Blokes

 I regret to note that Piers Morgan and the middle aged blokes of Twitter are at it again.*

This time criticising the sensation of this year's Wimbledon, the break-out star, 18 year old Emma Raducanu, who came from nowhere** to storm through the first week, before pulling up short, unable to breathe properly.

Superannuated personality-bypass John MacEnroe was the first to weigh in, opining that it was because she couldn't handle the pressure and Piers, never shy of an opportunity to criticise a talented young woman (Can't. Imagine. Why.) was soon honking his patented brand of toxic masculinity all over a screen near you, warbling on about resilience and toughness, this from a man so fragile that he flounced off his own show when the weatherman disagreed with him; soon to join in was the notoriously hard-bitten Kevin Pietersen, whose ego was such that he slagged his own team off to the opposition when he felt slighted, and who kept getting out the same way for years.

Now, in the interests of balance, I should point out that two men leapt publicly to her defence, none other than Andy Murray and St Marcus of Rashford, both of whom have form for this sort of thing, so I suppose I should append my criticism with #notallblokes. But while MacEnroe does at least know a bit about tennis, and Pietersen a bit about sport, it was the intervention of Morgan which really brought the blokes out of the woodwork.

Oh God, that guy. I'm not going to waste too much time on him individually, but more what he stands for, the sort of self-satisfied golf-club bore of whom we seem to have a superabundance in this country. The red faced "it stands to reason" brigade, the ones who belittle any hint of mental fragility in others, particularly women. The ones who like to think of themselves as good guys, bastions of sound moral sense in a world going woke. And when someone like Emma Raducanu has a public lapse they love it, falling over themselves to opine at length about she couldn't hack it. How she's weak.

Now, I'm not here to speculate why these blokes (and I use the word advisedly, it has the sort of chummy  sports-club informality as "banter", and, like that word, covers a variety of unpleasantness; men, grown men, don't feel the need to belittle young women to make themselves feel better) froth with delight at Ms Raducanu's unfortunate stoppage. Possibly it's her heritage, of mixed Chinese and Romanian descent, she certainly fires up a few of the old racists, maybe it's a raging against the dying of the light, the realisation that a successful young female athlete wouldn't look at them twice.

It could, of course, just be plain old fashioned sexism. I had an interesting encounter with a bloke slating the England fast bowler Kate Cross this week, pointing out to him that the chance of him surviving her high-quality, international-standard fast bowling was precisely zero. That's part of it, sure.

But not all of it, because these are the same ones deriding the England football team for taking the knee, the ones worried that they're too "woke", these are the dinosaurs who, at a dim and subconscious level, are beginning to grasp that the world is changing around them, and they don't like it.

The blokes have had it their own way most of their lives, and it's not necessarily the case any more. In part, I feel sorry for them, they don't have the mental or emotional toolkit to deal with it, and that's partly a societal problem, not that they'd ever see it that way. As far as they're concerned, they're right, and they lack the capacity to think around an issue, they lack the self-awareness to realse that, just maybe, they're wrong.

The problem, as I see it, is largely one of a lack of empathy. Traditional masculinity in this country is strong and unfeeling, capable and stiff-upper-lipped. That's what was drummed into us from the day we first kicked a ball in nursery. We learned it from our dads, who learned it from theirs. As we grew older, traditional masculinity became about conquest, about how many notches on the bedpost you could get. The idea that women were people too existed on an intellectual level, but you didn't feel it in the gut, women were to be chased. 

Flexibility, changing your mind, these are weaknesses. Not knowing something is a weakness, it's preferable to bluff and guess and insist that you're right. It's the old joke about men refusing to ask for directions and getting lost, it's all of these things. And it's damaging.

What men fail to understand is that traditional masculinity, and the continuation of patriarchy, is as damaging to us as it is as it is to women. As I survey the wreckage of my teens, twenties and thirties from the vantage point of having learned a thing or two, I wonder how much damage, both external and internal, could have been avoided. How much better things could have been if I'd admitted I was wrong once in a while, if I'd listened better, allowed myself to care more. As this generation eases into middle age, the ideas become entrenched, the ones above us, the Morgans and MacEnroes, the Andrew Neils and the Boris Johnsons, are too far gone, their lack of capacity for self-reflection manifests itself in un unyielding world-view which harms those around them, and those who their world-view affects..

But things are changing. My children have a far greater emotional intelligence than I ever had. There are kids comfortable enough in themselves to admit their sexuality in secondary school (something I can't imagine happening at mine). Ignore that hysteria about cancel culture, and the piety of the left, the "you can't say anything any more" today's kids are far more tolerant and understanding than my generation, and certainly more so than Piers's. The age of the blokes is slowly coming to an end. Thank goodness, because they've been dragging us all down.

*Not ageist, or for that matter platformist, as a middle aged bloke of twitter myself, I know whereof I speak

**If you know as little about tennis as I do, I imagine those more in the know had ann inkling