Pathetic, bulky men with pathetic, bulky attitudes
Will the recent stories about Gregg Wallace and Conor McGregor force a sea change in a certain type of masculinity? Probably not, but we can hope.
It's been a bad few days for big, bulky men with big, bulky attitudes, on both sides of the Irish Sea. At a court in Dublin last week, a private prosecution brought against the now presumably former MMA fighter and boxer Conor McGregor resulted in a guilty verdict on a charge of rape.
He won't see prison time as a result of this (as we can probably all agree he should), but the court's decision is an obvious, permanent stain which is already having knock-on effects, with a rush towards the exit as those who'd previously overlooked, well, just about everything about him finally feel the scales falling from their eyes. From fans who idolised him to the sponsors who paid him lavishly and the media companies who built him up as being some sort of hero for being very good at smacking the shit out of people, the McGregor bus has reached the end of the line. Well done, all concerned.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the sea in London, Greggg Wallace, who is essentially a bespectacled egg balancing on top of a tattooed elephant's leg of doner meat, has been removed fron the BBC's Masterchef following a slew of rumours about him being the sort of man who shouldn't be walking the streets alone late at night without pepper spray-armed supervision.
McGregor has at least had the sense to shut the hell up. For now. This is more than can be said for Wallace, whose decision to double down by blaming, umm, the very demographic who make up a substantial part of his normal audience while claiming that he "might" have a condition which renders him unable to do anything but walk into a workspace wearing nothing but a sock on his peen has left him digging so deep that he's expected to hit the earth's mantle with his next public statement.
It should go without saying that claiming some form of undiagnosed autism is an absolute cunt's trick of the highest order (pardon my profanity, but sometimes the phrase just fits too perfectly). To be clear, even an actual diagnosis of autism would not be a defence against such behaviour, and to suggest otherwise is insulting to all autistic people.
If anything, Wallace's attempt to defend himself in such a way means that we can add autistic people to the pile that he's wilfully insulted as he flails around trying to put together some sort of defence for the indefensible. The implication from his career suicide statements over the weekend is that he just can't control himself.
Well okay, Gregggg. In that case, the only way we can protect women on the sets of television shows from you is to ensure that you never, ever, ever work in television again. Indeed, there's a case for saying that if he just can't control himself in front of women, then perhaps we should just lock him up, throw away the key, and have done with it.
Conor McGregor, meanwhile, is a rapist. And there'll be few who are surprised by the fact that someone who looks like the smell of a changing room twenty minutes after the end of a rugby union match should behave in such a way. We can hazard guesses at the entitlement that must have grown throughout years and years of never having been stood up to or told a few home truths.
He's been cheered on through the gurning and the growling by a supporting cast of thousands for years. It is to be hoped that they look inside themselves over this but no, as it goes, I'm not especially optimistic that many people will, because it's fair easier to dismiss all the men who end up being caught over this sort of thing as 'bad apples' than it is to actually give consideration that there might be something fundamentally broken within the rancid, curdled mess that masculinity seems to have become in the 21st century.
This toxicity may even have spread into the profession that I loosely inhabit. A very senior football journalist, Suzy Wrack of the Guardian, referenced allegations at the end last week which has been met, at least on social media, by a wall of silence within the industry. For the record, I have no idea who it is. Also for the record, if I did and had spoken to those on the receiving end of him, don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t be telling you lot, and damn the consequences. This poison gets everywhere.
And I have to declare an interest here. I'm a father to two boys, aged nine and seven, and the point is arriving at which their media consumption will be independent from me and they will start to find their own role models beyond their silly old dad. And when I survey the landscape of what male role models might look like, it's pretty terrifying. Everyone has to be a 'bro' these days. We are ultimately talking about a culture in which Andrew Tate can flourish.
This form of masculinity looks gross, smells gross and tastes gross. It's a sweating, leering, muscle-bound hyperreality which pushes the worst instincts of men into the foreground and then celebrates them. It has no place for love or compassion, which it views as forms of weakness. Its ugliness poisons every well into which it comes in contact. It's extremely bad for men, but it's not as bad for us as it is for women.
At least Greggggg Wallace is unlikely to have ever been considered a role model by many people. A walking id with substantially less restraint—and, we may therefore extrapolate, fewer social skills—than a bear in the woods, his caterwauling about ‘the wokes’ is essentially the death rattle of his career. Perhaps he'll end up in the far right media sphere, allowing his feeling of entitled grievance to metastasise into a full-blown mental illness. Perhaps Elon Musk will chuck him a million quid to be a freelance sex pest, or something.
All I can say for certain is that the rest of us are just sick of it. It's in every profession and every public sphere. It's exhausting, this constant pipeline of allegations, all the more so because we know in our heart of hearts that they're almost always true. At least this time there doesn't seem to be many people defending them, and those who continue to do so will be easy to dismiss. I'll carry on teaching my boys love, compassion and empathy, even though it can feel like I'm pissing in the wind, at times.
Accompanying image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay