Tim Winton, you’re wrong. Men don’t need to be fixed
THE celebrated author has maligned ‘toxic masculinity’ in a recent speech, but hasn’t come up with any meaningful solutions. How about not peddling the same old rhetoric about men, writes Louise Roberts.
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WHEN one of our best-selling novelists spoke recently of the emotional and cultural crisis crippling Aussie men, I imagined thousands of his fans across the country sitting up to take notice.
Winton has, in appearances and talks while promoting his book, implored men to help our boys rid themselves of the patriarchy and misogyny to which they are hopelessly “shackled”.
Boys need help, he says. They’re under attack and we cannot stand idly by.
Mr Winton, tell me something I don’t know.
The author has lamented the lack of constructive rituals to signpost the road to manhood, an Achilles heel for many parents including myself.
“We’ve scraped our culture bare” of them and we are “not sure what we’ve replaced them with,” he says.
“ ... The poverty of mainstream modern Australian rituals is astounding.”
True. But I would go one further and argue that our obsession with feminising boys has relegated traditional “bloke” activities to the bin, to the extent we now have school-based father and son activities to bridge the gap.
The best man, our culture says relentlessly, is the one most like a woman. I’m probably not supposed to air that in polite company.
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to hearing my son’s verdict on Winton’s latest read, as he is an important voice.
But while well intentioned, Winton has also missed an opportunity to be proactive rather than reactive and help end a tiresome, unhelpful debate around “toxic masculinity” — a loaded phrase whose users too often seem to think it redundant. After all, the implication goes, is there any other kind of masculinity?
Toxic doesn’t just imply something unhealthy — it suggests something insidiously dangerous, deadly even. Somehow I can’t reconcile this image when I say goodnight to my teenage son and watch him sleep, his adolescent muscles twitching with touching vulnerability as he slumbers.
Toxic, no. Misunderstood, yes. I wonder if being a young male in this age feels more like standing in quicksand.
Worse still, Winton has done a deep dive into the progressive playbook by suggesting boys need to, yes, check their privilege.
“Boys need help,” he wrote. “And, yes, men need fixing — I’m mindful of that. Males arrive in our community on the coat-tails of an almost endless chain of unexamined privilege. I don’t deny that for a second.”
I’m not a bloke but I take some issue with this wild generalisation. It feels a bit like he is selling the brotherhood out a bit and it’s uncomfortable. Where is the solidarity, the mateship for which Aussie men are held up for all over the world?
And then later: “Yes, boys need their unexamined privilege curtailed. Just as they need certain prescribed privileges and behaviours made available to them.”
Odd coming from the author of The Shepherd’s Hut, whose main character is singularly male and as unprivileged as you can imagine.
Telling young men to check their privilege — have you tried asking a teen boy to explain how that works? — doesn’t trigger self-awareness. It reinforces that our boys have something to apologise for before they even open their mouths.
And it comes from a primitive instinct to find a scapegoat, and insist that even today men bear responsibility for the sins of their fathers.
But why do men always need fixing? There are plenty of authentic, lovely ones out there.
Winton paints a vivid picture of sitting astride his surfboard and waiting for a wave in the company of other males, of all ages and life experience. He winces when he witnesses some of the clangers that fall out of their mouths as they posture and “rehearse” their masculinity.
I’ve heard teen boys deliver some fairly ripe comments too, including my own 14-year-old who once memorably asked me why all feminists hate men. But the fact these men-in-training are practising and feeling their way along a terrain towards being a decent person is something to be encouraged not appalled by.
What’s wrong with kids “rehearsing and projecting. Trying it on. Rehearsing their masculinity. Projecting their experimental versions of it” as Winton says, especially in a safe environment among mates?
I challenge any woman to say she never did that in her own youth. You cannot have self-awareness without self-experimentation.
Didn’t we all practise being the people we wanted to be as we tried to ‘find’ ourselves?
The issue for our boys is that women have had more to gain in the quest for equality.
That social change has happened with such concentrated force that many men have not had the chance to catch their breath, a point Winton acknowledges.
There is so much narrative about toxic masculinity out there. We go around and around with no end. Where is the solution?
Winton argues that men who need to step up and finally take their full share of that responsibility. He says men are often “massively derelict” about it.
But mothers of boys are the key to change.
They’re the ones who have a deep understanding of the struggles their sons face in this brave new world and they are also the new generation of so-called liberated women.
We are old enough to remember what it was like without the force-fed equality, young to enough to cherish the opportunities and choices it has given us but enlightened enough to see the world through the eyes of our boys.
Mr Winton, you’re a grandfather and I’m a mother of a teenage son.
As a woman who relishes the freedom women before me have won on my behalf, but who acknowledges there is a biological difference between the sexes — emotionally and physiologically — I want to know. What is your solution?
From where I sit, I see just some more rhetoric that doesn’t really help my son hope for a peaceful and equitable world for men and women.