“Teach boys not to…”

Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times witnessed something he didn’t like on a Dublin Tram this week. Conscious that one-man crimewave Harvey Weinstein is still on the loose and stalking the Hollywood Hills (although maybe it’s the Alps these days), Fintan, like all good newspaper columnists, is watching carefully for any breaches of sexual etiquette to report on.

…Near where I sat, on the opposite side (of the tram), there were two young girls, maybe 14 or 15 years old. Just before the tram pulled out, a gang of seven lads got into the carriage. They were roughly the same ages as the girls, between 14 and 16…

As the tram pulled out, the lads spotted the two girls and moved in on them. They literally invaded their space. Two of them sat on the available seats beside them, the rest stood over them. It was all chat – how are ye? Where are ye going? But it was intimidating. The girls got up and stood right at the end of the carriage, next to the driver’s door. The lads followed them and stood around them in a pack. They started to urge the kid who looked like he was the youngest of their number to kiss one of the girls…

(At the next stop) the girls got off on to the platform… The lads made no effort to follow them. They sat down on the seats, sprawling, occupying territory. They spent the rest of the journey playing with their phones and occasionally thumping each other. To them, nothing had happened.

And the solution?

We have to teach boys manners. There is no golden age in the past when men did not harass and belittle and intimidate women. But there was, I think, a greater restraint on this behaviour: the restraint of good manners. Boys were taught rules of conduct, especially of conduct towards girls: don’t make hurtful remarks, don’t sit or stand too close for the other person’s comfort, don’t sprawl, don’t touch without permission. The idea of good manners has become deeply unfashionable – “mannered” is now one of the most damning terms of critical abuse. But manners are really just social software, the codes that make dignified interaction possible… progressives need to reclaim good manners as the necessary rules of decent conduct.

Good manners don’t stop sexual predators. But they might stop a lot of boys from turning into the kind of men who don’t understand or respect personal boundaries. We have to recognise that they don’t come naturally. Boys have to learn how to be good men – and men have to teach them.

You can read variations on this theme here, here and here. Can’t fathers just teach boys to be civil to women, and to be respectful of them in public? Wouldn’t that end this kind of minor harassment forever? And why do they think they can do this kind of thing anyway?

Fintan’s summary is that in times gone by men taught the boys manners, so they behaved. That feels wrong. Has there been a generation of Irish boys whose fathers were as directly involved in their lives as those kids’ are, as emotionally supportive, as involved in the day to day duties of parenthood? If we’re talking about leading by example, the current generations of Irish fathers are probably more powerfully aware of sexual harassment of women in public than any before them. If you’re Irish, consider: how much did your Dad think or read about the public harassment of women, in comparison to a modern man? A lot? Or not at all? If this stuff didn’t happen in the past, the involvement of fathers in parenting and moral guidance is not the issue. Something else has changed.

Say what you want about the Ireland of 50 years ago – it had a crystal clear message about which public displays of sexuality were acceptable and which weren’t. (Short version: nothing was. Take your hands out of your pockets.) Now consider the opaque logic-trap the averagely horny teenage boy is caught in today:

• You want to be sexually involved with girls;
• It’s normal to want that and to try to make it happen, and it’s encouraged as a healthy expression of your growth as an adult;
• In order to do that you need to approach girls your age to discern their interest;
• It is oppressive, invasive and threatening to approach a girl who is not interested;
• Barring her making a formal announcement (which will essentially never happen) there is no way of knowing for certain whether a girl is interested.

More forcefully saying to these kids “don’t do that” may or may not work in a given situation, but it will not work consistently, because it implicitly contradicts many of the other ideas we broadcast about what normal, desirable human behaviour is. It also won’t work because restrictive social conventions only function when they’re anchored to something deeper and heavier than “I shouldn’t, because it’s not nice to.”

In the past, the reason gangs of boys didn’t come on to girls in public was not mere politeness but that public expressions of sexual desire were considered coarse, shameful and immoral. This was not a single discrete belief but one of many, beaded on a string – you can’t pick up the individual bead without lifting the whole necklace. If you want the old-time civility then you also take the other old-time beliefs that were adjacent to it, that flow logically from it, and that are it’s emotional foundation. One was that women must dress modestly in order to not provoke a sexual response in men. Another was that having children outside of wedlock was profoundly shameful. A third was that, even when unexpressed, sexual desire itself was shameful and should be scorned, controlled, ignored.

The same goes for a vanished sense of restraint, of politeness and deference. What beliefs underwrote those behaviours? That society is a hierarchy and that there are betters you should shut up in the presence of. That you shouldn’t draw attention to yourself or cause a fuss (this includes doing things as banal as talking too loud) because doing so implies you think you’re a better and more interesting person that everyone else, and because children should be seen and not heard. Those were not positions that people reasoned themselves into, they were written in their hearts, and policed first from there. Traces of those beliefs still linger in the Irish DNA. But they’re essentially gone can’t be resurrected in a fragmentary fashion just because we feel we need a dash of morality to keep things under wraps.

What we are really talking about here is not politeness, but regulating public expressions of sexuality. Do we want to do that or don’t we? And if we do, how do we make that work?

Let’s say the reluctant answer to the first questions is yes. The way you make it work is having a single message about what is acceptable. You provide a tightly regulated formal process through which the range of acceptable behaviour can be expressed. Then you make people feel ashamed and ostracise them when they step outside the red lines.

So we could decide as a group to tell boys it’s ok to approach women in a very limited number of formalised settings, supervised by adult authority figures with some specifically moral standing. Why not make it fun and organise a dance? You could have a table of sandwiches down the centre, the modestly dressed boys on one side and the girls on the other, and the parish priest in the corner. Hmm. This is all starting to sound awfully familiar. In fact it sounds like a social system we are still in the later stages of dismantling. In G.K. Chesterton’s phrase we have torn down the unsightly fence, having never fully known why it was put up. Now we’ve decided we want an invisible boundary where the fence used to be, and we want to establish that boundary while telling ourselves that fences are for buttoned-down squares.

The sort of behaviour Fintan witnessed gets under my skin, and I agree with the impulse to restrain and civilise – after all, as Angela Nagle has recalled “if you don’t initiate your young men into the tribe, the young men will burn down the village”. Bourgeois liberal people want the initiation, but do they want the tribe? They want the order and the civility, but not the hard edge of moral judgement that guarantees the clarity and effectiveness of such a structure. (I’m as bourgeois as they come, so I don’t mean that word as an insult.)

Reading Fintan’s article calls to mind Arthur Schopenhauer’s comments on the disguised conventionality of rival philosopher Immanuel Kant’s beliefs:

I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife.

Fintan dances with his mysterious partner all article long – afterwards he recedes into the night, ruminating on her true identity. Once his back is turned she removes her mask, and reveals herself to be none other than judgemental, traditional bourgeois values. We know these by another name, and Fintan should feel free to use it the next time he writes an article, so we all know what he’s talking about – the name is “Patriarchy”.