Men Talking

Over and over and over again.

I see that book, Diary of a CEO, literally everywhere. WH Smith has a permanent shrine to it, and you can’t go into an Oxfam charity shop without overhearing some guy in a beanie hat talk about how Steven Bartlett’s ‘33 Laws’ gave him the vital guidance he needed to finally get over his sadness and get his beanie drop-shipping business podcast off the ground. 

And if it’s not diaries by CEOs, then it’s rulebooks for life by borderline fundamentalist Christian disgraced psychologists, or podcasts by new-atheist dweebs with a permanent hard on for Christopher Hitchens (which I don’t get because he wasn’t even hot). I saw that even Arnold ‘I love cumming’ Schwartzenegger has a self-help book out, which offers ‘Seven Tools for Life’. I don’t know what all seven of the ‘tools’ are, but I bet at least one of them involves weight lifting. 

I keep hearing that ‘men need role models’ - but aren’t male role models everywhere already? Public life has never not been inundated with male success stories, pretty much since the inception of going outside the cave. Prehistoric man never felt the need to start his own podcast, talking to other prehistoric men about how terrible it is to be a prehistoric man in prehistoric times. He wanted to, no doubt - thank God there wasn’t the technology (transcribing it would have been a nightmare). 

For the longest time we told men that they needed to talk more - that they’re too repressed and closed off. Well, it turns out that, for the first time ever, men listened. ‘You want us to talk?’ they said. “Well, we’re going to talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, over and over again - to the same people, in a rotating hell-scape of different podcasts”. 

And worst of all, the thing they want to talk about, ad infinitum, usually boils down to how terrible it is to live in a slightly more equal society. Or body count. Or how weird gay people are. Or cum (thanks Arnie!). 

We don’t need men talking this much. Is it too late to take it back? I can admit we were wrong! Can men go back to silent brooding, please? We simply didn’t know that the ‘answer’ to ‘men’s mental health’ was going to be fascism. If we’d have known, we would never have asked them to express themselves more - to get more in touch with their feelings. 

A lot of (primarily) straight, white men say that they need role models nowadays. They say that there is a shortage of positive guidance for them. They argue that: “Surely, it’s better that men be having these conversations with each other. That they be reading and opening up their hearts more. Surely Jen - this has to be a good thing?!”

I guess what I would counter that with is: for a ‘straight man’ is Steven Bartlett really the best role model for that sort of thing? 

After all, he does write a ‘diary’. Last time I checked, that was pretty fucking gay, bro. 

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