MEN ARE TRASH

“I’ve come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum” Rowdy Roddy Piper – They Live

Unless you’ve been cataloguing snailfish in the Mariana Trench or rebirthing your inner unicorn at an off grid ayahuasca retreat, you can’t have missed the circus of social media stars lumbering into boxing rings to punch at the yawning void that clicks and cash have failed to fill.  As a result, my social media feeds are increasingly awash with an eclectic gamut of pundits romanticising blood and bruises under the glow of pay-per-view lights.

I'm fifty. I was raised on a diet of sociopathic action heroes that would snap some anonymous goons' neck before dropping a glib one-liner about it. I should probably feign that I was above it all, but there’s something about watching steroidal walnuts punch each other’s heads off that speaks to me on an almost chromosomal level.

20th-century culture taught me that men should be strong, silent, and disposable. Men were to be awarded inequitable privilege and glory, on the understanding that we take the bullet if the shit goes down. Women and children first, that was the mantra. Why shouldn’t we be given the freedom to follow our base desires without consequence, we’re practically martyrs. That was how manliness was idealistically characterised when I was a lad. It was a time when women, on average, held less than half the legal rights men did. In many parts of the world, women couldn’t vote, sign contracts, own property, or even be their own person in the eyes of the law—thanks to the doctrine of coverture, which subsumed a wife’s legal identity under her husband’s—even well into the 20th century. In the UK, women were relentlessly mocked, diminished and objectified by a culture and media run almost exclusively by dudes. And not just any dudes, but privileged cisgender white dudes—historically not the most self-aware when it comes to checking our own privilege.

Ironically, the freedoms men bestowed on themselves meant I didn't get to spend much time in their company as kid. Around my way, fathers were either absent or so terrifyingly dysfunctional you’d wish they were. My dad scarpered when I was four, so other than the double-denim clad specimens of seventies machismo that slid across car bonnets on the telly, I was raised solely by working-class women. Brilliant, capable matriarchs who saw none of the privilege or the glory but dodged bullets left, right and centre. Thanks to them, I have some awareness of how the threat of men impacts women's lives.

In the last decade men have begun to receive a long-overdue education regarding how our presence and violence disrupt and destabilise. The aggression and unease that many of us bring into the world is obscene. I'm not attempting to draw an equivalence, but I think it would shock a lot of women to find out how many men live in fear of violence from our own gender. We don't all have scale on our side. Lots of boys grow up in circumstances in which violence feels inevitable. We're constantly braced for impact. I know many men who struggle to focus in public because they're hypervigilant to physical threats. I know blokes that struggle to leave the house or have to sit with their backs to the wall, so they're permanently primed for a potential attack. I’ve been one of those men. I have diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder born of male violence.

I've also known many men who are violent predators. With men, perpetrator and victim are frequently one and the same. That's far less true of women. When it comes to threat and violence, men can sometimes be the victims, but we are overwhelmingly the problem. I’m not in any way diminishing the suffering of those who have endured violence at the hands of women, I’m talking about culture not individuals. Of course, women can be violent, but they’re rarely encouraged towards it, or celebrated for it.

The women that raised me were so self-contained that I grew up not seeing the point in men. They highlighted everyday sexism in such an unquestionable way that men who try to minimise it have always seemed ridiculous to me. Though my mum and nan would identify as feminists, they were also products of their time, environment and heritage. My people are a mixed bag of working-class Scotish, Romany gypsies and Lancashire miners, so along with home-spun interpretations of second-wave feminism, I was also taught that men should be chivalrous, gallant and brave. If the adults in my life offered me one clear message as a young person, it was that you never ever raised your hand in violence against a woman. When it came to violence against men, the message was far muddier. The fact that my Grandad served time in Barlinnie prison for lamping a lance corporal during World War 2 was always communicated with a frisson of pride.

Lads are supposed to love our mums, nans, and sisters, aren’t we? I do. As a child, that trifecta was my only source of information about what men are. We absorb your opinions about us; they help define us. I'm the product of a single-parent household. I've seen first-hand how women have been expected to step in when men have disappeared or failed. But the job of teaching boys not to be asshats shouldn’t fall solely on women. We need a society that pro-actively produces positive male role models. And the fact that something so obvious even needs saying is an indictment in itself.

Despite being a geeky kid with a keenness for social justice, by the time I had learned what the patriarchy was, Mr T, Han Solo and Dirty Harry had snuck in through the fire exit of my subconscious and set up home in my formative psyche. My real-life male role models differed little from my on-screen idols. The older lads we looked up to on the estate were cool and reckless and had scant regard for their own lives. Above all, they were excellent at violence. As men, especially those of us who grow up on the social and economic fringes, we're conditioned from day dot to believe that violence is our language, and if we’re not fluent, we’re lesser. The message is so ubiquitous and relentless that even the gentlest and most sensitive amongst us can't help but feel that being able to throw (and take) a punch is our moral duty. One look at a boy’s face after losing a playground fight tells you everything you need to know – the shame – the collapse – like they’ve been evicted from their own manhood. Failing at fighting is failing at being a man.

Dumb, isn't it? Stupid boys with our stupid violence. Especially us council estate types. Not fit for much else, though, are we? So, here’s where I raise some hackles: in my experience, despite all the virtue signalling, plenty of educated middle-class liberals quietly believe that that violence amongst men from lower economic backgrounds is not just inevitable, but somehow appropriate. We don't talk about it, but there's an implicit gradient of acceptability, or rather a diminishing level of empathy regarding those who endure assault. Council estate lads are at the sharp end of that zombie knife. Don't get me wrong; I understand why that is. We are statistically the most likely to be the perpetrators of violent crime, but what is rarely mentioned is that we're also the most likely victims. As with most complex problems, we hear endless discourse about the effects of male violence but very little about its causes. Until that's addressed, nothing will change.

“I love a bad lad, me”—the mantra echoing off the estate walls during my awkward puberty, as common and acceptable as stating crisp preference (Frazzles, obvs, I know who I am). As far as I could tell “bad lad” was usually shorthand for a violent, emotional Tamagotchi with poor impulse control.

Over the last few decades, almost all of my relationships have been with educated, middle-class, vocally progressive, self-declared pacifists.  With shockingly few exceptions, there has come the point in each of those relationships where ex-partners have either coyly or with lustful enthusiasm begun to express how titillating they find the violence of my youth. Whispering in my ear as a finger traces the blade scars down my face, across my stomach or down my back. Some have even gone so far as to instigate violent situations out in the real world because they find the idea of being defended or protected arousing.

Once again, for the cheap seats, male violence is a problem for men to address. We are responsible and culpable for our actions and aggression. I'm just saying that if you want to be an ally in the war against toxic masculinity, maybe stop using our trauma as lube. I'm not kink-shaming, you do you, but for many of us that have experienced extreme violence, there's nothing sexy about it. Lying concussed and humiliated in a pool of snot and blood as a bunch of meat-heads leave footprints in your skull may be someone's idea of foreplay, but it isn't mine. I have PTSD for fucks sake, who in their right mind thinks a stabbing flashback is an effective aphrodisiac. The most embarrassing part is I've always just gone along with it, mostly because I haven't wanted to make anyone feel awkward and kill the mood. In the 2000 film The Replacements, Keanu Reeves emotes: ‘Pain heals, chicks dig scars, glory lasts forever.’ Go look it up on YouTube—it’s so dumb, it’s funny. What’s less funny is how many politically progressive partners have echoed some version of that line back to me, apparently oblivious to what it actually feels like to earn those scars. Or to patch yourself up in silence afterwards, because that’s the script we’re handed— no dialogue, fade to black.

Here’s the truth—and I feel like a mug saying it out loud—I’m only writing this because I’ve been triggered by my Facebook feed (archaic, I know). I’m triggered by keyboard Spartans spouting macho bluster they’ve never had to back with a bruise. I’m triggered by otherwise progressive women using their online clout to romanticise violence or flatten men into hashtags. And for the record, this isn’t me shifting blame—any incels thinking I’m about to let men off the hook can go snorkel a sewer in a mouth clamp. The point is, everywhere you look, men are being nudged toward violence—even from the angles that claim to oppose it. It’s all fuel for the same tired lie: that violence is the entry fee for masculinity.

There’s no shortage of people willing to casually brand men as mindless, impulse-driven garbage. And sure, plenty have the personal receipts to justify the anger. But repeating it on loop doesn’t spark positive change—it just swells the ranks (and the bank accounts) of Andrew Tate and his ilk. There seems to be an ever-growing cohort of ludicrous manosphere grifters, who will happily weaponize the resentment of young men who are desperate for guidance. Desperate for someone to tell them they have worth and the potential to be positive force in the world. Entrenching their belief that they’ll only ever be worst of their impulses helps no-one.

Ask a psychologist; recycling the trope that all men are violent is antithetical to a less violent society. Psychologists like Claude Steele and Howard Becker argue that labelling a group as inherently ‘bad’ only serves to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing the very stereotypes it aims to condemn. Research on stereotype threat shows that being repeatedly tagged with a negative identity, chips away at confidence, performance, and future prospects. Slap a label on someone and sooner or later, they start to own it. When we confuse behaviour with identity, we’re in dangerous territory. Too many men already treat violence as the bedrock of who they are rather than a behaviour they can change—and weaponised language only hardens that delusion

Type the millennial mantra ‘men are trash’ into your platform of choice and you’ll drown in thousands of performative monologues arguing the case. Is it often a fair critique? Of course. But it’s important that men, especially young men, understand that this is a criticism of specific behaviour and not some grim decree of an inevitable outcome.  Some men swim so confidently in their privilege that they're oblivious to their crimes. Others spend a lifetime being bombarded with the message that they're useless, disposable, and good for nothing but violence. Then the world feigns shock when they violently take their own lives. Some men backflip off skyscrapers for shits and giggles, and others are so burdened with grief, heartbreak, or insecurity that they can't get out of bed. Some men define themselves through violent acts, whilst others would sob if they accidentally stepped on a spider. Some men are entirely self-serving, and some do gruelling manual labour every hour they are able just so a family they barely get to see can eat. Some men aren’t men yet, and some never will be, and when we use the term men, we are talking about all these people collectively, and surely, they can't all be trash. Is anybody trash?

I'm an autistic man; maybe I take things too literally.

And just to be clear, this isn’t me doing that cringey ‘not all men’ dance. Women have no way of knowing which of us are dangerous, so they’re forced to assume we all are. That’s grim for everyone, but what choice do they have when the threat is real? They aren’t making it up. I know full well the threat men pose—women would be putting themselves at risk not to assume danger. My own history means I regularly do the same. But casual name calling, while cathartic, doesn’t shift anything. If the goal is less violence, we need solutions that are practical, realistic, and—above all—empathetic. Acerbic slogans won’t save lives; reaching the lads who might otherwise grow into the thing we all fear might. Words matter. They shape beliefs.

This isn’t about cutting men slack—‘bro code’ is usually just five-pints-in spin for excusing each other’s worst behaviour and dressing it up as loyalty. Yes, tradition, trauma, and conditioning matter if we want to understand how violence takes root—but none of that excuses the inexcusable. Personal responsibility means keeping our own toxic impulses in check; collective responsibility means calling them out in our mates. Silence isn’t neutral—it’s complicity. Every time we let it slide, we hand out permission slips. Change doesn’t come from sidestepping discomfort; it comes from stepping in and stepping up.

So whilst male violence certainly isn’t born out of women calling us worthless or trash; it doesn't help. Stereotypes are lazy and obstructive; you can't insult someone into being a better person.  Equally —some (many) blokes are absolute whoppers, so I totally understand why Tweeting men are trash might make you feel better, and it's probably accurate in your experience. But throw that line around too much and the lads who actually need a compass might take it as a verdict instead. ‘Not all men’ is cringe, sure, but being specific about who’s trash and who isn’t matters—because somewhere out there, a boy is listening for clues about who he’s allowed to become.