Smith Journal — January 2018

ROBERT WEBB

THE COMEDIAN AND PEEP SHOW

STAR DOESN’T WANT TO ‘MAN UP’,

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

I’ve always had a preoccupation with gender
and masculinity, partly because I found all
those rules about how you’re supposed to be a
boy a bit of a tight fit. You’re supposed to love
football and climbing trees and science. You’re
supposed to be cheeky and boisterous. But I
was almost completely mute and couldn’t do
any of that stuff. I remember acutely the time
that, through no fault of my own, I had to
do sports day in girls’ socks. The trauma has
stayed with me to adulthood.

There’s a lot of behavioural repression that
goes into making a boy a man, but much more
concerning is the emotional repression we
foist on boys. When you’re told to “ be a man”
and “man up”, what you’re actually hearing
is, “Stop feeling these feelings.” But those
feelings still have to come out somehow, so you
end up with a bunch of men for whom every
emotion is expressed as anger. We get angry
when what we’re actually feeling is fear, or
embarrassment, or shame, or anxiety, or grief.
When my mother died, when I was 17,
I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people
saying, “If you need to talk then just talk.”
Which was great, but I was thinking: talk?
Since when do I talk? I’ve been specifically
trained not to talk about my feelings and

now I’m just furious. All that stuff about

manning up doesn’t work, because it leaves

you unprepared for those difficult times.

I always say that if you want a man of a

certain age to go a bit quiet and stare into

the middle distance for five seconds, ask him

about his relationship with his father. My

relationship with Dad was complicated, to put

it euphemistically. My mother divorced him

when I was five, and Dad was on quite a short

fuse. He drank a fair bit. He was often absent.

He punished his kids physically. Not that this

was strange – corporal punishment was very

much alive in England in the 1970s – but Dad

took to it with a particular enthusiasm.

There are lots of different ways of being a good

dad, but all too often we just follow the model

we know. A few years ago I became a father

myself, and while I’d rather chew my own arms

off than hit my kids, some of my dad’s other

behaviour started to reassert itself in ways I

wasn’t expecting. I started drinking more.

I went into a breadwinning panic: I took every

job going even when I didn’t need to. But I

was a man. I needed to earn the money. Which

is very convenient actually, because, much

as I adore my own small children, they can

be relentlessly difficult and thankless work.

It’s boring looking after babies. So, it’s very

convenient that men have this ‘duty’ where

they have to get out of the house.

We have two girls, and they make me so aware

of how much we still need to fight these gender

roles. It’s not like we banned the colour pink,

or didn’t let them play with dolls or dress up as

princesses. Of course we did. But, they also love

playing with Lego, and karate club and running

around and wearing trousers. I like to think that

if we had boys, if one or both of them turned out

to be a gentle lad, or effeminate, or thoughtful,

or enjoyed dressing up as a girl, that we would let

them get on with it and be themselves.

As far as parenting is concerned, I think it’s

about teaching your children to ask, “Hang

on, am I being told to do this because of

what’s in the front of my pants rather than

because of who I am?” Teaching them to

recognise that and to name it when they see

it is a straightforward duty of care. That’s

not meddling with nature. That’s just looking

after your kids. •

Robert Webb’s latest book, How Not to Be a Boy,

is out now through Allen & Unwin.

opinion

039 SMITH JOURNAL

As told to Luke Ryan