This is what the Noughties were actually like

I was a bit confused when the stereotype of the millennial man started appearing in the media about 10–15 years ago. Apparently we were all soy-eating, overly sensitive feminists who got offended just by anyone saying anything vaguely offensive or sexual. Apart from just thinking generational theory is complete garbage and that whatever time you were born in, people are just people, the reason this confused me so much was that it ran counter to basically ALL of my memories of what other guys around me were like when I was growing up.

There’s a documentary on Netflix called “The Most Hated Man on the Internet”. Its about a guy who ran a popular revenge porn website where he’d post nudes that had been submitted by jealous ex-partners for all the world to see. Admittedly he did post revenge porn of both women and men, but it was mostly women, and the entire culture on display resonated with the hyper-misogynist environment I grew up in. You think millennials are all over-sensitive progressives? Watch that documentary: those are the millennial guys I remember.

I’ve mostly been thinking about this stuff again because of the obvious item in the news at the moment. You know. That one.

I always hated Russell Brand when I was at school. I liked shock humour when I was a teenager. I was a huge fan of South Park and to a lesser extent Little Britain, but something about Russell Brand just flicked a switch in my head that made me angry whenever I saw him on TV. It could have been because everyone who bullied me at school liked him, but I remember trying to watch a DVD of his standup show and thinking “where’s the joke? Its literally just a man standing onstage and saying various euphemisms for his penis and describing his sexual encounters for two hours”. I kept being told that he was actually incredibly intelligent “look, he uses big words!” - anyone can buy a word-of-the-day calendar and talk like Captain Jack Sparrow. Its really not that impressive.

But the other reason I disliked him was the way I saw him engage with women on TV. I remember some of those clips that got used in the documentary where he would be very abrasive and just openly ask female guests to take their clothes off in front of the cameras. All in the name of humour, right? Well when I set it in context of what other guys around me were like at the time, none of it SEEMED like a joke.

The way guys around me at school talked, girls did seem like something sub-human. They were items that you could stick your knob in. That’s it. They’re not people, they’re just a means to an end. I remember crushes that guys around me would talk about, and I never actually knew WHAT it was they liked about said crushes. What were these girls like as people? I don’t know. These girls had talked to these guys once or twice, so the fact they acknowledged their existence was a signifier that they were a potential means to get sex.

Alright: I know what you’re thinking. Its teenagers going through puberty. That’s what they’re like. But I was going through puberty too and I never thought of women as merely a means for sex and that’s it. I understood that they were basically just like me but from a different gender. They were people.

I think a major factor in the creation of this hyper-misogynist environment was the fact that a few years prior to the rise of Russell Brand, we had basically been the last group of kids taught sex education before section 28 was repealed in 2003. If you don’t know what it was, Section 28 was the legal apparatus that banned any kind of education of the existence of LGBT people in schools because some idiot decided that education is “promotion”. You might be wondering my reasoning for thinking this informed the misogyny, and to explain I’m going to have to talk extensively about Little Britain.

Little Britain was a hugely popular British sketch show in the early to mid noughties. It started out as a broad comedy full of reversal gags and some bits of shock humour that then got amplified when it exploded in popularity. It was rated 15 and was broadcast after the watershed, but pretty much everyone knew that it was popular among children. I’ll admit I liked it at the time. Everyone did.

Since kids were not taught about the existence of same-sex relationships, the first introduction that most of us had to the concept of gay people was by way of a running character in Little Britain called Daffyd Thomas. A doofy stereotype who wears stupid outfits, talks in a ridiculous voice, and the joke is that he thinks he’s the only gay in the village when he actually isn’t. The reversal bit wasn’t the reason kids found these sketches funny though. The reason they found them funny was the stupid voice and appearance.

Now think: if this is a young teenager’s ONLY visual representation of what someone other than a straight person is like: a doofy sterotype and butt of a joke, then that inspires fear. Kids do not want to be the butt of the joke. They will do ANYTHING to not be the butt of the joke. Up to and including hiding their true selves.

There were about 300 kids in my year at school. I didn’t know all of them, but I remember that there was only one person who came out as gay in the entire time I was there, and he did it towards the end of sixth form. I heard about the odd one or two after we left. That doesn’t sound right, does it? The figure is supposed to be 2 in 10 people identify as anything other than straight, and all I can remember was just ONE person coming out during sixth form? Really?

He wasn’t in the room when a bunch of us found out, and when we heard about it, I remember there being this sense of dread. One girl reacted in denial. It was this moment of horror to them.

…yeah, this doesn’t sound like a healthy environment, does it? And what year was this?

2007.

Section 28 was about 4 years dead at that point, and the education system hadn’t caught up with my year group. We all still saw being anything other than straight as something to fear.

If kids are not taught about the existence of LGBT people in an educational context, their own logic will lead them to the conclusion that there must be a reason for that. It must be wrong to be this way, and if anyone around them seems like they might be this way, then that inspires bullying. This is why whenever I see arguments from people these days along the lines of “it is wrong to teach kids about the existence of trans people” I just shake my head a think “fuck that”. Whatever side of the political spectrum you like to think you’re on: denying kids education is a pro-bullying argument, and there’s also another complicating factor I’d like to talk about because removal of certain people from education creates an “other” that teenagers will desperately want to prove that they aren't.

In order to deflect the possibility that your orientation is outside of the only one you were taught about by a teacher, teenagers will want to showcase to their peers how much of a straight person they really are. The teenager’s goal in this type of environment where the existence of LGBT people is unmentionable is to get sex in order to disprove the notion that they could possibly be anything other than ‘normal’.

There was this urgency to prove your heterosexuality among my classmates. This desire, not to actually connect with someone of the opposite sex on any kind of meaningful level, treat them as your equal, or even just to satisfy your own sexual desires. They JUST needed to prove to everyone else that they weren’t one of the unmentionables that we had to learn about by way of a show that portrayed them as the butt of the joke. I didn’t want to treat girls like that, and so I was the butt of the joke.

This is why whenever I hear anyone say anything positive about Margaret Thatcher these days whenever I’m listening to political podcasts, my immediate thought is “no, she deployed what was essentially psychological warfare against children. 300 kids and ONE came out as anything other than straight during my school years. A lot of kids must have suppressed their true selves and a lot of others started treating sex as a mission objective and their partners as objects because of this need to prove their ‘normality’ to their peers. Whatever your gender, whatever your orientation, she did a lot of damage to children well into the 21st century.”

Looking back on that environment, I’m curious if anyone I grew up with ended up being a sexual predator of some description, because I am pretty certain that some people did. Teenagers with this urgent need to prove themselves when it came to sex weren’t exactly going to be all that careful.

Yes the Russell Brand allegations are just allegations but I wasn’t surprised by them because the idea that someone who talked to women the way he did wouldn’t go as far as is alleged isn’t that hard to imagine for me based on the environment that I grew up in. I remember the way guys around me talked about women and the way they reminded me of that guy on TV who made my skin crawl.

I’m not blaming Russell Brand for the entire culture of the time as that would be stupid. His influence was large but limited. He wasn’t a cause for anything I’ve talked about here, but he was representative of what the noughties were actually like.