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I used to joke to friends that, ‘5000 years of recorded human history and I finally came along when straight white guys went out of fashion! They say we’re out of date,’ I’d follow up, ‘but I see us rather more as a design classic.’
Well, jokes like that certainly seem preferable to me than my making anguished performative denouncements of straight white guys as an entire class. Why would I hate straight white guys? It wouldn’t make me any less of one. Plus it’s not as if straight white guys (hereafter SWGS) are out of fashion everywhere; in the care sector, they’re still a novelty, and a male primary school teacher has an air of positive chic.
It just happens that I’ve spent a lot of my career in sectors – the arts and academia – where SWGs have become a sort of convenient whipping boy, an object of ritualized disapproval even when there are no straight white guys in the vicinity. Denouncing the dominance of straight white guys within performance poetry or the world of contemporary literature – right, because if there were ever field where straight white male dominance was at its apex.
It’s something I’ve touched on before, the fact that in specific areas such as arts funding the historical dominance of SWGs has led to a situation where in an attempt at course correction they have now become weirdly discriminated against. In addition, even articulating this perspective is seen as evidence of straight male privilege. To which I’d argue: When did you last see a call out submissions welcoming the contributions of straight white men? The normal response is, Well, white guys will dominate anyway, which clearly isn’t the case when such an explicit commitment is being put forward in favour of other groups. Indeed sometimes all other groups. As ever, making this point is not an argument against the effort to bring a greater diversity of individuals into cultural production.
In addition, those straight white guys who do continue to participate in cultural spaces are expected to advocate a wider diversity and inclusion agenda, offering a somewhat ritualized disapproval of their own identity, in the spirit of Freddie deBoer’s infamous ‘Good white man roster’. This means that the cultural space available to straight white guys has become increasingly limited and constrained. To get ahead now as a straight white guy, you have to combine a condemnation of your ‘privilege’ with an avowal of a certain kind of politics which may not be your own.
A frisson of ‘queerness’ also does no harm, I’ve no doubt that there are SWGs who’ve adopted a non-binary or sexual minority identity in order to attain advancement in left-liberal spaces; we might call this ‘sudden onset queerness’. In my generation of Old Millennial men, we just got on with the business of sucking the odd dick or two without it even qualifying us as bicurious. You took what you were given in those days.
These arguments are not a call for blokes to sail off to Incel Island. For sure, SWGs should have the right to describe the specifics of their experiences in society just like any other group does; there is no such thing as a single ‘Straight White Guy’ perspective any more than there is one for any other group, let alone a group which forms circa 40% of the British population. It is at the same time laughable to say even the specific disadvantages I speak of, found in highly specific milieu, make SWGs anything close to a discriminated-against group.
Aside from the enormous inherent advantages of being straight, able-bodied and male – think about them next time you walk home alone at night – there’s also never been more tools available for SWGs or indeed anybody else who feels culturally excluded to circumvent the specific problem of legacy media gatekeepers who are increasingly allergic to them. You can start your own YouTube channel, you can write your own newsletter, you can get your own podcast going. Audiences couldn’t give a rat’s arse about the identity of the person making something if it’s any good; they just want to be stimulated. If you’re funny, they’ll listen; if you write well, they’ll read. The barriers to audience creation have never been lower and the scope for creative innovation greater even for those of modest means.
Yes, it’s an irritation that we’re in an era where SWGs miss out on the prestige and the prizes, where ‘Fleabag’ is hailed as offering a radical insight into feminine chaos but a man making the same show would be considered as reinforcing harmful tropes. Yes, it sucks that our cultural commentary offers so little space for men to describe entirely normal male experiences without being deemed problematic. Yes, it rankles that the narrative liberal society wants of men now is of us being in crisis, tortured and toxic, stereotyped as being unable to communicate our most basic emotional needs and desires in a manner which would have seemed dated in 1950s suburban Wichita.
Yet no-one really likes the stuff that the liberal moral mainstream is venerating now. No-one really likes reading the five hundredth article on land acknowledgments or ethical non-monogamy. I always thought that one of the Achilles’ heel of what got dubbed ‘wokeness’ would be that it would deliver diminishing economic returns; the fate of Vice magazine when it moved from offering ‘hipster perversion’ to ‘moral scolding’ is salutary here. It’s just tiresome and predictable to experience culture subservient to a superstructure of moral precepts, and most people don’t have much free time to spend on work which is without surprise.
A key piece of feedback I get on this newsletter, from male and female readers alike, is how nice they find it to read a man writing openly about his feelings and concerns. I wouldn’t say my preoccupations as a guy are particularly unusual; I love female physical beauty; I think men need to control their horniness; I do feel protective and worshipful of the women I love. These are all completely undramatic male kinds of attitudes which my prose style dresses up a bit. It’s only in the content pages of The Guardian, where saying ‘Men are horny and corny’ has become frightening to a certain kind of over ideologically-leveraged liberal that such things have any element of taboo.
Oddly, doesn’t that weird cultural neurosis about us put SWGs in a pretty good position? As a concerted effort has been made to de-centre us from the cultural mainstream we can, perhaps for the first time ever, regain some kind of air of transgressive cool. It means that the straight white guy precepts – morality, loyalty and heroism – might even attain some kind of the shock of the new. Not masculinity in crisis, not ‘toxic male behaviour’, but simply men being good, reliable and true. All that unironic honour and ambition, which speaks to something really deep in men, becomes from being so rarely heard in the mainstream almost hip.
In a way, and I appreciate it’s cheeky to draw the comparison, SWGs in liberal culture today face a little of the problems that talented women and POC historically have had; aside from those ‘grandfathered in’, straight white male artists have grown somewhat marginal and fated to work a touch outside of the mainstream. Too dominant for too long, we are now deliberately underrated. How brilliant for us! Look at all the work great female artists did under those conditions, forced to serve their art and their visions all the more purely because if no-one else would take them seriously they had to themselves.
At the same time, in the cultural sphere, women are now displaying increasingly bold genius. Indeed I think one of the challenges that Western feminism currently faces is updating its language to indicate that there are sectors, such as pop music, where women now dominate in a historically unprecedented way. Poptimism is a female-led business. It is difficult to reconcile a narrative of sectorial dominance and economic power - Taylor Swift is the modern East India Company - alongside one where women are still hugely oppressed by dint of their biology in countless parts of the globe. However, to mention the most banal truth our current culture struggles with, more than one thing can be true at the same time, and said thing can have more weight in some circumstances and some milieus than in others.
In short, fellow dudes, no whining. Set the mics up in your basement, self-publish your novel, upload your drawings to Instagram. Personally, I wish I’d gone the independent creator route years ago, given how much validation this newsletter has already offered my writing. Fundamentally audiences, composed of the latest generations of confused human beings, still want the good stuff and the sense of ennoblement which comes from interacting with the most excellent work of their age. SWGs may not set the cultural pulse any more but there are currently very few barriers to putting our excellence out there.
And we can still get the money. It’s those who have nothing to offer but strident diversity we should feel sorry for, offering up their diet of cultural Mung beans and grievances, trapped to write endless memoirs of mental episodes and phobias they themselves would be best served to move on form. Even they’re bored and trapped of it. Meanwhile, the straight white male no longer gets to take up space just because of who is his and from a natural sense his voice counts more – which can only be to the benefit of his work.
We can build ourselves real audiences, people who’ve come to us not because we were given peremptory puff pieces in The Times Magazine but because our work was strong enough to win their attention. Nowadays the cultural authority of straight white guys will derive from the fact that, as creators of our own compelling cultural spaces, we’ve actually got something to say.