OFFENSIVE 3. Shame

Apocalypse Now & Then

Day 3

Tuesday May 20

Munster to Baccarat 85km

“To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity.”

bel hooks - The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

From our hotel window we can see storks nesting in the top of trees. They no longer fly south; climate change has grounded them.

Chris - who has claimed for the last twenty years or so that I’ve known him to have absolutely no trauma - wakes Tom in the night screaming. My own dreams have already become populated by death and loss, but tonight I sleep through the commotion, although the dry, salty, baked gnocchi I had for supper was enough to make me scream, the vegetarian options in Alsace definitely heading downhill, unlike the terrain, with what promises to be the hardest day of our journey, up and over the Vosges.

We are not far from Kaysersberg Vignoble, where TV chef Anthony Bourdain committed suicide, and because we’re bad people we can’t resist making dark jokes that it was because of the quality of the food. Bourdain appeared to have it all, but I find it easy to imagine how the pressure of always being on for the camera, day in, day out, became too much with the number of demons he clearly felt he had to conceal from the world.

Now I wasn’t there when Bourdain killed himself, I didn’t know him, never met him, but from what we understand he acted when in a state of despair and humiliation. I worked in domestic violence for years, and if I learned anything, it’s that men do not do well with despair and humiliation. And you’d be absolutely correct to say – but who does?

But when you add in multi-generational patriarchal values:

Power and control must be maintained at all costs.

Violence is legitimate.

Being right is everything.

Vulnerability is weakness.

Women and children are possessions.

And if you fail to uphold this order… you will be humiliated.

People are going to start dying.

Eighty-five to ninety percent of murders are committed by men - a significant proportion of those are triggered by feelings of humiliation, shame, or perceived disrespect.

Eighty five percent of suicides are by men (a bigger killer than cancer or heart disease).

War is conducted and orchestrated – by men.

Because war is patriarchy, it’s patriarchy gone mad on steroids, where dominance, destruction and extreme violence are not only legitimate, but celebrated, where mass murder is the game.

If I believed this is what men are, I’d quit my practice now and go live in a cave. But I don’t. I believe this is what men are told they should be.

If you want men, and therefore the world, to change, there’s not much point in saying - listen, I know you hold most of the power, get paid more, and essentially control and dominate the planet, would you mind giving all that up? ‘Cos the ladies think it’s unfair…

You’re not going to get very far.

Point out that it’s killing us, causing the bulk of our mental health issues, destroying our relationships, separating us from our children, putting a disproportionate number of us in prison and making us slaves to patriarchal culture… maybe we’re in with a shot.

In our groups we do our best to celebrate the softer sides of our nature, our tenderness and fragility, but even as I write these words something ancient and cruel within me makes me squirm with discomfort, as the word ‘gay’ comes screaming into my consciousness, and I think of how men not in uniform were handed white feathers by women on the street.

Men are notoriously insecure and easily manipulated by these tropes. Fighting is seen as a way of proving you’re a man, and what better way to feel legitimate than to kill for king and country. Beyond the mud and the deprivation, hundreds of old soldiers tell of how the Great War was the best time of their lives because they had purpose and felt like they were doing something for the greater good.

My father used to tell of his grandfather, a bare-knuckle boxer who would fight for prize money in country fairs. But later in life, when I asked my aunt, my dad’s sister, about this man she told a different story. Not only was he not a boxer, he was a conscientious objector who, rather than kill, chose to serve in the trenches as a stretcher bearer, going unarmed into no man’s land to gather the wounded.

My father is so trapped in his masculinist values that he had to reinvent his grandfather as a brute. But my great grandfather didn’t fight men.

He carried them.

That’s the kind of man I respect, that I would like to be, that I encourage other men to be.

And I’m doing my best. I really am. But it doesn’t stop those values living inside me, so much so that when I post a photo of our bikes, and a friend of mine, an old friend who I know is as anti-patriarchy as I am, comments:

Battery powered bikes?

Accompanied by not just one, but two shock faced emojis.

I go into free-fall.

Because real men don’t ride e bikes.

They ride high-performance carbon fibre racing bikes uphill without so much as breaking a sweat, and never, ever, ever use step-through frames – all my bike needs is a wicker shopping basket and I’m Mary fucking Poppins.

Riding up the steepest slope of the entire fourteen days, I can’t get it out of my mind, especially as I surge ahead of the guys on manual bikes, my thighs nevertheless burning with the exertion but still I feel a fraud, and then, halfway up, our support vehicle comes driving back down with the news that a landslide has blocked the road.

We convene by an abandoned truck, the real bikers panting like mad, and I console myself by making some real coffee, dark, organic, Peruvian coffee that sorts the men from the boys.

Bikes loaded onto the van, we walk through forests full of shell holes and ancient trenches – eighteen thousand men died on these same idyllic slopes that we climb, but all the way my own war wages in my head, fucking e bikes, come on, think of a snappy comeback… well at least I’m doing it mother fucker, what are you doing? Huh? Huh? When did you last get on a bike?

We pause at the top of the hill and read a letter from Edward Thomas to his six-year-old daughter, Myfanwy.

From One of These Fine Days by Myfanwy Thomas (1910-2005)

The first of the only two letters I ever had from my father must have reached me on the last day of 1916. It was posted on 30 December.

R. A. MESS

TINTOWN LYDD

29.xii.16

My dear Myfanwy,

I am so glad you haven’t got that nasty tooth any longer, and I hope you don’t dislike the dentist who took it away. But you did enjoy your Christmas, didn't you? I know I did. I mean I enjoyed your Christmas and mine too. When I got here I found two more presents, a pocket writing case from Uncle Oscar and a piece of cake from Eleanor.

Did Mother tell you I wrote a poem about the dark that evening when you did not want to go into the sitting room because it was dark? Eleanor perhaps will type it and then I will send you a copy.

I am going to be very much alone for a few days, because the man who sleeps in my room is going home to Scotland. I think I shall like being alone.

On Monday and Wednesday we are going to shoot with real guns. I don't quite now what I shall have to do. (You see I have spelt ‘know’ without a k.) But as one of us is away the rest will be uncommonly busy from now onwards. I should not be surprised if we were in France at the end of this month. I do hope peace won’t come just yet. I should not know what to do, especially if it came before I had really been a soldier. I wonder if you want peace, and if you can remember when there was no war.

It really is very solitary by this smoky fire with the wind rattling the door, shaking it and making the lock sound as if it were somebody trying to come in but finding the door locked and knowing there was somebody inside who could open it.

I think if I had a chair or a table I should write verses just for something to do before bedtime. Perhaps I will try.

Give Mother and Merfyn and Bronwen each a love for me and tell Mother her letter came this afternoon after I posted my second one to her.

Goodbye.

Daddy

I’ve lit some incense to enhance the vibe with some feminine, spiritual energy as we read, but ‘Competent’ Steve (we’ve dubbed him that to distinguish him from our other Steve), our super fit, masculine support van driver who’s met us at the top having driven around the mountain, probably with one hand on the wheel and an elbow sticking out the window suggests, disapprovingly, that I put it out as it’s a fire hazard.

I stub the incense out like a schoolboy caught smoking behind the bike sheds. Competent Steve doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to.

A real man would have known better.