“I’m a dude. I suck. Despite being well read on the subject and being raised by my mother and grandmother I still make dumb dude decisions. I dick swing.”
So says one of the men who took Dave Pickering’s #ManSurvey this spring. Dave’s putting together a storytelling show on masculinity and he fished online for a few quotes from blokes and ended up getting 1,000 responses. I’m one of the 1,000 and I blogged about my response in April.
It’s a brilliant collection of anger, confusion, love, compassion, wit, misandry, misogyny, dangly bits, homophobia and regret…
Here are some more:
“When I was a kid, I invited all the boys in my class to my birthday party, except the two boys rumoured to be gay. I still cringe with shame every time I think of it.”
“Not completely sure if a man should call himself a feminist, as his number one roll is probably to get out of the way.”
” I certainly had a bit of a ‘nice guy’ complex in my teens / early 20s, and felt hard done by with women, which is unfair and a bit immature. This all would have been somewhat unwittingly and ignorantly, but that’s how insidious the patriarchal system is though – it doesn’t always look especially bad or feel like you’re doing anything wrong.”
“I’m a teacher so adopt the role of “big brother” in the classroom. While I try to lead by example and impart knowledge in a positive way, I do often regress back to my childhood days and treat the pupils as I would my younger sisters.”
There are hundreds more insights in this survey. Well done Dave! Shame I can’t make the London preview of the show on 23 July 😦 but I wish you well.
The survey results are here and you can also follow the discussion on Twitter.
