‘Why don’t you just come out and say it?’
‘Say what?’
‘Say that you don’t like Jess.’
‘I don’t like Jess.’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine.’
‘She doesn’t like you much either.’
‘I’ve never liked her. And I wish I’d said that eight years ago.’
‘Fuck you, Sam.’
‘Fuck you, too.’
‘Just go and fuck yourself.’
‘You fucking go and fuck yourself.’
Alan sprang to his feet and moved towards me, his fists raised. I was a head taller, but he was a great deal angrier. The others got up, too. For a moment I thought we were going to have a full-on fight. But who was fighting whom? I was the one who deserved to get hit by all the others.
Alan, though, had already decided which side he was on. ‘Actually, fuck all of you,’ he said, dropping his fists and heading towards the door. ‘I came round because I thought you might listen, because I thought you might care about the situation I’ve got myself into at work, because you’re my oldest mates. I came round to say that I was moving into Jess’s, but also to say that I’ve spoken to my uncle and he’s happy for you, Sam, and you, Matt, to stay here. I thought that might make you happy. I thought you might even be happy for me and Jess… ’ He shrugged and tailed off. ‘And instead it ends up like this. Well, I tell you, I don’t want this any more. I’ve got Jess. I don’t need you guys. You know what I think? I think you’re just jealous. That’s what your sad little bet is really about.’ He pointed at me and Matt. ‘A couple of losers who can’t even keep a girl beyond a couple of months. A couple of losers trying to get what I already have. Well, good luck with it. And good luck with finding somewhere else to live, guys. You’ve got a month to move out.’
And with that Alan turned his back on his friends and returned south of the river to his new flatmate, or his fiancée, or whatever else he wanted to call the woman he loved and I had so clumsily criticised, the Thames a stinking metaphor for the chasm that now separated us.
*
During the recriminations that inevitably followed, the general consensus – with which I found it difficult to disagree – was that I had acted fairly appallingly.
‘Basically, you’re a complete tosser,’ summarised Ed. ‘Surely you realise that you missed the window of opportunity to criticise Jess years ago.’
‘I know,’ I said, apologetically. If only I had listened better to my own internal monologue when I was policing my earlier thoughts about Amanda.
‘You’re worse than Alan’s mum,’ continued Ed. ‘Sure, none of us is mad about Jess, but that doesn’t mean that we know better than Alan what’s good for him.’
I said nothing. I really did think I knew better than Alan what was good for him. Alan’s mum and I had always got on very well in that respect. I was her favourite pupil.
‘So where are we supposed to live now?’ I moaned.
‘We?’ questioned Matt.
‘Well, obviously not Ed – he’s already got a shoebox with negative equity he can call his own until Tara decides to sell it. But you and me, Matt. You’re not leaving London, are you? We’re in this together, right?’
I looked at Matt pleadingly while he stared at his shoes. ‘I don’t know, mate,’ he said, eventually. ‘I just don’t know. I mean, it hasn’t exactly been a resounding success so far, has it? You were on the verge of committing a cardinal sin with an evangelical Christian while simultaneously convincing another impressionable young woman – whom incidentally you owe £5,000, if you ever want to see again – that you are the CEO of a promising start-up. And me? Well, I’ve had a blind date with a Spanish fascist.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Alan’s right, you know. We are losers. This is a silly scheme. I’m up to my eyeballs in debt. I’ve got a degree in medicine, a further three years of pointless specialist training behind me, and I’m squatting here in my engaged mate’s uncle’s flat in the vain hope of trying to get married to someone rich. I should be moving around the country, trying to get locum work. Or moving to Australia. Moving anywhere, in fact, that isn’t here.’ He thumped the sofa and finally looked me in the eye. ‘I’m sorry, Sam. But you’re on your own now.’
But I didn’t want to be on my own. I’ve never wanted to be on my own. ‘Come on,’ I pleaded. ‘Just one more month. Just see me through that and then I’ll give up, I promise.’
‘Really?’
‘Promise. One more month to find myself the money for Rosie. And one more month to find you a rich wife as well. Then I’ll apologise to Alan and we can all go on with our lives as before.’
‘Who says I need your help, anyway?’ said Matt, trying and failing to conceal his wounded pride that the bet wasn’t going too well for him.
‘I have a particularly cunning plan which is foolproof, even for a fool like you. It’s the art of seduction meets the science of seduction. And it involves Claire.’
‘Claire?’
‘You’ll see.’ I turned to Ed. ‘Now, are you with us or are you against us?’
‘Neither,’ said Ed.
‘What do you mean? You’re not planning another drunken attack on the security guard at Tara’s office, are you?’
‘No. This is a much more sober and subtle plan.’ Ed rustled around in his man-bag. ‘Do you remember me telling you that I was going to become a masculinist – that I was going to stand up for men’s rights?’ He handed me a few sheaves of paper. ‘Well, I wasn’t joking. In fact, I turn your question back on you: are you with us or against us?’
‘Ed, what the hell is this?’
‘It’s a blog I’ve written. The Guardian has picked it up and it’s going to appear in the paper tomorrow.’
The Male Eunuch
by Ed O’Brien
I’m not saying we now live in an entirely feminised society any more than anyone has ever lived in an entirely masculinised society. Cleopatra seduced and used Antony. Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships. Queen Elizabeth I sank a few dozen.
We men in modern, feminised Britain are not tyrannised by women, as men themselves have tyrannised women for much of history. There have been no castrations. No male rape. No prostitution and slavery.
But, at some point in the early twenty-first century, Western man started to lose the battle of the sexes.
It didn’t happen overnight. Most people haven’t even noticed it’s happened. There have been no running battles in the street: bra-burning women clashing with Y-front-burning men. Germaine Greer has not challenged the editors of men’s magazines to unarmed combat in Trafalgar Square. The Gherkin in London has not been torn down and replaced by a giant, symbolic vagina. Calendar months have not been re-synchronised to a twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle. History has not been renamed her-story. The revolution is quiet, subtle, deadly. It’s a femme fatale of a revolution.
The few men who have noticed don’t even appear to care that much. We still have our jobs – for now, at least. We can still vote. We’re not throwing ourselves under horses at the Derby.
But look a modern man in the eyes, really look him in the eyes, and ask him what is he for? Is he a hunter? A gatherer? A warrior? A hero? ‘There is an electric fire in human nature,’ wrote John Keats, ‘so that there is continually some birth of new heroism.’ But where is our fire today? Sanitised, domesticated, tamed and curled up in front of a modern electric fire watching costume dramas with our girlfriends. All men want to be heroes – it is one of the many aspects of boyhood we never relinquish – but modern life offers precious few opportunities for heroism. It is difficult to be a hero in Tesco.
So what are we left with? What are we meant to do now that all our other traditional roles are on the verge of being eroded? Women dominate, or soon will, the workplace – rightly so, in my opinion, for they are better team players, better communicators and better manipulators than men. They’re better at the dating game than us. They certainly hold all
the cards when it comes to granting and denying sex. Ogden Nash put it well: ‘I have an idea that the phrase “weaker sex” was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.’
Historically and biologically, men have just two distinct advantages over women. One is that, with the exception of a few hockey goalkeepers, men are bigger and stronger. But what use is this to the modern, civilised man? I am not going to convince a girl to come to bed with me by beating her in an arm wrestle. An employer would not be more inclined to give me a pay rise just because she’d defer to me in a fist fight. I cannot – and would not – sit on a female traffic warden in the hope that she would withdraw my parking ticket. We men are lumbering, impotent beasts of burden in this brave new world of emotions and mascara.
Our only remaining edge, then, is that it is the woman who gives birth. To date, at least, this requires a man – to inseminate, if not to provide afterwards. But every day we read about diminishing sperm counts, the rate no doubt accelerated by the expensive phones we carry around in our pockets so that our girlfriends can summon us back home to take out the rubbish. And even if we are fully functioning, we still have to find a partner. The latest statistics suggest that there are one million fewer single women than men in Britain.
Then there is the unspoken Armageddon scenario: what if women suddenly decide en masse that they no longer want to be inseminated by men they know? What if they want designer babies to go along with their designer clothes? What if your girlfriend pops into a sperm bank, orders a blue-eyed, Oxford-educated six-footer with an IQ of 150 and a decent tennis backhand and, nine months later, asks you to be his godfather?
Then, my brothers, we are truly fucked.
I have seen the future: the future is pink. So now is the time to daub the present in great swathes of blue. Now is the time for men to be men again. Now is the time for us to reassert our masculinity before it vanishes for ever. Then women can have their cake and eat it. We can eat ours. And we shall all grow old and fat and jolly together.
‘What do you think?’ asked Ed when I’d finally got to the end, barely able to read any more through tears of mirth.
‘What do I think?’ I handed it back to him at arm’s length. ‘I think you should ring the editor of the Guardian immediately and beg, bribe or blackmail him not to publish this drivel.’
Chapter Thirteen
Psychologists like to talk about the grief cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, which can apply as much to the end of a relationship as to death itself. I went through most of these stages in the first few weeks after Tara wrecked my life – all of them, in fact, apart from acceptance.
Most of all I felt depressed – depressed and drunk. For the first two days I didn’t get dressed, or didn’t get undressed – whichever way you wanted to look at it – and simply sat on the sofa in the pyjamas Tara had given me the previous Christmas, swigging from a bottle of cheap vodka and alternating between re-watching old box sets we’d bought together and listening to wrist-slitting music on the iPod she’d left behind. ‘Dry Your Eyes’ by The Streets. That was the soundtrack to the early days. It didn’t work.
Sometimes I would convince myself that Tara would walk in the door at any moment. In my more lucid moments, I would kick the wall repeatedly in a torrent of impotent anger until I fell on the floor, exhausted and weeping among the empty bottles.
Whoever said that alcohol numbs the pain has never tried drinking to get over a failed relationship. It does not numb anything; it fuels everything: the pain, the anger, the loneliness, the vivid images of Tara – how she used to be, and worst of all, how she was now, spending time with her old lawyer, laughing with her old lawyer, sleeping with her old lawyer…
The anger became uncontrollable. So did the drinking. And with the alcohol came the bargaining. Sam may have thought he’d achieved something by flushing my mobile phone battery down the toilet, but all it did was make me think he was more of a prick than usual. What did Sam understand about this kind of thing, anyway? Tara’s number was seared across my heart; her email address lodged irreversibly in my head; her Facebook page re-checked on an hourly basis for incriminating updates. These days, there are many ways to get hold of someone who’s destroyed your life. Too many ways.
Traditionally, it is women who make the most convincing mad-ex stereotypes. To judge by the newspapers, they are very good at pouring paint over sports cars, cutting up expensive suits and forming internet groups to discuss how tiny your penis is. Sam, who barely has any possessions to ruin, and whose demeanour suggests he is perfectly well endowed, had one ex who took her revenge by turning up to all his plays and heckling his character whenever he spoke. What she didn’t seem to realise was that the last laugh lay with Sam in making her sit through his plays.
My point is that jilted men don’t really do revenge – not calculated, cunning revenge – the way women do. Traditionally, a tiny minority of men are better at the psycho, criminal end of the revenge spectrum. The rest of us just get over it and get on with it.
But I didn’t want to get over it, so I created a mad-ex male prototype all of my own. When I called Tara repeatedly from my landline, she was initially quite understanding. She was in the wrong, even though it felt right; she had done a bad thing, even though it felt good. So she felt duty bound to listen sympathetically while I ranted insanely at her. But then, inevitably, she grew tired of my demands that she justify herself and stopped taking my calls. So I started withholding my number. When that no longer worked, I would call her office switchboard and ask to be put through to her even when she was in meetings – especially when she was in meetings. On one glorious occasion I pretended to be a client I’d once heard her mention and succeeding in joining a conference call. I got as far as ascertaining that her new guy was also in the room before announcing, on speakerphone, that I had enjoyed our threesome with a male escort in Soho the previous weekend.
No blow was too low or too pathetic when it came to poor Tara. Until she deleted me from her friends list on Facebook, I wrote regular messages on her wall. Then I wrote messages on her friends’ walls. Finally, I updated my status – the one thing they couldn’t touch – so that the few remaining mutual friends who hadn’t severed all contact could see ‘what was on Ed’s mind’ regarding Tara. Ed, it is fair to say, wasn’t thinking very nice things about Tara.
I begged, bullied and berated her to come back to me. I rang her parents and asked them to help make her come back to me. I fabricated a letter from our mortgage company saying that she wasn’t allowed to leave as we had taken out a specific couple-only mortgage. Tara wrote back, tersely and firmly, saying that this had to stop. There was a vague hint that if it didn’t, she might have recourse to some of her legal knowledge. The letter came on headed notepaper which included her ‘partner’s’ name at the top.
Well, I knew a threat when I saw one. I knew that none of this was helping. I knew that I was acting like a dick. But I just couldn’t help myself. Tara is – was – my life. Without her, there was nothing, just an awful absence, an absence of Tara. At least if I spent my time riling her, we still had some sort of contact.
This is what formed the basis of my thinking – if you can call it that – the day I got in a fight outside her office and was taken home by Sam. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was actually going to see Tara because I wanted to share the strange history of my article that was appearing in that weekend’s Guardian. I’d first written down a few rushed, loosely connected thoughts in a blog for the bit of the newspaper’s website that anyone can write for and no one reads. A university friend, who worked occasional shifts there, saw it, stopped it being posted and suggested I sex it up a bit for the paper instead. I spent an entire week proudly rewriting and editing it (it was my summer holidays; teachers have to fill the time somehow), and thought it only fair to give Tara some advance warning of its contents. The only problem was that I still hadn’t quite got my daytime drinking under
control and ended up trying to hurdle the security barriers.
Writing the article had actually brought something of a revelation in itself. I no longer felt angry with the older lawyer; I felt sorry for him. Both of us had been manipulated by Tara. And if she could do that to us… Well, what had started out as a directionless rant crystallised into something much stronger. The specific became generic. I was no longer writing about me, Ed O’Brien, and my pitiful life post-Tara, I was writing about all men, all of us in the same situation, whether we knew it yet or not: Alan forced to kowtow to the unholy trinity of Jess, Amanda and his mother; Matt losing out to girls for every job he went for; Sam driven to lies and subterfuge to find a mate.
Then the article appeared. What could have been a fairly forgettable blog had become a monster, trailed on the front page of the print edition with the strapline: ‘“Soon, my brothers, we will be truly fucked”: the future of gender politics by Ed O’Brien’.
It wasn’t the only line that came back to haunt me. A femme fatale of a revolution… It is difficult to be a hero in Tesco… We men are lumbering, impotent beasts of burden in this brave new world of emotions and mascara… Had I been drunk when I’d written this?
The readers certainly seemed to think so, judging by the comments they left online.
‘Is this writer high?’ wrote big_guy29. ‘How exactly could a building look like a “giant, symbolic vagina” in any case?’
‘I am an expat in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where I don’t think it is accurate to say that women hold all the cards when it comes to granting and denying sex,’ wrote Bob.
Others were downright offensive.
‘I’m a female traffic warden and I’d definitely have Ed in a fist fight.’
‘Well, I’d like to castrate Ed for one. Or at least cut off his fingers so he can’t write again. Look at his ugly ginger byline photo. No wonder he can’t get a woman.’
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