taken up the sport again after her experience as a girl who wanted to surf just like her friends who were boys – but was instead treated inequitably.

Here is a longer version of the speech

14 responses on “📑 About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny”

  2. Replied to About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny by Aaron Davis Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)

    In a speech about a new book The Shepherd’s Hut, Tim Winton says that it is men who need to step up and liberate boys from the culture of toxic masculinity that has come to mark Australian society. In the absence of explicit, widely-shared and enriching rites of passage, young men in particular ar…

    Thanks for sharing this Aaron, I found it to be a carefully thought out piece. The idea of Art being a toy rather than a tool was a great hook. Looking forward to reading one of his books now.

    I huffduffed the audio from here. About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny

    Reply
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