Break up with your misogynistic mates.
By: James Pilbrow
Tags: Friendship, Male Friendship, Masculinity, Sexism, Misogyny

(a warning, the following contains references to gendered violence and sexual assault)

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Towards the end of 2020 I ended a longstanding friendship with somebody I’d been mates with since my early 20s. The friendship had hit a slippery slope some months earlier when I called out some misogynistic comments that he’d passed off as “just banter” in a group chat we were both in, which wasn’t an isolated incident. He didn’t take my accusation of misogyny kindly, and I never expected him to, but, I had expected him to relent.

He didn’t, and from then on he made it a point to create conflict with me. It felt he was trying to push me out of that friendship group because I was willing to call out and condemn his sexist jokes and comments. He seemed to rationalise that I was mentally unstable and looking for a fight, and that his attitudes were permissible and that he wished he could be in a space where people didn’t tell him what to think or do. Like I was oppressing him. He had grown to be someone easily swayed by conspiracy theories, get-rich-quick schemes and often proselytised about such things — certainly not a person who liked to listen to others.

After I’d begun calling out his sexism, he became very snide with me, as though he was trying to live out some sort of high school bully fantasy. Like many people in 2020 I found myself out of work for a while and he attempted to welfare shame me. My (in his words) “bitch” ex-girlfriend, who thought he was sexist (because he’d mansplained something to her about the impacts of menopause), had “ruined” me. He once even tried to joke about impregnating my mother and forcing me to call him “father”. My perspectives were invalid because they were mine. He would (probably) think and say the inverse, but, he was the sexist, would-be-bully spouting arrogance and discrimination.

I walked away from any association with this person after he made a series of rape jokes that were directed towards me. He evidently didn’t care whether or not anyone around him might have been a victim of assault. I stood my ground while he denied having said what he’d just said and stated that I had a problem because I was critical of his sense of humour. He then tried to gaslight me into apologising. There was was a smug Freud reference about projection in there somewhere. Bear that this happened over Facebook Messenger — it’s easy to hide behind a keyboard and that particular exchange would never have taken place in person, although less-severe animosity did. I’d finally had enough.

What was his conduct like with women? I can’t paint a complete picture of that, but, I can say he didn’t have many female friends, only had short romantic liaisons and possessed a tendency to make demeaning comments amount women we knew and women in general when there were no women around. He bragged about his sexual conquests, often weaving them into unrelated conversations as if he needed to remind everybody that he’d had sex with someone from a dating app recently. He tended to criticise women’s looks, always with something along the lines of “she’s not that attractive”, and, he made jokes about harassing and beating women with some regularity.

There was always aggression in his tone, like he needed to dominate. Women were sex objects or adversaries depending on whether or not they did what he wanted them to, and any light that he couldn’t appear dominant in didn’t matter to him. This meant that he talked over you and tried to ridicule you, but, was also never willing concede mistakes or defeat, even when he didn’t know much about what he was talking about. He was a (figuratively) small man who surrounded himself with younger guys he thought he could influence, but outside his friendship circles he was nobody in particular, and he often made a fool of himself — although it seemed his arrogant sense of self made him oblivious to that.

People I’ve told about this have asked “why were you ever friends with person at all?”, and believe me, that has dogged my mind a lot. All that comes to mind is that I’d known him for a long time and he was friends with many of my other friends. Nothing else. He was there. We’re all creatures of habit, and, to some extent it becomes a lot harder to find new friendships as your twenties wear on and your life becomes filled with more obligations. Personal conflicts aside, I now feel disgusted that I ever associated, drank, smoked, partied and travelled with this pathetic, cowardly misogynist.

I’m usually not one for polemics but, here’s one. Men, break up with your misogynistic mates. They’re in every pub and every sports team and many workplaces. Every government. They have mums and grandmas and plenty of them have girlfriends, wives and daughters. Call them out before you distance yourself from them. Tell them that sexist “banter” is still sexism, and probably indicative of deeper prejudice. They won’t take it kindly, but they will remember it, because they’re scared that their misogyny will eventually catch up with them. And I hope it does.