#OpenMinday – Cheating, high-brow laddism and Venn diagrams @EricAndersonPhD @OMGchronicles @WomanSavers @DatingExpert @SarahJSymonds

What is Open Minday?

There are only two reasons why cheating happens. Either you’re not right for your partner, or you’re not being honest with them.

Any other excuse is merely justification for avoiding either fact. Crucially, more often than not the eventual discovery of infidelity forces acceptance of one or both of these facts.

Being honest with your partner means being honest with yourself, about everything. It means accepting yourself, accepting your urges and your inner conflicts, and accepting responsibility for each and every decision you make.

Being honest is hard, and it is never over.

Which is why I feel driven to rubbish any claim that asserts that men can’t help themselves cheating because they’re genetically or culturally or however programmed.

At best this bullshit is vaguely misogynistic, in suggesting women simply can’t cope with either the urges of their partners or the discussion of them. But at worst it’s an insult to all men who stand for honesty. It’s a mass moronification of the species, ignoring our ability to self-analyse, take responsibility for our actions or communicate with our partners.

It insults every man’s efforts towards responsibility or self-control and self-understanding and instead shirks this life-defining challenge and shrugs helplessly in the direction of a cod-scientific, presumed primal instinct. It is science as banter. It is science sponsored by FHM, Zoo, Nuts, Front, Men’s Health. It is pub theory. It is intellectual laddism.

There is no justification for cheating. There is no ‘Why Men Cheat’. There is only a man’s decision to cheat and his deeper decision not to be honest with himself or his partner.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, @EricAndersonPhD explains why he thinks men are not honest about cheating on their partners:

“[Men lie about cheating] because they know that if they ask for permission to have recreational sex: 1) they will be denied 2) after they are denied, they will be subject to scrutiny and increased relationship policing; 3) they will be stigmatized as immoral, and most likely broken up with.”

These are all reasons based on fear and perceived reality. How do these men know that they will be denied if they haven’t asked? If they are denied, yet their urges are still genuine, isn’t it clear then that they are with the wrong person?

This is what frustrates about Anderson and his theorising (based on evidence which amounts to asking male university students the redundant question, “Would you like to fuck more girls?”). He doesn’t question the fears or motivations of his young men, the conflict of what they want for themselves versus what they expect from others.

“… honesty doesn’t meet [these men's] desires of having both a long-term partner and recreational sex with others … When men cheat for recreational sex — not affairs — they DO love their partners. If they didn’t, they would break up with them.”

Surely, anyone who’s ever been in a relationship could attest to this last ‘fact’ being winsomely naive at the very least. People do not only break up with people because they don’t love them, and breaking up with someone does not mean you do not love them.

If Anderson was just saying that these 120 undergraduate boymen wanted more sex then fine. If he was extending this to say that undergraduate and sexually active males have urges to cheat on their partners, then fine.

But in the title of his book, The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love and the Reality of Cheating, Anderson is sending out a very clear message that his theory does not just include these 120 undergrads, or just undergrads, but each and every man. Yet his general assumption (ie. men who cheat must love their partners otherwise they’d leave them) is bogus.

Anderson’s position is such that when he says ‘Men’, he means ‘Men who actively want to have sex with people other than their partner’. “Our physical desires don’t die; they just change from our partner to people other than him/her.”

None of Anderson’s conclusions resonate with me. They do not feel genuine. But let’s be honest here, on this point there is at least some truth to be examined. I am only one man, so I can only speak for myself. But I would guess there are other men who are conflicted, just like me, and who have thought about people other than their partner.

This is hard to deal with. Sex is very important to me, perhaps too important and perhaps because of events and experiences in my life. I have a vivid imagination. I have urges, conflicts. I want things sometimes which go against the agreements I have made with myself, with my wife, with society.

The interrogations I have battered myself with are as numerous as they are confusing. Why am I sometimes compelled to buy porn, and why has the purchase of it in the past conjured such aching desire in me? How can my deep love for my wife exist in the same shell which can occasionally and sharply yearn for a different body, a new touch?

But most of all, how can I be honest with my wife about these urges rising up from my very bones? How can I explain the experience of visiting a strip club to her without running the risk of hurting her, of exposing something that I only wish wasn’t so genuinely me? And how can I hope to be myself with her unless I am honest about it, about all of it?

The only answer is that I cannot protect my wife from who I am. I can only be honest with her about who I am. I can only ask her to love me for who I am.

I can understand the compulsion to avoid these questions, these challenges, because I’ve done that too. I felt sure that the toxic emotional fallout my confessions would create was too much for the first relationship I was in, the girl I was with. So I swallowed everything and suffered the pyschic indigestion it brought, rather than risk a breakup.

Eventually we did break up, of course, once we were finally honest with oneanother and accepted the fact that we were not right for each other. But by this time I had destroyed my sexual confidence, I felt almost like a potential rapist in some respects. There were no benefits, emotionally or physically, to withholding honesty.

But clearly the attraction of a generalised theory that all men are hardwired to want to sleep with every woman they fancy, that this is some sort of primal, unassailable instinct which cannot be understood or salved but only accepted (privately, secretly) is massive.

It means no need for honesty. No accountability. Don’t deny yourself, just deny you have any choice. Limply shrug in the direction of caveman urges and keep hiding. Keep cheating. Because it’s not your fault.

This is pure, convenient and unexamined bollocks. Just as with Anderson’s argument that unburdened (no kids, no marriage) men must love their partners despite having cheated on them, because if they didn’t love them they could just leave them.

Cheating is satisfying a sexual urge, while lying to protect partners from the same urge. Cheating is satisfying a sexual urge that is not fully understood. Cheating is avoiding the understanding of this urge, out of fear of the consequences of that understanding.

Being honest makes you accountable. And being accountable all the time is hard. It’s so hard that it’s easier to find an objective reason why other women can have an impact on me, why I’m drawn sexually to them, why I can love my wife but be burdened with an imagination that conjures fantasies from innocent bystanders.

It’s even easier when someone (published by Oxford University Press, no less) comes along and tells you that being honest isn’t that important, after all.

One of the reasons why I try to push myself to be open and honest in my writing is because I’m not a scientist. I’m not a researcher. I don’t know things outside of myself. But I know myself intricately, and I’ve subjected myself to protracted self-analysis. One of the things I know is to distrust any easy solution, anything which avoids more difficult territory.

Knowing yourself, being honest with yourself and your partner, and being open to the possibility that this honesty may show you that neither of you are in the right relationship is the difficult solution to avoiding cheating. Justified cheating is just the easy way out.

But if this is why men cheat – because they’re too afraid or simply not equipped to be honest with themselves or their partner – then how do we talk about the urges and conflicts that exist in relationships. How do we express that someone isn’t right for someone else?

The most rewarding relationships I have experienced have been equal. This equality has not always lasted, but I believe that in order to continue a relationship must be equal, it must be equally shared, and neither side can give or receive more than the other.

Think of each circle as a person, and the area they cross as their relationship. My marriage is 1-9-1, almost all of ourselves pooled in the relationship, sharing almost all of our energy, with the smallest amount residing outside of this and effectively marking us as individuals.

But we weren’t always like this. And, quite often, we move through a 2-8-2 or 3-7-3. I have learned to see and feel this change and on the whole it has been driven by me keeping back parts of myself or not being honest with her about how I feel or what I want.

Being 1-9-1 means you don’t hold back anything other than that last sliver of yourself. For me and my wife it is our natural point. It’s come from a relationship that provided me with the safety and security I needed to expose my shadows, to reveal my urges and conflicts. It’s the point where we are best together, but importantly it is the point where I am best.

Now imagine if 1-9-1 was not natural to me. Imagine I desire (though I might not know so) a 5-5-5 relationship, a marriage where I retain far more of myself and share far less. I will struggle with full integration. I will attempt to pull back. I will look for ways to gain that extra amount, ways to create something outside of what we share, something only mine.

But our energies, our selves, must either be shared or held back. They cannot be increased. You cannot sustain a 5-9-1 relationship, or a 9-9-9 relationship. Anything that is not equal causes tension.

I hold 1 but I give 9. My wife holds 1 but gives 9. We form a reflexive loop of energy as the amount we give out is returned in equal measure. We can do this because we are receiving enough, and we can do this because we trust the other to reflect the same as we give out. Because we’re honest with ourselves, and we’re honest with each other.

If you give 9 but only receive 5 you know it, you feel it. And you question where the remainder is going, where the rest of your partner’s energy is being directed. You demand that they give to you what you give, you accept the little you get, or you begin to give out less yourself. You can no longer trust them to return what you give.

If you receive 9 but only give 5 you may not know it. You may believe you’re giving 9, that your relationship is equal. But you feel it, nonetheless. You feel the pull, the strain, of being asked to return something that isn’t right for you. You’re not being honest with yourself about what you aren’t sharing, and this lost energy has to go somewhere. So you cheat.

There should be no stigma on those who want a 9-1-9 relationship (or an honest and open 8-2-6-2-8) or those who want a 0-10-0 relationship. But unless you know your number, unless you know how much you are happy to share and how much you want for yourself, you run the risk of entering unequal relationships.

There are only two reasons why men cheat. Either their partner is not the right number for them, or they don’t understand the number they are. Everything else is just noise.

#OpenMinday – The harassment of women and the fear of men @DawnHFoster

What is Open Minday?

I’m sorry to every woman that I scoffed at for not walking home along a route that made them uncomfortable, but that I was happy with day or night. I’m sorry to every woman that I made to feel belittled through my disbelief of their stories of harassment. I’m sorry to every woman who felt as if I’d brushed their experiences aside because of my own.

Just the other week I was attempting to illustrate how white, middle-class western men already know what it feels like to be a woman, they just don’t realise it. The headline was nice, and I tried hard in the article to make my point. A point I thought I had grasped. But, as it turns out, I was distressingly far from the truth. I’m sorry for this, too.

My mistake was clear once I’d read @DawnHFoster, her blog post Background Noise, and the shockingly close-to-hand anecdotes of real women that she collated. I wanted to help men empathise with how women can feel intimidated. Dawn’s article is cold, unavoidable evidence of the active and actual harassment women suffer all the fucking time.

By the end I didn’t know whether to be more upset or furious, but I was also concerned that by expressing the keenness of my feelings I’d be stepping on the toes of the women who’d had these experiences. Does a man responding emotively to such awfulness end up overriding the perspective and justified feelings of the women involved?

Oh, what a tonne of bullshit.

Sadly the comment below below mine is a neat illustration of how a male response can be an obstacle. It’s by a man who has read the article and is taking time to comment, and who could be assumed to have given a level of consideration to the topic. But it’s a dispassionate voice, a defeated voice, a voice that does nobody any good.

“This isn’t a problem anyone can solve,” it begins, perfectly, though admittedly severed from the only natural sub-clause to such a statement: learn to put up with it. Instead it’s followed by a defence of inaction and a description of the perceived outcome, the feared outcome – that acting to protect might result in being labelled misogynistic.

Men, a question. Would you rather be called misogynistic by a traumatised woman who has been assaulted before your eyes while you did nothing, or by a terrified but now safe woman who has been protected from assault by your actions?

This is not about YOU. This is about HER.

As I wrote in my comment, I’ve never witnessed the level of inexcusable treatment that these women are talking about. But I did once step in to challenge a drunk, pathetic and unthreatening man who was subjecting a young Middle Eastern guy to a sustained racist verbal assault. This was an easy thing to do.

It was easy because I could talk the idiot into the ground. It was easy because his assault was entirely verbal and only barely coherent. It was easy because there was never any threat to me, either verbal or physical. It was an easy thing to do.

But I will admit that I am scared at the prospect of stepping in to protect a woman being surrounded by a group of men. I fear that a man who has found it so easy to violently or aggressively intimidate a woman would not hesitate to turn the same level of violent or aggressive intimidation against a man who is not strong, threatening or big.

I’m average size, I’m no alpha male and I simply don’t have the capacity to intimidate another man. Especially not the sort of masculine waste product that congeals in numbers and treats women as community property or sub-human objects. I’m scared. I’m afraid of being beaten up. I’m terrified of becoming a headline.

But at least I don’t suffer the fear that grips others. Manboys who fear being ostracised by other manboys, childmen who fear their ability to take a joke being questioned, as if casual assault were an established comic vehicle. Emotionally stunted and tribalistic males who value belonging above self-regard, above pride, above all else.

Because it’s fears like these, abstract and unexamined, that lead to male and female (but mostly male) commenters to turn discussions expressing rage at sexual assault into discussions about how difficult it would be to police a wolf-whistle. Or for debates about rape to twist into redundant arguments over whether all men are potential rapists.

(On a side note, before anyone talks about rape culture they should read Shakesville’s blog post on the subject. For me, the term is encapsulated in a single point: “Rape culture is tasking victims with the burden of rape prevention”. Our approach to rape prevention reduces rape to burglary, and by extension, women to objects.)

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” is overused but the more I read, the more I experience and the more I see the more accurate and spearing the statement becomes. Men, arguing that you are not a rapist and shouldn’t be treated like one is not helping. Standing up for a woman’s right to be protected from rape is.

At the heart of the problem as I see it is that many male voices, many So-Called-Men, can’t see the difference in their position (their privileged position) and the position of women. Women aren’t resisting change, So-Called-Men are. So-Called-Men aren’t standing for something, they’re standing against something.

Women are asking to be considered, to be given respect. SCMen are asking to be excused the responsibility of doing this. Women want equality, an equal share. SCMen don’t want to give up anything in order to balance the scales. Women speaking out are speaking out against society. SCMen are only speaking out against women.

I want to believe that I would stand up for the principles I believe in and defend a victim of harassment, but I cannot deny that I am afraid of the physical fallout of doing such a thing. But because I accept my fear it’s something I can consider, I can examine. SCMen bury their fears so deep that discussion or examination is impossible.

If you are really afraid that by stepping in to protect a woman who is being harassed you will be thought of as misogynist, then I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry that you’ve allowed your fear to suffocate your principles. But I suspect that at the heart of your fear is a conflict, because you have never been taught to examine or discover your own principles.

Do you know what you stand for? Have you ever asked yourself what your principles are?

Behind misogyny, as with every prejudice, is fear. I am afraid of being beaten to a pulp, but by examining what I believe, by understanding what I stand for, I can face that fear with the strength of my principles. But if you don’t know your principles or what you stand for, how can you challenge what makes you afraid? How can you challenge harassment?

So-Called-Men are afraid. But women – mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces – are being harassed. Men should never be afraid of wanting to stop this.

xci

Some idle theorising…

Writing, the way I’ve lived it, is like breathing. Poetry or the lyrics I fumbled with that were my first self-aware writings, were like a held breath, a single breath held in as I tried to grasp a moment or a feeling and keep it intact.

Short stories are single full breaths, in and out. Especially ghost stories, which I was drawn to and used to talk about as I became more aware but less sure of my need to write, my ambition to write. The breath in, the set up, leading to a moment of suspension, of tension and fear before the held breath is released in relief.

I always looked at novels in these early stages and struggled to comprehend how I could have an idea which might suit longer form writing. All mine, at that time, centred on the held breath moment, the central point around which everything else moved.

Writing novels, writing long stories, is a series of breaths – shallower, deeper, quicker or slower, held or panted, each breath building towards the final breath, the final expression, and perhaps suggesting other breaths, untold and unrecorded, ahead.

But having started my first real writing project, and being paralysed in writing the long-form poem I’ve been thinking about for so long, I’m beginning to think that just as breathing rises and falls, passes in and out, that my writing will move like this.

In my first run at editing I’ve already started this – removing, paring down, exorcising redundant breathing, needless intakes and expressions without energy. I’m reducing the number of breaths. Might I come to a more mature poetry when I’ve learned to compress all those many thousands of breaths into one held and heady inhalation?

—

Grand theorising is a pasttime of mine. For a while I’ve picked apart one idea I’ve had about the methods we hold (specifically men) in the fibre of who we are, the ways we have been built to express ourselves. Sport, poetry, ideas, talking, caring, finding, hiding.

Alongside this I’ve tried to pin down the polarising impulse which motivates people either to remain in family units, in friendship networks, in established communities of any degree, or to leave the gravitational field of these groups and set a personal orbit, find your own destination and eventually found your own groups, networks or families.

I assumed that since the two points at the heart of my original theory felt so natural and so complementary, that this force would also be one of two sides. The finders and the … the seekers and the … the explorers and the …

But I’ve never managed to find the opposing position that fits in the same way as my main structure. I can’t pin down two sides, only the one, and while in the original structure the two sides feel genuine and true in this case a singular force seems only appropriate.

And not just appropriate, but required. Instead of a compass of points I have two fundamental methods (loosely summarised as looking inwards and looking outwards) and a motivating force which exists between them, or all around them, or through them.

It isn’t that you are one method or the other, it is that the force which motivates or energises you is most purely expressed through one method or the other, and that to express it through the other you must first be aware and must own the expression through your natural preference of method.

#OpenMinday – Sport, commentary and banter @BarnayRonay @EvaWiseman @martinkelner

What is Open Minday?

The oily slipperiness of banterese makes attempting to pin down why it’s become the touchstone of maleness (or, at least, self-proclaimed ‘ladness’) a Sisyphean task. The banterers aren’t listening.

Anyway, @BarnayRonay has already expertly speared the way banter has weedled its way into mainstream sport (or football, as it’s known outside of the tabloid back pages) all  shit-eating grin and shrugged shoulders, hands raised in defence, “It’s only bants!”

And @EvaWiseman took a scalpel to the seams holding together the “Just bants, gramps!” excuses, in the awkward silence as UniLad shuffled its feet and squeaked out an apology for celebrating the low convinction rate of rapists.

Banter is now, essentially, an excuse to be inexcusable. It’s driven by fear – of silence, of being outflanked, of failing to be the dog that’s doing the eating. It’s tribal, it’s aggressive. It’s not sparring with words, it’s half-formed nonthoughts scrapping like boys in a playground, all headlocks and hamfisted thumps.

The “it’s just a joke!” defence means one thing – “I didn’t mean it!”. Banter is a loud and unpleasant fart, semi-self aware, guiltily enjoyed for the effect it has on bystanders but ultimately and unavoidably a waste product that could have been avoided. Or at the very least genuinely apologised for.

In 2012 banter isn’t Oscar Wilde or even Newman and Baddiel. Like Barnay Ronay says, banter is “anti-chemistry”. It’s shutting other people down, drowning other voices out, filling the verbal space with guff spuffed directly from the sludge of the unconscious, the hindbrain, bypassing thought.

I stopped watching football after binging on the World Cup in 2010. I’ve since lost all interest in the sport. One summer of listening to men paid to share their knowledge and experience of the game blurt out inane, uninformed lazy commentary was enough to kill football for me forever. My own knees, meanwhile, were enough to stop me playing.

“This player has the ball, oh and now that player has the ball, he’s taken the ball past another player and hit the ball with his foot and, oh, the striker nearly put the ball into the net to score a goal which as we all know would have made the game a different game to the game which we are watching now which is actually still the same game because what I said could have happened didn’t.”

I’ve thrown myself into cricket instead, a sport that can still boast a full-voiced beer-fuelled population while managing to talk about itself without smirking, joking, winking or nudging. Cricket commentary in every form covers the game, the tactics, life and everything inbetween. Football commentary seems trapped in inane nothingness. In banter.

Almost a year ago @MartinKelner wrote a fantastic article comparing the sparse, sure-footed commentary of Brian Moore in the 1981 FA Cup Final with the nonstop nothing-speak of latter-day TV sofa-saints like Clive Tyldesley: “It is almost like a form of Tourette’s”. Or banter.

There are some great analysts in football – I loved Gordon Strachan’s short stint on Match of the Day, and occasionally one of the old cloggers will shed light on an aspect of the game usually given nothing even approaching lipservice by the Andy Grays and Richard Keys of the world. But you simply can’t fill every second of a match with considered thought.

But banter can fill a thousand stadia, a hundred thousand silences. So commentators banter with each other, cast judgement on a player’s off-field life or make idiot abstract observations. And the language of football, the teased statistics, gives these babblers all the mouth-amunition they need to fill every second of a match with unconsidered nonthought.

In Saturday night pubs automaton voices parrot the same witless verbage, proving their commitment to the sport through their dedication to memorising the accepted phraseology. And on the Sunday morning sports fields the adult voices bellow remembered lines of commentary at confused kids attempting to learn an incredibly technical game. Attempting to enjoy learning an intricate and hugely tactical game.

What other sport promotes the voice of the fat-ankled radio presenter, the bellowing fan, to such a towering level they can spit out judgements of a player’s commitment or effort while picking donut out of their teeth? How can you take seriously a sport which insists on elevatating the recognisable voices, the cloned outrages, the echoed opinions?

The phone-ins complain about the skills of English players, players who have only ever been told to hoof it out of danger into the channels or the mixer, who never heard an extended and exploded discussion of the thought behind the action during their grassroots years, who grew up listening to commentators filling dead air with dead thoughts.

I honestly believe that commentary is a huge and compelling factor behind the English football team’s inability to win a major tournament. It’s a cycle of non-ambition that begins with watching the game on TV, through to the yelling of fans in the stalls, and the limp questioning of TV interviewers in post-match broadcasts.

And it’s this need to banter, to talk, to spout noise endlessly at all levels of a game that has the same base strength as cricket or rugby (another sport that manages to retain thought without being sapped of excitement) that makes football the obvious contender for mainstream tribalism, easy access sports tourism.

It’s precisely because of this ubiquitousness of football that the massive influence of TV and radio mouthpieces spouting sport talk about anything but sport can’t be underestimated. Football can’t go anywhere but down if it continues to elect its champions from the ranks of the banterers, the unreconstructed lads, the echo chambers in human form.

xc

Some of my brightest memories are from the acting I’ve done, at school, at university. It all felt so natural – I never had stage fright, the lines always came, my confidence on stage always several levels of tonnage higher than in my normal life.

But though I was good I would have faced a struggle if I wanted to be great, to be a professional. Because every character I played was me. My approach was simply to soak up the character and imagine what sort of me their situation, their backstory, would have created. I reacted, I spoke, I moved as a slightly different sort of me.

In acting it’s not such a problem, unless you want to really become a true actor – someone who doesn’t just put on different clothes, but different people. In writing, though, my impulse to put myself before everything else has strangled me, and continues to do so.

I wouldn’t want to escape my natural talent for taking things I experience, moments I live and relive, and being able to turn these out on the page. But now deep into my first real writing project my weakness in character, in understanding other people, comes out.

There’s parts of me, or potential parts of me, in my characters. But there must be more than that, unless I want a book staffed by facsimilies. Without differences there’s no tension, there’s no direction.

The other night I sat down with a new book my wife has bought me, a text book basically, and gave an exercise a go which asked you to examine your philosophy of life. Use a few lines of dialogue, it suggested, use images.

I’ve written about using books like this before in my journal – this whole exercise is from the first book she bought me. I always feel a bit dirtied, almost, by using something so workmanlike (in my perception) in the pursuit of connecting with my passion.

Sometimes I think it’s because sections are so obvious, or Fisher Price level to me that I question why I’m even reading the book – I know all this stuff, don’t I? It feels like a dumbing down of me, of the process of writing. It takes the magic away, and makes it all into something that anyone could do. It devalues my image of writing.

But only because I see what I want to see, or see what I don’t want to see. When I’d finished the exercise what I had to share with my wife wasn’t anything to do with my life’s philosophy – it was a sugar-shell bit of fun with words and images. It was easy.

I didn’t engage with the point of the exercise, I just saw in it what I could do without thinking about it too much and fired something out. My technique is practiced, I’ve had years and years of writing to hone the ability to develop something surface-level in a matter of moments. Well done me. But one tap and it all shatters into worthless pieces.

The fact my wife wouldn’t allow me to get away with what she called a missed opportunity really cut me. I wanted reaffirmation that my cleverness with words, my unformed quick-and-easy natural idea was something to be proud of, to celebrate.

I always react badly to these books, and it was clear from our conversation that it’s because I want to be able to do what comes naturally, easily, and get somewhere without having to do anything more. Which isn’t possible. I can be good, if I like. But wouldn’t I want to be really great?

So the challenge suggested by all these books is that I’m not working hard enough, that I’m lazily drifting through something I want to succeed at, and succeed in big, big terms. But if I’m serious about getting better, I’ve got to do more than just do what I’m good at.

The evenings are getting lighter and I’m getting increasingly excited about this year’s cricket season with my village club. Any suitable moment I have between now and April’s first match I’ll be practicing, pushing myself, working on ironing out the flaws in my bowling and getting consistent. Consistency is my only ambition. It’s doable.

Why I can’t look past my natural writing talents and start cracking on with practicing and improving my natural writing weaknesses is beyond me. Well, it’s not beyond me. It’s down to me. It’s up to me. It’s my fault I didn’t push myself in the exercise, and I deserve all the stick I get, much as I’ll deserve any praise if I target my weaknesses.

But I’ve not been writing this for a long time. I’ve been reaching for journalism on a low level, personal questions. I’ve been expressing a lot, my writing’s been about taking action or actively expressing something that I’d arrived at or come up against. But I haven’t been journaling, I haven’t been questioning, I haven’t been getting myself out of the way.

I’m sure my wife, reading this, will see that I’m casting about wildly for a direction, and that probably I’ve arrived at the direction right now, and will be frustrated that I’m about to stop writing just as I arrive at the direction. I feel blind, I feel lost. I feel like I’m blathering on about old, old stuff. Tired stuff.

I need to be asking myself new questions, not repeating old journal entries in different ways. One of the greatest things about our relationship is that we talk openly and intricately about everything. I’m a natural confesser, I can’t move through something unless I express it, and I don’t want to express something without expressing it to her first.

That’s why I’ve talked with my wife about visiting a strip club. About looking at other women, girls. About my feelings of uselessness, or my fears of getting things wrong, my emotional weariness. My sense of how pathetic all this sounds.

I drag these feelings I have around and around trying to make sense of them. I question myself, and if I don’t reveal these questions to my wife – the one person with whom I share my entire life – then I can’t fully answer them, and I wouldn’t be able to express or discover the answers with her if I didn’t reveal the questions to her.

At the same time I don’t want to be a stuck record, always having the same tensions, the same questions, the same confusions, and so often I’ll just brush away recurring conflicts in an attempt to save her from the same conversations. Like an idiot. Because largely the conflicts only recur because I don’t share them with her.

There’s no direction here, only a need to write something honest and open and exploring at work, because I’m getting sucked under the tide of my job, and my job is not who I am. I want to give it what I can, but it can’t have the whole of me. And yet, I have to stay whole somehow, I have to prevent myself splintering into work-me and real-me.

I’ve been running a weekly blog thing called Open Minday, writing some theory blogs, some economic thoughtblogs, basically just examining and exploring my feelings about topics and issues. But I think I need to put those away for now. I need to concentrate on the book, on myself, on character and other people, other humans.

I need to get back into journaling, digging around in my head, giving the papers of my mind a shuffle, file away bits and pieces, take out things and consider them. I need to get back into journaling so I can get back into writing, and back into the book. That’s what’s really important. That’s the writing that really matters.

I’m white, middle-class, male and live in the west. I know what it’s like to be a woman #OpenMinday

What is #OpenMinday?

There is no opposite to racism or sexism. When I see a woman I don’t see a sexless thing. I see a person who is female, a person who is not my sex, a person who is fundamentally different to me on an obvious level. But this doesn’t make me sexist.

Walking last week I passed between two very tall black students stood chatting calmly on the path ahead of me. The gap between them was more than big enough for me to walk through. They didn’t look at me. But I didn’t see colourless ‘persons’, I saw two people who were black. This doesn’t make me racist.

A person who is black is black. A person who is white is white. A person who is tall is tall. To be someone who resists, who rejects and who stands against racism or sexism or any prejudice isn’t to be someone who doesn’t see these truths. It’s to be someone who sees that all of these people are people first.

One of the things that struck me while my wife and I visited a naturist resort last year was how naturists are just people. Being a naturist doesn’t mean they have this view or that view. Being a naturist is an expression of the views that they have as a person.

But on that visit I couldn’t shake the pre-conceived idea I’d had of naturists. I viewed the whole visit with a cynical eye, looking for the dark cracks in the ordinary surface. Looking at something I didn’t understand and expecting the worst.

Honestly, when I approached these two black men I became self-consciously non-racist, like an idiot. I went over every thought I usually have in this situation: Is it racist to look? Is it racist not to look? Is it racist to walk slower or faster? Is it racist to smile or not to smile? And how do I make peace with the fact that I feel intimidated? Is that racist?

Put me in a dark night at 3am after all the pubs have kicked out and see me walking towards two young tall men of any description who are taking up my path onwards, forcing me to pass between them, and I would feel at least this same discomfort.

I don’t know who they are, I can’t judge their temperament and I feel vulnerable because to go on I have to submit to being surrounded. But this is in the depths of night. Why do I feel this way in the middle of the day? The only answer can be because they are black.

It hurts me that I feel indimidated by black men, because I loathe the swallowed-racism I’ve somehow internalised without evidence. But my bewilderment at these feelings surely can’t begin to match the confusion and frustration that would be felt by the two students if I told them how I felt. And why shouldn’t they be confused? Offended, even.

When the morons who created UniLad’s ‘banter’-inspired content found themselves hauled up as an example of how men normalise rape it struck me that even in the places that men are attempting to talk about how men normalise rape, there’s still a fervent defensive streak fuelled by men failing to understand that they know what it’s like to be a woman.

The majority of men who would even have such a conversation would be white, western and middle-class (to be judgemental, but see GoodMenProject for examples of this neverending circular discussion). And I believe that a good deal of them would have experienced what I’ve experienced, and would feel exactly the same self-conflict.

The fact is that this discomfort, this self-conflict and self-conscious attempt to be both invisible and visibly not making yourself invisible, is experienced by women all the time whether they’re walking alone or not. Men intimidate women. The attempt to justify the normalisation of rape as ‘banter’ or a joke does nothing to solve this.

Plenty of men I have read online are aghast, offended, upset or even furious that a woman would class them as a potential rapist. I’ve been among this number. Because it feels idiotic, doesn’t it? It feels unjust. Exactly how those two tall black students would have felt if they’d known what I was thinking. Probably, they did know what I was thinking.

White, western, middle-class men have a lot of priviledges, but being able to have our cake and eat it is one that in the modern world has to mark us out as all sorts of -ists. Racists, sexists… they all have two things in common. They’re people who see the detail before the person and who will defend their right to do so.

I know what it feels like to be uncomfortable, to hate myself for prejudging someone, but to also know that I’m doing so because I want to protect myself and avoid finding myself in a situation I’m not prepared for. Is that wrong? Only if I ignore everything else but the detail, only if I don’t see the person first.

I don’t think it’s right for women to see every man as a potential rapist, but then I don’t think it’s right for any man to be a rapist and there’s plenty of debate about that too. Rape is bad. Women want to protect themselves, rightly, from it happening to them. Who am I to blame them if their methods make me sad?

It’s men who believe that their rights are under attack who we should be arguing with, not the women who just want to avoid being brutalised. Because we all know what it feels like to be vulnerable, to be uncomfortable. Would you appreciate being made to feel guilty for feeling that way, too?

On Tuition Fee Mistakes and #OpenBook, @mariellaf1, @BBCRadio4 @MartinSLewis #OpenMindaySpecial

A message I wanted to submit to Radio 4′s Open Book programme but was unable to do so due to the limits of the contact form.

Dear Mariella and Open Book,

I admire you very much and enjoy your podcast immensely. But I nearly chewed through my steering wheel this morning in frustration as Ben Masters and Prof John Bowen aired  ridiculously uninformed comments on the impact of tuition fees on modern students.

To suggest a sort of Brideshead reimagined, where a “two-tier” system exists not only between the privileged ‘finishing-school’ students of monied families and earnestly grateful young people from underprivileged households, but also between universities themselves (without clarifying what exactly this might implicate or mean) points to a void of understanding of the lives of students today and the HE system itself. This is a surprise to hear from two writers with such a strong connection to student life.

But to allow the misjudged, if popular, assertion that tuition fees means fewer students from low-income families will be able to finance their studies to stand unchallenged by the facts is irresponsible. Mariella, I would have anticipated you at least to question this unformed, knee-jerk opinion with your trademark spearing intellect.

In actual fact, by comparison to my own entry into HE, it is now far more immediately affordable for anyone to go to University than it was a decade ago when £3,000 worth of fees was payable up front.

And as the tireless Martin Lewis will explain to you, in careful and slow detail if required, even a drop to fees of £6k would benefit only those who leave uni into a job with a starting salary of £30k+. I can tell you categorically that this is hardly a broad swathe of graduates.

The moral panic that has gripped discussions about tuition fees wilfully ignores the reality: At a salary of £21k a graduate pays back less a month than an iPhone contract; Mortgage brokers and credit agencies have stated that student ‘debt’ will not affect calculations; The entire debt will be written off completely after 30 years regardless of payments.

I only wish I had gone to university 10 years later and ‘suffered’ the new fees. I entered in 2000. At the moment I pay back over £120 a month to my student loan. I began paying it back when I earned over £15k a year. This was more than two years after I had graduated (having been a journalist) which meant that I am only now, after working full-time for 8 years, beginning to see the total drop noticeably beyond the £9k I left with in 2003. And this does not even touch the £3k a year in fees which was paid by my parents.

Under the new system I’d pay £80 a month (£40 can be very useful). This would see the interest drive the total higher and higher but at this point in my career I would be just as close (if not closer) to being free of the debt as 2012 loans will be written off 30 years after graduation whereas my actual loan will exist until I every penny is paid. Or I die.

I would go so far as to suggest that in the last 10 years, perhaps almost 15 years, there has been no better time for a student of the arts or humanities to go to university. Careers in the arts and humanities traditionally not only start below 21k but often will rarely step significantly over this line, making the lifetime repayment a fair fee for a higher education.

I am fortunate in earning far more than I ever dreamed was possible, given my English degree and my distaste for management or upper office roles, but my ambitions to become a full-time writer do not combine as well with the 2000 fees as they would do with the 2012 fee. I have to face the fact that I may never pay off my debt.

The obfuscation around this issue makes me furious. Especially so when a highly respected and intellectual arts and humanities service such as Open Book gives credence to such idiotic, ill-considered conclusions that do nothing but pile higher the blind fear and confusion which feeds newspapers and commenters with low ambitions.

The question of whether increased fees would impact on campus novels was cack-handled in similar fashion by the two guests. The lives and loves of a generation of students who might carry alarming and undeniable debt but who are also empowered by the ownership of their education (not gifted it as I was by my parents) and the prospect of the future emotional and financial payback of making good on both that ownership and the debt owed, promise truly gripping and moving pieces of work.

Work that a 2015 graduate, with no repayments to make until they had reached 21k (a mark of fair success and comfort by any measure) and who had paid less upfront than myself to enter university, would be perfectly well positioned to create.

If I weren’t already deep in another project I would write it myself. Perhaps, in a few years, I will. At which point I look forward to the privilege of being invited to talk with you on Open Book, Mariella, about how the unreconstructed opinions of two men inspired me to write this message and begin the entire process.

Thank you for your time,

Ben Catley-Richardson