Real men don’t man up, they open up

Brian O’Connell is an author, journalist and broadcaster with RTE. He stripes back our generational culture and attitudes towards alcohol, male emotions and mental health with such personal and social exposure, while maintaining concise clarity. Every now and again we read a piece of writing that has us nodding in agreement with every sentence. Writing that allows us look at our own behaviours with a greater sense of comprehension. The following is such a piece.

My father’s family were farmers from west Clare in the parish of Kilmurry McMahon and my mother’s family are from Kildysart, not far away along the Shannon estuary. Until he died last year, my grandfather lived on the family farm in Kilmurry, having been born there in 1916. I mention this because I think it’s important when looking at the notion of emotional life in Ireland to understand the emotional life of those who came before, and how landscape and place shape that inheritance.

It’s an inheritance which can be both inspiring and stifling, one that sometimes I feel, mutes our male emotional vocabulary and also at other times keeps it honest and true.

I remember a very early first year history lecture in University College Cork, where Professor Joe Lee was talking about the Great Famine and the kind of lifeboat complex that must have taken place so frequently. Who got the little food that was available? Were decisions taken to save the youngest? Or the oldest? Or the parents who could reproduce in time? And how then did these decisions and the legacy of them come to be passed on and inherited down through the generations, particularly in areas such as County Clare, where for several years in the mid 19th century so much suffering and heartache must have been internalised and kept hidden within the four walls. And it’s not that long ago when this took place. As I said, my grandfather was born in 1916. Thanks to the digital revolution, I could sit with him in his cottage in the west and show him PDFs on my laptop from the 1901 and 1911 census, which are online. In them, he recognised the handwriting of the people who were in the house the night the census was taken, some of whom lived through the Famine. I find that closeness to so much emotional darkness relevant, especially when I was going through periods of my own life when I was working through certain mental and emotional issues.

Some years ago, I wrote a book about my difficulties with alcohol in my later teens and early twenties and my efforts then subsequently to try and re-engage with Irish society as a sober late twenty something male intent on having a social life of sorts. It was a very strange place to be in, particularly when I was somewhat uncomfortable with the “alcoholic” tagline.

I’m always reminded of the writer Conor McPherson’s observation that Ireland is about the only country in Europe where the alcoholic is the one standing at the bar with a sparkling water in hand! I had very little idea of what life would be like without alcohol. As an Irish male there is a somewhat pathetic unquestioning, and still is for many, of the role alcohol will play in your emotional development and formative experiences.

One of the many things I wasn’t prepared for when I stopped drinking in my late 20s was a feeling that I needed to go through adolescence all over again, and learn to emotionally connect with myself and with others. The second thing, just as a wider social observation, was just how much re-framing my relationship with alcohol often made other people uncomfortable.

Time and time again, young men who might call me wanting to address their relationship with alcohol will share similar experiences of how much they feel society doesn’t want them to get better. Many of them are from small towns and villages and they ask me how will they ever have any chance of a girlfriend again or go away on holidays if they don’t drink alcohol? They are terrified in case anyone finds out they can’t ‘hold their drink’ and they worry that unless they identify with the extreme definition Irish society attaches to what an alcoholic is, they shouldn’t seek help. Unfortunately for many, this means they won’t seek help until they are at rock bottom, in prison maybe, with serious medical issues perhaps, or having been isolated from their friends and family, making their journey back from the depths that bit harder but not impossible. Some men will tell me they genuinely cannot imagine having sex without alcohol, again underlining how male emotional and sexual development in this country can be inextricable linked with alcohol consumption.

This can manifest into more horrifying and disturbing tendencies. Rape and Justice in Ireland revealed a few years ago that 70% of victims of rape and 84% of those accused of rape had been drinking at the time of assault. On average in Ireland, about half of all sexual assault crimes involve the use of alcohol. Now obviously I am not saying that alcohol causes sexual violence. But it is a fact that alcohol is involved in a substantial number of sexual assaults in Ireland, and there is a link in my view between the expectation on males in society to be successful in seeking sex and the role alcohol is perceived to play in this.

In particular in Ireland, the way in which we binge drink is out of kilter with most of Europe. When we look at the involvement of binge drinking in rape, we see that 88% of defendants on trial for rape had been binge drinking at the time of the rape.

I think we could be doing a lot more to encourage frank and open dialogue around male emotions and sexual behaviour. Having spent a lot of time in schools talking with second level students, I feel that our inherited inhibitions around opening up are causing a vacuum, which is being filled by damaging behaviour, particularly in the case of young male adolescents.

I find it inexcusable that there is as little dialogue in most secondary schools today around issues of sexuality, mental health, drugs, alcohol and addiction, as there was when I was in secondary school in the early 1990s. There is meant to be space in the curriculum now for these topics, but in my experience, teachers feel uncomfortable teaching these areas, often contracting out the topics to religious or vested interest groups. I have sympathy for teachers, in a way it’s not their primary role to teach children to be emotionally articulate, or to be upfront about how they are feeling or to encourage them to question peer norms around sex, or alcohol, or drugs.  But the very fact that there is little open dialogue being promoted by adults among our adolescents, makes labelling ‘binging teens’ as our problem all the more hypocritical and emotionally scarring.

Returning a little bit to my own journey, I had through my later teens and early twenties come to rely on alcohol for emotional articulation far more than I realised on a conscious level. This is something that I don’t see being challenged much in the current generation just as it wasn’t in mine. My generation, who emerged at the tail end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, lapped up the myth that alcohol heightened emotional responses, either physical, such as in the case of sex, or mental, in somehow allowing us speak freely and in a way that Irish males find difficult. Now, as the father of a teenage boy, I see that same awkwardness and emotional reluctance in my own son, and I can only assume that he absorbs societal and cultural norms, and takes his cue from his peers. My job then as a parent is to ensure I begin a dialogue with him around how difficult it is to be an emotionally open male in Irish society and how he needs to be careful in not becoming too reliant on certain things to access those emotions. I’m also trying to get him interested in golf.

I suppose one extreme version of how Irish males struggle, particularly when left to their own devices, was that generation who became muscle for hire in the UK from the 1940s onwards rebuilding the country after the war. There are few of them left, men from Mayo, or Clare, who went out at 15 or 16 years of age and got a start and a bed from a publican somewhere in Kilburn and Cricklewood. I’ve returned several times in the last decade to interview these men, or the few of them that are left, living now in Dickensian hovels without bathrooms or kitchens. When one of them dies, the landlord is usually in the next morning dumping what possessions they have left, moving someone else in without a break in the rent.

Each time I’ve met these men in recent years what has struck me was the fact that so many of them were almost paralysed by shyness, which, coupled with alcoholism, had a big part to play in them never marrying. That shyness, or emotional stunting, came sometimes as a result of being catapulted into a hard drinking environment from their teens, with very little schooling, and having to grow up quickly as children in a harsh adult environment. I was fortunate in recent years to accompany some of those emigrants home, in one case for the first time in over 40 years. And as we made that sacred journey through overgrown briar paths to a small cottage on the side of a mountain in Sligo, the emigrant I was with told me he could only have made it since he got sober about a year earlier. Inside the cottage, it was as if someone had turned the key in about 1960 and left everything in a hurry. Hanging up behind the door into the kitchen was his mother’s dress, while her shoes were still in the press beside the old range. He had to make the journey to make peace with his past and with himself and to calm his mind. We didn’t stay long, he took a box of mass cards from a wardrobe – all neighbours he once knew, and he packed away a chipped Child of Prague statue, and we left after about 20 minutes. I was holding back briars on the path away from the house and looked back to see if he was still behind me and he was kneeling down, crying outside the front door – the occasion had become overwhelming. It was a deeply moving moment of sheer naked emotion and one that was, dare I say it, only possible once he came to realise how true emotions can be accessed and articulated without the jar.

When I decided to write about my alcohol experiences and lay bare the extent to which those experience impacted on my mental health, I didn’t really think too much about the kind of impression it would leave people with about me. And that’s a good thing! To be honest, on a very selfish level, I saw the book I wrote as a cheap counselling session with myself. There was a very cathartic element to it, but I think you do have to be prepared for the fact that you need to get to a very secure place in order not to feel judged by Irish society as a result of publicly acknowledging emotional or mental health related issues. There is even now still a feeling like I shouldn’t be doing this, that I should just keep things suppressed, quiet, hidden. Our social conditioning in Ireland, particularly around male emotions makes it difficult at times not to feel like damaged goods, a feeling like you are somehow abnormal, that you have failed to ‘man up’, that God-awful phrase, or that you are not a “real man”, whatever the hell a real man is. (I always imagine he’s a mix between Humphrey Bogart and Miley)

The challenge then for my son’s generation is to somehow interrogate the emotional inheritance they will receive, to question perceived national and cultural stereotypes around who they are and how they are meant to act emotionally and to not feel socially scarred as a result of honest and open dialogue.

My hope then is that his generation will realise that real men don’t man up, they do in fact open up.