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When I told my son the facts of life I had to explain that pornography is shaped by misogyny and far from realistic

Teens can access pornography on their phones Expand

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Teens can access pornography on their phones

Teens can access pornography on their phones

Teens can access pornography on their phones

Bill Linnane

Men have had a pretty rough run of it of late. I mean, yes, it is all our own doing and yes, it’s really just time being called on the more monstrous aspects of our behaviour, but still, #notallmen, I guess? Except, in my experience, it kind of is all of us, and by ‘us’ I mean guys like me.

Of course, manhood is a broad spectrum. I’m not an especially manly man; I’m not the guy you call when you need help chainsawing a tree that fell in your garden, nor am I the guy who helps you rebuild your XR3i on the weekends, nor am I the guy you go to all the matches with. As blokes go, I’m not that blokey, but even I can see that masculinity needs something of a reformation.

So many men waded into various discussions around #MeToo with a well-intentioned but tone deaf opener of ‘as a father of daughters’, as though you had to father a child of the gender to have any empathy with any woman, ever. I have a daughter, but more importantly, I have three sons, and it’s for them that I have to be objective about the weird constructs of identity that we have around being a man.

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