Confessions of a ‘toxic’ male, turned new man
Gillette’s new ad for the Metoo era has divided opinion, but Nirpal Dhaliwal isn’t sure which side of himself he liked best
When I was 11 years old, my dad bought me a gleaming new pair of trainers. A day later, as I walked proudly in them through a local estate in west London, a couple of older boys ordered me to take them off and hand them over, and, when I refused, gave me a beating.
I ran home sobbing to my father, an ex-squaddie, who, infuriated that I hadn’t put up a fight, marched me back to the estate, adamant that I was going to give them a proper scrap. We didn’t find the boys, but I will never forget the terror and humiliation I felt, this time in front of a father who was already disgusted by my lack of what he regarded as manliness.
I had many such experiences that informed my sense of what it is to be a man, and thought of them this week, having watched the clunky and deeply cynical Metoo-inspired Gillette advert that asks “Is this the best a man can get?” Having spent decades telling us to be squarejawed, corporate-raiding Olympian ladies’ men, the executives at Procter & Gamble are suddenly admitting they had it wrong, all along.
There’s a lot of noise today about “toxic masculinity”, a fiction invented by septic feminists, whose curdled thinking can only regard maleness as a sickness. All human beings carry damage. Masculinity itself is no more toxic than femininity.
As a boy, I swore that I would not be like my father. Unlike him, I was scholarly and sensitive, and drove myself first to go to university and then become a writer. But my demons were not beaten, only buried, and surfaced throughout my thirties as a compulsive overindulgence in women and substances, as well as emotional avoidance and, ultimately, depression.
Having grown from a bookish schoolboy into a “toxic” male, aged 44 I’ve transitioned again: into, it feels, something like my true self. I’m not alone in this. Most of my male friends are living in the wake of some personal catastrophe: chronic illness, bankruptcy and career failure, divorce or the loss of one or both parents. And, in middle age, none of us are running anymore, knowing the monsters that chased us have now to be faced down.
Nothing takes the pain away – no woman, potion or powder numbs it – so it finally has to be accepted and dealt with, in the brutal process of a long-overdue growing up. Younger friends – still in their thirties and believing their appetites for sex, intoxication and “good times” will propel them forever – don’t understand the transformation. One even wants me to teach him how to “feel dead inside”, after I told him that my most prolific period of womanising was in the years just prior to going into depression in my late thirties, when I existed in a state of icy aloofness, which women mistook for a nonchalant panache.
But the fantasy that women are more emotionally literate than men was dispelled then, too, as I realised that while they may be more in touch with their own feelings, they have as little insight into others’ as anyone else. Lying in bed together, one asked me how I managed to always seem so composed – even during lovemaking. Tears welling, I tried to open up about the truth of my condition: “I feel dead inside,” I told her. “You’ve always got something funny to say,” she laughed, kissing my face and initiating another bout. Watching her enjoying herself with no sense of my desolation was one of the loneliest experiences of my life and the beginning of my disillusionment with sex as an escape.
When I recounted this experience to my thirtysomething friend, he was awed by the seductive power of the high-functioning zombie and wanted me to instruct him in it – as though emotional devastation were a sort of pick-up technique.
That suppression prevented me from telling the women I had loved how much they meant to me. It also made me unfaithful. It made me treat everything with a casual disregard – be it work, friendships or money. As a result, my life and state of mind spiralled downwards.
The supposedly toxic male is an interesting conundrum, not least because of his definite appeal with women. Be it Don Draper or James Bond, the charismatic highfunctioning zombie, dead to his own feelings and everyone else’s, is a man many women are drawn to – be it through some emotional masochism or compulsive need to repeat her distant relationship with her father, or some other kink in her psyche.
My coldness and occasional cruelty co-existed alongside the sensitivity
that was always there. I was never entirely what they loved or loathed, but moved unpredictably between the two, and, for some at least, this was exciting.
Such contrasts have existed in many of the women I have known, who were just as capable of shifting between saintly and sinful. Human beings exist in an ever-changing state of grey: sometimes light, often dark. Anyone who thinks we can be otherwise is either mad or a fool.
And becoming a better person has its price. I haven’t become a more popular person, or even a much happier one. I have much less excitement in my life.
And I have never enjoyed sex as much as when I was most toxic: in that respect, women certainly got the best of me then.
But I can’t go back to being who I was. I know too much. I am my life partner, the person I am stuck with until the end. And I’m finally learning how to live with him.