Why do men sigh and put up with That Guy?

‘Sometimes I’m just ashamed to be a man,’’ sighed my friend. We’d just been discussing #turnardern. ‘‘Only dudes would do that, eh?’’ The Twitter-based movement features middle-aged dudes who film themselves going into shops and turning over books and magazines with Jacinda’s face on them, and tweeting the daring move. I tried briefly to imagine platoons of women, applying war paint, radioing their ‘‘soldiers’’ and deploying into Whitcoulls to turn over biographies of John Key.

I just couldn’t. Maybe it was the pseudo-military language, the fact that it took place on Twitter or the napalmy whiff of trolls trying to trigger the Left that clung to the whole debacle . . . but it did feel like something only a certain type of bloke would do. Specifically . . . ‘‘They’re just,’’ he sighed, ‘‘guys being That Guy.’’

I knew instantly what he meant. When a guy refers to That Guy, we all know who he means. It means a wellestablished specific type of guy who is a prize boor. Someone who draws his personality traits from an exotic menu of the aggressive, sexist, competitive and/or petty. Basically that dude who’ll come to your party, get drunk, make loud rape jokes, drop the N-bomb and go on about banging your mum. A lad. A bro. A dick.

That Guy is interesting. I mean not in person. In person, That Guy is as charming and welcome at a party as footrot. But conceptually the That Guy classification is fascinating.

Firstly, because women don’t really have an equivalent. That’s not to say we don’t sigh, ‘‘Oh, don’t be one of those girls’’ in various situations. We can drop that everywhere from when a girl has a ‘‘man voice’’ to someone who bums drinks off dudes and runs. But there’s no universal, shared figure of That Girl loitering in every woman’s mental dictionary as an example of the worst type of femininity.

What’s even more interesting is that often guys deliver the That Guy label with a kind of ashamed, dejected sigh that encompasses disgust, shame and resignation that it’ll never change. And if you hang around nice, normal men long enough (especially dads) you’ll hear many variations of a darkly cynical sigh like, ‘‘I know what boys are like.’’

Hear it enough and it sounds like every man subconsciously acknowledges that, when it comes to manhood, there’s a large chunk of men who are inherently, irrevocably dicks. As though there’s a Jekyll and Hyde distinction that splits the male world into normal guys and That Guy.

That confused me for ages because, while I know some women suck, I’m not carrying around shared cultural shame that there’s an unavoidable evilness lurking in our ovaries.

It continued to baffle me until I read a recent study out of the US which surveyed 10-19 year-olds. Its findings suggested that young women overwhelming agreed that there were many versions of womanhood: you could excel as an athlete, a musician, a politician, an artist. Whereas young men believed that there was only one, increasingly narrow definition of how to be a guy. And it’s exactly the stereotype of what you’d think it would be: aggressive, macho, stoic.

One-third of young men said masculinity meant sucking up their real feelings, 40 per cent of them said that society expected them to be aggressive, and only 2 per cent said that society valued honesty and morality in men. And the depressing part of this is that, the further you go into this version of ‘‘manhood’’, the more likely you are to tip into That Guy. There’s no space in this world for traits like honesty, kindness or compassion.

In Peggy Orenstein’s recent book Boys & Sex, she quotes American sex educator Charis Denison, who puts it a far simpler way: ‘‘At one time or another,’’ she says, ‘‘every young man will get a letter of admission to ‘dick school’. The question is, will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?’’

In other words, while we’re presenting multiple ways for girls to be women, we’re presenting two ways for boys to be men: the normal guy or That Guy. How depressing is that?

One of the biggest triumphs of feminism is that it is freeing women from the monolithic definition of being A Woman. Gone are the days where our femininity rested only on our ability to cross-stitch and simper politely. Girls can do anything. Whether that’s be bossy, bold, brave, bashful . . . if you can name Snow White’s Dwarfs after it, we can be it.

That just hasn’t happened for guys. You can go down the traditional route, become a bro, and find yourself sneaking around bookshops waging war on a women’s mag. Or what? Muddle through, keep your head down and hope it turns out fine? How liberating.