Swallow

Crap Bloke

How can you tell if a bloke is crap? See if he's breathing.

How do I know? I am one.

The universal crapness of men is not exactly news to some of us, but with it comes a certain inevitable denial syndrome. This syndrome is found both in men themselves and those women who despite it all persist in hanging around with them. It manifests itself in a similar way to the 'some of my best friends are...' form of racism: most men are crap, it goes, but I / he / you aren't.

Let me spell it out - it's a denial syndrome - one of those things where you refuse to accept the truth about something. In this case, you are denying that you are crap, the logical consequence of which is bad news for blokes in general.

So, blokes, let us punch one another in a manly fashion and admit it once and for all. We are crap.

How to tell if you are being crap:

when your view of the computer screen is obscured by your girlfriend droning on about how you are more interested in a machine than in her, and you push her out of the way. You subsequently fail to complete that particular level of Quake because every time a grenade explodes in your face you can actually feel someone punching you;
when you move into a new flat and it is your girlfriend, not you, who unpacks everything, arranges all the things, sorts the kitchen out and cooks the first proper meal, even though she isn't actually living with you. You wonder why she isn't living with you, but can't quite put your finger on it. Later that night you have a row. Inexplicable;
you are obviously mesmerised by the gorgeous woman in the restaurant sitting at the next table. Your girlfriend, with whom you are having dinner, seems suddenly cold. The first time you did this, ages ago just after you'd first met, she slapped you. This time she does not bother;
you have been flirting all night at a party with the girlfriend of one of your girlfriend's male friends. As the four of you walk home later, you tell your girlfriend that you wish she would go off with whatshisname that other bloke. She seems uninterested. You do not have sex that night;
when you make someone pregnant and then leave the country, severing all contact with her. NB - unlike many of the other examples, I have not personally done this one, but I've heard of a few blokes who have, so it seems only right to distribute this particular piece of information a little more, since there are clearly a number of men who haven't grasped it yet;

New men

One of the odder things about the alleged new man is his inability to translate well understood phenomena observed in other men and catalogued under 'this is a crap thing to do so don't do it', into practical everyday action. Someone who believes it to be their solemn duty to do anything to avoid housework is clearly preferable to someone who would agree with you that it should be shared fifty-fifty - of course! Mr Fifty-fifty will nevertheless then do everything to avoid actually doing anything around the house at all, turning if necessary to DIY for cover (and wonky shelving). Self-confessed new men will rarely if ever be honest about this, although interesting results may usually be obtained by plying them with alcohol and then goading them to admit that it's all really only a pulling ploy... that doesn't work.

The mind-body fallacy writ large, if the new man is unable to sort out something as relatively minor as housework (note my choice of words and re-read the first sentence), what makes anyone think he will be any better, on average, when it comes to more urgent and serious questions such as equality of opportunity or prostitution. That's not prostitution as in 'should it be allowed', that's prostitution as in 'will he go off and sleep with one while he's going out with you?' I shall not mention pornography. We don't, on the whole, which is odd when you consider how much there is around.

The only thing worth saying about the 'new lad', of course, is that it is meaningless: there simply is no adjectival altering of the meaning of the word 'lad'. Old lad, new lad, big lad, tall lad, short lad, my lad, your lad, group of lads, when I were a lad - all of these phrases fail to alter the sense of lad as 'young, male, could do anything at any point, including things you would wish they didn't'.

Crap role-models

There are two basic categories of crap male role models. There are those which belong to the fucked-up patriarchal straight world of traditionalism, capitalism and chauvinism, and those which spring from the fucked-up patriarchal pseudo-radical alternative scene, whether community based, arts oriented or otherwise. Paul Gascoigne and John Major are shining examples of the former; illustrations of the latter would run from Kurt Cobain to every guy who ever founded a hippy commune only to spend the bulk of their time trying to fuck all the women instead of actually building a sustainable community.

We could be here a very long time listing further examples, so I shall not bother. The fact that there are also those who in fact have a foot in either camp only serves to illustrate another crap male trait - that of an over-reliance on categorisation. I can't think of any examples of those ones, though.

The ironic point about crap male role models is that even though hordes of crap men succeed entirely in their aspirations to be just as crap, most of them never realise it. When questioned on this, the nearest thing to sense you can make of their answers is that they wish they were able to be crap in a different way. There would be so many more crap things they could do, and they could probably do many of them on a much larger scale. Powerful cars often come into it, along with women who look just like the picture on the box only twice as vacuous.

Crap things that blokes do

Create a thing called virtual reality and then spend all their time running around in it shooting one another with virtual grenade launchers and hand guns.
Think the joke about the old bull and the young bull is actually how they are supposed to live their lives. (Young bull says to old bull, "Let's run down the hill and fuck some of the cows." Old bull replies, "No, lets walk down the hill and fuck all of the cows.") Many more people think this joke is funny than actually get it.
Attempt to get into philosophies beyond their intellectual capacity to the extent where they are actually sectioned.
Wonder how the hell they are supposed to have long-term relationships when they are really only turned on by women in their early twenties.
Actively crave empty, meaningless sex.
Say things like "I'll ring you," "I'll be there," and "No, of course I won't forget." Many men will say "Yes, I've done it," when they haven't, hoping they will get around to it before you find out. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
Rape, war, pollution etc... You know the general outline.

Crap conclusion

Of course, having established conclusively exactly how it is that men are crap and in what way, the question must be put - what of women? They've let us do all these things, including setting up societies that more or less enslave them. How did that happen exactly, then? Who was bearing all these crap male children, cooking, cleaning, looking after them, bringing them up; who was sleeping with them, forgiving them, sending them off to war, and so on? Sending them off to war, in the light of all this, is now a lot more understandable, but the awful truth is as obvious as the twinkle in a paedophile's eye.

Throughout history, women have helped men to be crap every step of the way. We couldn't possible have done any of it without them, and it is only relatively recently that there has been any widespread movement to change things, if improving the lot of a few middle class women in the West can be counted as widespread.

So, we're all crap then.

crapbloke