Nature versus nurture

ON Saturday I was in the game shop with my son. A man in his 50s came in to buy some games. The girl behind the counter told him that since he had spent more than €70, he could have a free T-shirt. “Any T-shirt”, he asked? “Any T-shirt”, she said. “Can I have that one?” he asked, pointing at her T-shirt.

She made some flippant comment to brush it off, he got his stuff and left. I felt a mix of emotions. Pity for the man, who was so tone deaf that he didn’t realise that what he said wasn’t flirty, or funny, or anything other than unsettling; embarrassment for the staff member, even though she seemed wearily used to this sort of ‘top bants’; and a general sense of shame over being a bloke.

I tend to drop kick all these aspects of men into the same cauldron of Oedipal horrors – the aggressive driving, the creepiness, the inability to read the room. How did we get here? We spent so long styling ourselves as some sort of apex predator that we sacrificed essential components of our own humanity. We have devalued ourselves in this process.

Look at jobs where nurturing is required: What percentage of crèche staff are male? If you advertised for an au pair and a man showed up, would you call the cops right away or wait until he was gone? We just can’t seem to free ourselves from this predatory status, even though we have devalued our role as carers. Look at the concept of the stay-at-home dad – why isn’t that more common (apart from the limits of the glass ceiling, which is really more like a ‘Temple of Doom’-style descending stone roof with spikes in it)?