The opposite of toxic masculinity is…

Elizabeth Oldfield is grateful for the true manhood of some knights in blue boiler suits.

A few years ago, I was helping to lead a walking holiday on the south coast of England. As it happened, we were all women. Many of the participants came from North America, so I became familiar with the different associations of the word ‘hike’ in our two cultures.

In the UK, almost everything is a walk, unless it requires poles, and possibly crampons and rope. A hike implies a serious and sustained incline. Scrabbling up and down hilly coastal paths made by rabbits, which may at any moment slide into the sea? It’s still a walk. In the US, I have gathered that anything longer than a stroll outside a city, even on very even tarmac paths, is a hike.

We were doing a long walk/hike that day along a wild, challenging section of the South West Coast path. Participants had been briefed on length and inclines, told some of the walks would be strenuous and warned in advance of the holiday to be working on fitness levels if needed.

They had all declared themselves ready, and so we got off the coach on a gorgeous spring day in high spirits, checking water bottles and handing around facial sun-cream of various levels of fanciness. I noted how the age of the participant correlated with the price of the facial product.

As we set off across the fields, one set of leaders at the front, I hung back to keep an eye on the slower members. I got them to stop and smell the unexpectedly coconutty gorse flowers and offered hands over deep puddles.

Fairly early on, I noticed a member of the group was picking her way delicately, as if afraid to fall into the deep ruts created by cow hooves. Her name was Sherry, and she was the most elegant of us, her anorak stylish and well fitted and her walking boots, as many participants had already commented, ‘cute’. On the older end, she had a sheet of blonde hair and still-smooth skin, and mischievous blue eyes framed by a faint fan of smile lines. I fell into step beside her, offering a hand for the trickier bits.

Before long we were far away from the road, deep in a national park with no sound but the wind, the birds, and the sheep. Underneath it, the booming crash of the Atlantic from the cliffs nearby called us on.

I was enjoying getting to know Sherry. She was from California and had been heavily involved in the 1960s counterculture, a dancer for a psychedelic rock band. She told me she still owned her thigh-high silver gogo boots, and could fit her silver minidress. Her stories were hilarious and scandalous, so I didn’t at first notice that she was leaning more and more heavily on my arm.

As we set off after a lunch break overlooking the sea and turned to trace the shore, Sherry’s difficulties got more obvious. I conferred with the official group leader, and she confirmed my fear – we were now as far from a road going back as we were going forward. She had also noticed the lack of phone signal. We would just have to keep going.

As the afternoon wore on, Sherry continued to slow, while insisting she was ‘just fine, sweetie’. My back was beginning to burn from leaning my nearly six foot frame sideways to support her petite one, so the other leaders began to take turns.

Before long, it needed two of us to help her over stiles set into dry stone walls, and as the sun slanted sideways and we were still several hours’ worth of walking away from civilisation, even that became too much.

At one point three capable and kind participants, all of whom were trying to help solve the problem, attempted to carry her in a chair lift with me. It quickly became clear this was not a goer. We simply did not have the strength to do it for more than half a field, and there were many, many more fields before we’d reach help.

As we set her down gently on the grass and collapsed around her in a heap, her bodily frailness, contrasting so sharply, with her smooth face, made me think vividly of broken hips. It prompted me to ask “Sherry, how old are you?”

“A lady never tells”, she said in her seductive drawl, but her trip companion, hovering anxiously nearby, said flatly “she’s 80”.

One of the leaders and I made eye contact. We both thought the same expletive at the same time.

We were out in the middle of a national park with dusk not that far off, and had an eighty-year-old to get safely home. Everyone was exhausted, and the capable and caring group of women simply did not have it in us to fix this.

We had fancy sun-cream, first aid kits, hair bobbles and excellent listening skills, but they were not enough. She pulled out her mobile phone, which mercifully had signal for the first time all day, and called the coast guard.

We sent most of the group on with the other leaders, and I waited with Sherry, lying in the most sheltered, sunlit patch of grass we could find. I watched the shadows lengthening, trying to keep her warm with all my layers and scanned the sky for a helicopter while jogging on the spot to stop myself shivering.

As it happened, three bright blue four-wheel drives appeared on the horizon instead, coming over the ridge like the cavalry, like Gandalf’s forces in the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

As we watched them approaching in the distance, scattering sheep in all directions, unperturbed by the steep rocky terrain, Sherry sat up. She reached into her pockets for a comb, used it and applied lip gloss. Then she arranged herself on her elbows and tossed back her hair. I exploded. “Sherry! We have called the emergency services for you! This is extremely costly for the tax payer! We can’t have them thinking we have wasted their time! Stop trying to look hot. Look frail!”

Then the jeeps were surrounding us and twelve tall burly men in blue boiler suits were unfolding themselves, smiling. Honestly, I have never seen anything hotter or more welcome.

One crouched down to talk to Sherry, flirting lightly with her as if he already knew what she needed to save her pride, tenderly checking her pulse and blood pressure. Another coast guard asked me questions about what had happened and also flirted, chivalrously. After the day I had had, honestly, it was not unwelcome.

The other men got back in their vehicles, clearly disappointed they had not needed to use their ropes and cliff rescue kits, but laughing and joking all the same. Then Sherry was helped gently into the vehicle and I was squeezed between two rugby-player sized sets of shoulders in the back, and we were driving back up the terrifying inclines. It took maybe four minutes.

I sat in that jeep, surrounded by the ribald banter of fishermen and farmers from the local communities, all of whom had instantly downed tools to come to our aid as part of the volunteer service, and felt immense affection for these men.

They insulted each other with the love borne of camaraderie.

In the front an older man was debriefing with a younger trainee, passing on his competence with no-nonsense compassion. As we passed the rest of our group of women walking exhausted into the town, Sherry waved at them as regally as a queen, grinning.

I had one clear thought: whatever ‘toxic masculinity’ is, this is the opposite.

………….

On May 6th I will be hosting a special live podcast recording with Caitlin Moran. She is a columnist for The Times and author of multiple bestselling books and screenplays including How to be a Woman.

Like a lot of us, this question has been playing on my mind. Netflix’s recent smash hit drama Adolescence, a terrifying exploration of the online forces radicalising young boys, is just the most recent spasm of collective handwringing about the ‘crisis of masculinity’.

Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men makes a level-headed (and blessedly non culture-war inflected) case that men are indeed in trouble – failing educationally, struggling in the job market and still three times as likely to take their own lives as women.

He delicately underlines that although gender is complex and socialisation important, higher average levels of aggression, risk-taking and socio-sexual drive amongst males are also biological realities which show up again and again in the data, and which can be channelled in healthy and unhealthy directions.

This doesn’t, of course, mean all males experience these in the same levels, or that females can’t also be aggressive, adventurous, or highly sexed. I’m sure there are female coastguards who relish swinging from ropes and battling high waves to rescue people in distress but, let’s be honest, they are rare.

Part of the difficulty of talking well about these differences is humans are bad at both talking and thinking.

Holding two true things in our heads at the same time takes enormous concentration, a human tendency I now see as at the root of so many problems. In this case, it is true both that

1) there are some salient differences between the embodiment of males and females that it is helpful for us to acknowledge and seek to understand if we are to live together well

and that

2) if we lean into those differences too hard we get absurdly broadbrush categories which many people neither fit into neatly, nor want to.

This means that continuing to complexify them (which is not the same as erase them) is also helpful (I have several readers who describe themselves as nonbinary, and if that is you, I’m very glad you are here). When I am writing about my own woman-ness (for example in this piece) I am always trying to allow both of those things to be true.

Both Reeves and Moran conclude that part of what is driving the crisis of masculinity is the absence of a vision of what a ‘good man’ looks like now.

Feminism, in its different waves and iterations, has provided for many women an ideal to work towards, a set of ideas to support them, a path. Like all movements it has had its spiky, immature and tribalising edges, but its main effect has been liberating for many women. It has allowed them – allowed me – to accept and value women as women, not take on the centuries old cultural story that we are lesser.

The female protagonist in a recent Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story says “it took me a long time, but I eventually stopped believing women are inherently ridiculous”. Feminism does that, in its healthy forms. It is medicine. As Moran says, there is no real equivalent. Men talking about being proud of who they are, celebrating their maleness, are associated with scary men’s rights activists.

A non-zero sum, non-misogynistic acknowledgement of what is good about men is missing.

This is deep, complex stuff and my thinking is still evolving, but I’d love to create some space here to celebrate brilliant men, whether they are coastguards or artists, dancers or soldiers, dads, bosses, friends, sons.

Not because there are no problems with some expressions of masculinity (a shrunken, scared, unhealed vision of it seems to be driving many of our political challenges, and that is before I get started on endemic sexual violence) but because I think the focus on those things alone isn’t helping. What we feed, grows. Please do come back to me to share your love for a particular man or one facet of the fractal multiplicity of healthy masculinity, something you like about your friends, dad, partner, uncles or sons. Or, something you like about yourself.

Here are a few of my current favourite men who I do not personally know:

Brick Man in the Australian version of Lego Masters. He has high standards, is unashamedly nerdy about his hobbies, is occasionally stern and then cries when he has to send people home. Perfect viewing for people who like creativity, ingenuity, and the beauty of simple human relationships.

The poet and musician Joshua Luke Smith. Joshua has a podcast and makes music and poems which draw on his faith but which many people of different backgrounds find helpful. He talks about fatherhood and mortality, recovery and porn, vulnerability and working out. His songs swerve from expressions of pain to lines like “I still love a car chase”. So do I, TBH.

Times Magazine Columnist Ben Machell. He’s been writing funny, self-deprecating and deceptively smart columns for the (London) Times on fatherhood and manhood for years (and should have long ago taken over the Beta Male column IMHO).

Bandit Heeler, the Dad in Bluey. Yes, I know he’s a fictional dog. I still love him.

This is a slightly edited and abridged version of an article which first appeared in Elizabeth Oldfield’s Substack blog Fully Alive. For the original article, click here.

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