One of the biggest mistakes of my youth was to arrange a sleepover at my friend’s house with the precise aim of avoiding maternal detection of my plans to party. I was 15 and wily. With this friend, whose mother was of a more lax disposition, I set off in a car with two young men, both 21 years old, to a club in Pretoria. For Joburg girls, this was already terribly outré behaviour. We ventured into an entirely different city where we could strut our stuff and pretend to be cooler (by a country mile) than the locals. The guys we’d conspired with were cousins. One of them was the object of both our fascinations; we tolerated the other cousin as a necessary evil.
Conversation with these chaps was heavy on motoring content. That is to say, they really liked to talk about cars. I made the mistake of mentioning that I was reading a book and my comment was met with horrified bewilderment. The conversation rapidly bored me into silence. My friend took the gap with the cute one, encouraging his automotive banter to the exclusion of both the other cousin and myself. I can’t quite remember how it happened but suddenly I was outside the club, standing at the car, being cornered by the cretinous cousin. I do remember his horrifying attempts to molest me, which made me burst into tears because everything else I was saying, namely “no”, wasn’t working. The crying, however, stopped him, and for this I’m eternally grateful.
But I was deeply shaken and it took a long time for me to feel comfortable, physically and conversationally, in a car-adjacent situation with a man. I still have trust issues about being in a car alone with the opposite sex. Perhaps, after all, my mother was right to be so hyper-vigilant.
I was reminded of this formative incident when I watched Louis Theroux’s travels into the manosphere on Netflix, called Inside the Manosphere.
There are a lot of cars, and the subjects of his documentary are very attached to them. Theroux has the same wry, bewildered expression on his face that he has when presenting other slivers of society as weird, unfathomable mysteries. How did these (insert category) people get here? He never quite answers this question. With the manosphere, he hints at childhood trauma: these okes were raised by single mothers, absent or abusive fathers, and so they’ve grown up to like fast cars, fast money and fast women who wear bikinis and are happy to be denigrated on their feeds while also being pimped to the internet on OnlyFans.
I still have trust issues about being in a car alone with the opposite sex. Perhaps, after all, my mother was right to be so hyper-vigilant.
Forgive me if these guys seem terribly familiar to me. They remind me of the basic thug model of manhood which, despite all the pearl clutching we’re prone to, is a trope we humans have lived with for a long time.
As a person who’s witnessed male behaviour from a critical distance while rubbing up against it for the bulk of my life (I’m a cisgender female and compelled, against my better judgment, to mate with the other half of the species), watching the documentary made me feel as if I was back in that car on my way to a hellhole in Pretoria. I preface this with #notallmen. Obviously there are the ones who read a great deal of books.
But guys, this stuff isn’t new. Why would any of it have changed? We live with belligerent big boy babies every day of our lives whose egos are as fragile as their ability to perform masculinity. The #looksmaxxing boytjies are a kind of beast we know well. There is, however, a critical difference; they can now play to their team in a constant livestream of drivel for days. The male brain only settles into maturity at about 30, according to neuroscience. But, as we know, there’s no guarantee. One of the most telling pieces of evidence from the Epstein dump was a picture of the genius Stephen Hawking beaming, flanked by two bikini-clad “assistants” serving tropical cocktails at a “conference”. Boys will be boys!
There was a moment in time when we tried to tell ourselves that our values were egalitarian in a small corner of the world; we’d allowed some women to work at jobs and careers that required reading and we’d conceded that some of them could vote (but by no means all of them). Some briefly gained agency over their bodies, but that’s being clawed back at a rapid rate. Really, why can’t these whinging femoids STFU and stay in their lane, pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen? If they did, then the blokes could get on with important stuff like bombing Iran, lifting weights, buying crypto, farming chicks, investing and stuff... and also cars.
