Toxic masculinity is all around us, we all have a duty to end it

INITIALLY, I thought it was a joke. The book was slim with an unobtrusive cover. I don’t know how I happened to pick it from the bookshelf in the communal sitting-room of my friend’s large, rented student house.

My friend was upstairs getting ready to go out so I had plenty of time to leaf through it. All the same, it took a while for me to realise that what I was holding was a DIY manual laying out the necessary steps to establish coercive control over a woman.

It was American, as I recall, and its tone was both plain and logical. It could have been a cookbook or a woodworking journal. I don’t recall the title.

I gradually realised that it was as brilliant as it was evil and that it could work on anyone. The advice went much as follows: Pick your someone. Forensically investigate her likes and dislikes, her fears and her joys, which she will tell you about because of course, these stupid b****** love nothing more than talking about themselves. Initially, reflect them back to her to make her fall in love with the man she believes is her perfect match. 

Then use your knowledge to break her down. Erode her self-esteem. Make her doubt herself. Tell her in subtle ways, for example, that she looks fat or unattractive in the clothes that she picks to wear.

You will come to control what she wears and how she looks. Intimidate her. Gaslight her. Make her jumpy. Make her nervous about ‘upsetting’ you. Isolate her from family. Isolate her from friends. Remove her financial independence. Get inside her head and use her growing sense of fear to control everything she says and does.

Eventually, you will come to control what she thinks, too.

It made it sound so simple. And truly, with the right amount of determination and hunger for control, the author was probably right.

Looking back now, I wish I’d slipped the horrible thing into my jacket and disposed of it in a way that it could do no further harm. But I was so deeply upset and so horrified by it, I shoved it back on the shelf and went off to find my friend.

What that book was doing there, and who in that house was reading it and why, I still shudder to think.

Years later, I was working on a newspaper article about coercive control ahead of the government’s landmark legislation on the matter. As part of my research I interviewed a therapist and expert in the area.

Within minutes, I suddenly realised he was telling me something I already knew. Then I ed the book.

I ed it again when I read the newspaper articles about the Chinese woman recently found chained by the neck and shivering like a dog in a shed in icy temperatures alongside the home her eight young sons and husband were living in. I think they said her teeth had been removed.

Violence against women is endemic. Physical, emotional, psychological.

I ed the little book again a few days ago as I drove through a quiet Cork village. One of those giant SUVs was parked on the other side of the narrow street. Although there was no obstruction on my own side, I slowed down. It was well I did. A car coming against me pulled out around the SUV, shoving in front of me.

The man who was driving tried with great determination to push into the middle of the road and force me to stop and make way.

 “Not happening,” I said aloud. I kept going, though cautiously, and loudly blew my horn. He paused.

As my car slowly ed his, he frothed abuse through his open window. He literally sprayed saliva into the road, so enraged was he by this female who looked him in the eye and refused to give way.

One or two of the cars behind me started honking at him as well. He gave me the two fingers and frothed some more. I sailed past.

And then I thought: Who is this bully going home to today? Who will pay for this tiny defeat he has suffered?

Recently, I was discussing the issue of violence against women in this country with a male in his mid-twenties. 

“Oh, but,” he argued, “it’s much worse in other parts of the world than it is in Ireland.”

Really? According to a new report, I said, young women in Ireland between the ages of 18 and 25 who are in a relationship, were currently at high risk of violence from their male partners.

The Women’s Aid ‘Too Into You’ study found one in five young women in this age-group are subjected to emotional, physical and sexual abuse by a current or former male partner.

The report strongly identified a need for greater awareness to help young people challenge social norms and behaviour that enable and even justify men’s violence against women.

The male motorist screaming filth at me because I wouldn’t make way for him was not being physically violent. But he was highly abusive. He typified the sense of entitlement so many Irishmen have, both in of expecting women to automatically defer to them and in loudly trying to put any woman who does not do so, ‘back into her box’. It’s common. It’s endemic. It’s even expected of them.

Often, men aren’t even aware of what they’re doing because they’ve been brought up with such a strong sense of entitlement.

At the lower end of the scale, they interrupt, contradict or talk over wives, girlfriends or female colleagues without thinking about it. They elbow them aside in meetings and conferences. They patronise them. You know the rest. It just gets worse from there.

Women’s Aid has pointed out that recent discussions on male violence against women have tended to focus on women’s safety in the outside world. On streets and in parks and remote areas. However, they also warn that we need to that women of all ages are commonly at risk of male violence, not just from strangers but in their intimate relationships with men.

The men who do it have more than likely learned this behaviour. They’ve learned it’s acceptable and to be expected. They’ve learned it from the abusive behaviour of male family towards women. They’ve been emboldened in this behaviour by the often smugly complicit response of much of Irish society to that metaphorical tell-tale circle of purple finger-marks on a woman’s upper arm.

And, after all, it might be bad here but it’s much worse elsewhere in the world… isn’t it?

Nearly as awful is the fact so many women too have assimilated the belief that the toxic male behaviour they are exposed to is both acceptable and only to be expected. 

They too have learned this either from their domestic environment or from society and social media. So they are in a sense, blind.

They may not identify the warning signs or the root causes of abuse primarily because it’s so normalised and has been portrayed as so acceptable and only to be expected. We need to know what it is. We need to be aware of it.

Knowledge, awareness and societal disapproval is what will help stop it. The information at toointoyou.ie might help us all to learn the signs of intimate relationship abuse.

The website also has tips for keeping yourself and your friends safe. Visit toointoyouie.ie or www.womensaid.ie.