.A few years ago, I was having a drink with a friend and, having recently interviewed her father for a story, I mentioned how much I admired him. He’d run national and international organisations with success, had become rich enough to buy multiple beautiful properties and had now taken early retirement in an idyllic part of the world, all off the back of relatively humble beginnings as a teacher. And he seemed to be a great bloke.
His only child had a different view. “Actually,” she said, “he’s made a mess of his life. He’s done all these big jobs and made all this money and now he realises that the one thing he really wants is to have a good relationship with me, but it’s too late. We don’t know each other.”
The first thing that struck me was: if he’s made a mess of his life, what am I doing? It took a while to realise that the real insight was the way that he – and I – had been measuring success. Over the course of a generation, the goalposts have shifted around what it means to be a good man – and, by extension, what it means to be a good father. That way of measuring success – prioritising, arguably, the wrong things – has been the object of some fairly fluent speech recently.
Straight, middle-aged white men – like my friend’s father and me – who for so long set the norms and expectations of culture around what we thought worked best for us, have been getting a bit of a talking to from wider society. Women, people of colour, Māori, the queer community – people who’ve been marginalised in a culture effectively run by and for people like me – are increasingly shaping the way we think about ourselves and taking hold of the levers of power. I’ll be 50 next year. To be honest, I didn’t expect to feel so confused about the right way to be in the world at this age. Instead of a sense of certainty, I find myself needing to rethink assumptions, recalibrating when to talk and when to listen, re-examining my own behaviour around what constitutes responsibility and what is just useful cover for an exercise of control.
.A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about my experience of masculinity for Stuff’s Sunday magazine, along with a few other male writers, and the feedback suggested there was interest in a wider discussion about men and their role in society. The male experience – like any experience – has always been more complicated than archetypes suggest. My paternal grandfather, who fought in World War I, was a farmer who played and coached rugby. He also overcame a speech impairment by reciting poetry to his sheep.
What we are all involved in now is the undoing of generations of baked-in assumptions around how to be a man. But rewiring those assumptions prompts a question: if society put us wrong on this stuff before, who’s to say it’s getting it right this time round?I was interested in looking at how men have been adapting, grappling with change and – for the older ones at least – coping with a very different world than that in which they grew up. A podcast series seemed like a good way to do it, and that’s how He’ll Be Right was born.
Stuff’s Carol Hirschfeld and Patrick Crewdson pointed me in the direction of Glenn McConnell, a young Māori journalist, possibly aiming for what felt like an Odd Couple-style road movie in audio for the 2020s. Glenn and I talked to people the length and breadth of the country, to try to understand what it means to be a man, here, now. We came at the story from different angles, which had its challenges but hopefully gave it some texture: not quite Goodbye Pork Pie, a little bit of Hello, Vegetarian Quiche.
Even today, for younger generations, old-fashioned ideas about masculinity weigh heavily. I’ve been helping coach a schoolboy rugby team over the past couple of years and, when we spoke to a few of them for the series, there was an obvious tension between the ideal of a good man as opposed to a real one. Still, I felt the maturity of those who talked about the reality of their emotions was a jump shift from my generation.
Back in the 1980s, we grew up in a mainstream culture that was incredibly limited by today’s standards. Homosexuality was illegal until 1986 while All Blacks who celebrated a try with any more enthusiasm than a clenched fist and a slap on the back were considered slightly suspect.
TV and movies – our main point for tapping into the wider culture – were largely dominated by American versions of men alone, from Magnum PI to Knight Rider and The Equalizer; Indiana Jones and the Star Wars trilogy had more female input but revolved around men who formed attachments to women largely to leave them swooning in their wake. “I love you,” said Princess Leia to Han Solo. “I know,” ad-libbed Harrison Ford, the definition of 80s cool.
This kind of cultural baggage shapes your perception of the world at a formative time, then it’s gone from view, replaced by something new for the next lot. But even if it becomes invisible, it is surprisingly hard to put down.
In his book How Not to be a Boy, the English comedian Robert Webb writes: “If you want a man of a certain age to go a bit quiet and stare into the middle distance for five seconds, ask him about his relationship with his father. Then expect the word ‘complicated’ to feature quite heavily in his next sentence.”
I was born in 1972, the same year as Webb, and the line resonated with me. I’m guessing it holds true more widely, based on a highly unscientific survey of half a dozen or so of my best mates, whom I didn’t even need to ask because I knew they felt the same way.
How do you be a good dad? I can’t help sympathising with my friend’s father, the one who’d made all the money but whose only child said they didn’t know each other.
My generation are expected to be much more hands-on in child rearing than our fathers were. In my family that shift in responsibilities is, I think, great for all of us, but – right or wrong – in my case and I suspect many others, I still feel primarily responsible for breadwinning too.
When our daughter was born, we were living in Auckland – an expensive city for most, but particularly for freelancers who don’t know where the next gig is coming from. While I had this wonderful new relationship with my baby beckoning, I was constantly terrified about money.
My wife had done the hard work, and this was the bit I was supposed to take care of. But it meant the idea of actually enjoying parenting felt like an unattainable dream, the reality more like a chore that took me away from ensuring my family had a home to live in and food to eat. In the end, we moved out of the city. Part of me felt like a failure for not being able to provide in the place we had previously chosen to live, but what seemed like a trade-off worked out for all of us.
Shifting away from being the guy at the head of the table mightn’t sound that difficult – but as Ben, a father of two who helps men end the cycle of aggression, pointed out to us in episode two, it entails a lot of work for some of us. In fact, he says, all men could benefit from that work.
Ben knows about it because he’s been there himself. “I used to yell at my kids and then feel absolutely miserable because I adore my two children. I would be angry and frustrated at life, at everything not going my way. The cruel twist of domestic violence is that you hurt the ones you love. You put on the face when you're at work, you put on the face with your friends – and as soon as you get home… I don't know why, I still haven't figured it out, but you attack the ones that you love the most.”
He says this behaviour boils down to the fact that “we have no idea of the emotions that are happening within us”.
Coming to grips with our often-neglected emotions is a key part of a complex picture. While we didn’t find any one right way to be a man in 2021, we did find all kinds of people who are pushing the thinking forward: teachers and rugby players, scientists and singers, kaumātua and kids.
Each of us works out our own way of being, but none of that takes place in a vacuum. If some areas are slow to move with the times, it’s worth recognising the parts of our culture that are shifting: in just the past few months, we’ve seen the compelling sight of ageing All Blacks showing their vulnerability in Three’s Match Fit and the latest iteration of the Star Wars franchise, The Mandalorian, is a redemptive story of a warrior looking after a baby.
It isn’t young people’s job to save everything. But listening to them can turn out to be quite useful. Working with Glenn – 25 years my junior – gave me the sense that all the middle-aged male angst doesn’t have to be so bad, so long as it’s pointed in the right direction. Change gets harder as you get older but there’s also the sense of enlarging your world, moving away from old structures – structures that weren’t as useful as we once thought – towards new possibilities.
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