Good And Bad Men
On misogyny and male silence.
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This is a piece I’ve been meaning to write for years, and have pitched several times in various forms, without getting it commissioned. Rather than sitting on the idea indefinitely, and given the allegations which have arisen within UK dance music over the last week or so, I’ve decided to write it up and publish it here.
It comes with a content warning for discussions of sexual assault and abuse.
Over recent weeks, a series of extremely disturbing allegations relating to a number of prominent and powerful men working within the UK dance music industry have reminded us that, for all its progressive rhetoric, our scene remains as riddled with accusations of systemic misogyny and abuse as the rest of society. From the Epstein files to the Gisèle Pelicot trial, all the way down to alleged abusers within niche musical subcultures, the same headlines continue to be a depressingly regular occurrence.
Each time one of these stories breaks through, I’m struck by how much of the cognitive, emotional and discursive weight is borne in its aftermath by women or trans and non-binary people, rather than (straight, cisgendered) men. Across op-eds dissecting the trouble with men, books exploring structural misogyny, video essays on modern masculinity, or the reporting of traumatic experiences, the work of identifying, understanding and engaging with the reality of abuse is conducted disproportionately by female journalists, activists and audiences, while male perspectives and engagement remain conspicuous by their absence.
Our response to misogyny needs, of course, to be led by the people most directly oppressed by it. But the extent of men’s non-involvement, even when we’re the primary topic of debate, strikes me as both a moral and strategic issue.
As a class, men continue to subject women to horrific levels of abuse and violence: how dare we compound those harms by absenting ourselves from the shared work of healing and accountability? Similarly, it’s hard to see how society can realistically hope to prevent future abuses if the people ultimately responsible for those changes in behaviour are only ever spoken about in the third person, rather than being actively and visibly involved in the conversation.
When men do intervene, our approach is repeatedly framed, quietly and perhaps subconsciously, around a sense of distance: the idea that this is fundamentally a problem of Bad Men doing unspeakable things, and that as Good Men our responsibilities lie in challenging other people’s abusive behaviour, rather than looking within ourselves.
Louis Theroux’s (excellent) documentary on the manosphere feels like a reflection of both of these trends. It’s notable for being one of very few examples of a high-profile male media figure in the UK using his platform to confront misogyny head-on, inadvertently underlining how few men of Theroux’s stature or background have been willing to do the same.
And yet Theroux’s focus on the most extreme and violent forms of online misogyny also serves to delineate the men he interviews from those of us watching. We bear witness to the horrors, we condemn them from the comfort of our living rooms, and reassure ourselves silently that surely we’re better than that.
I’m not sure those consolations stand up to scrutiny. Reading through the details of the Pelicot case was, for me, a moment of supreme and chilling moral clarity: it wasn’t just the appalling nature of the crimes themselves, but the fact that they were, in so many ways, deeply unexceptional.
The perpetrators were not the violently antisocial grotesques that we’re taught to expect, but bog-standard men of all ages and walks of life, bound together by a shared, implicit understanding that violating an unconscious woman was a perfectly normal and socially acceptable thing to do. The most monstrous thing about them was that they weren’t monsters at all: seeing that one of them was a journalist made my blood run cold.
I’m sure we’d all hope that men as a whole, and certainly the men we know, would instinctively raise the alarm when confronted with abuse. But it’s impossible to ignore that, when put in exactly that position, huge numbers of men around the world have either consciously refused or inadvertently failed to do so.
Look at the 60 million monthly views of an online “rape academy” or recent arrests in the UK related to a global ring of organised drugging and abuse, in a case with eerie echoes of the Pelicot trial, and the idea that these are fringe pursuits, indulged in solely by a distinct subgroup of Bad Men, quickly becomes untenable. We’re all familiar with the statistic that 1 in 4 women in the UK will experience rape or sexual assault at some point in their lives. There is an obvious follow-up question, which we seem far less willing to engage with: if women experience abuse at such an overwhelming level, then what does that say about the rest of us?
It’s tempting to look at the state of the world and conclude that men are irredeemably broken - indeed, a decent amount of the discourse around “the trouble with men” seems to take that idea as read. But if that’s true, then what hope is there for us to change? What point is there in even bothering to try?
Instead, the truth feels knottier and harder to sit with: that the vast majority of men are beyond neither redemption nor reproach; that we are enmeshed within misogyny but do not have to be defined by it; that the line between Good and Bad Men is far more slippery and permeable than many of us are willing to admit; and that without first acknowledging this, and finding space for a public conversation in which men can openly and empathetically reckon with our own complicity, none of us can ever hope to accurately diagnose, let alone address, the harms we continue to cause.
This feels like a particularly noticeable tendency within dance music. Time and again, powerful men whose careers have been built on their reputations as hedonistic loose cannons turn out to have pushed those ambiguous boundaries into far darker places. All too often the men around them, who collectively built the wider social dynamics which enabled those abuses to occur, either claim loudly to have known nothing about the details, or say nothing at all.
But conspiracies of silence have never required outsiders to have first-hand knowledge, or to actively participate in a cover-up. Far more often, and particularly within male-dominated scenes like dance music, abuse is sustained by people not seeing the patterns, failing to join the dots, or being unwilling to incur the social cost of asking difficult questions; abusers know this, and rely on social inertia to effectively groom onlookers as well as their victims. Framing the problem as one of “Did you know?” lets those wider structures of complicity off the hook. The far more helpful (and searching) demand is: “What did you do to find out, and how will you use that knowledge to stop this happening again?”
The binary we’ve constructed between Good and Bad Men - publicly-outed abusers over there, everyone else over here - prevents us from asking those questions, or engaging fully with these ethically complex realities. In the aftermath of abuse coming to light, men scramble to distance ourselves from it; in the ambiguous moments before it emerges, we freeze, and end up looking the other way for fear of implicating ourselves or those around us. Men no more than a few degrees of separation away from us are accused, arrested, charged and convicted; within a matter of months, anyone who wasn’t directly affected appears to have forgotten that it even happened.
We skim the Epstein files and conclude that sexual violence is the direct consequence of extreme wealth and political impunity. The far right look at abuse in Rochdale or Rotherham, and find evidence for their own diseased worldview, in which misogyny is exclusively a question of ethnicity and religion. We read about legions of anonymous abusers in darkened corners of the internet, and assume that none of them are people we know. We watch big-name DJs disappear for two years, then return to an industry in which self-destructive behaviour continues to be lauded, and women are still devalued and marginalised. We look to the men in our own lives, and reassure ourselves that surely they’re not part of the problem, even as all the evidence continues to suggest otherwise.
In recent months, some of my closest friends have responded to an allegation of sexual assault within our shared social circle in ways that I have found impossible to understand or justify. It’s been nothing short of heartbreaking to watch people I’ve known and loved for more than 20 years reach for a grab bag of victim-shaming obfuscations to avoid confronting the idea that their friend, whom they believe to be a Good Man, could also leave another of their friends bruised and bloodied.
They don’t understand how someone they know could be capable of something so awful. They’re confident that the alleged victim’s shifting recollections make it impossible to form concrete conclusions, that these things are always so complicated. They believe women, they reassure me, just not this specific woman, in this particular set of circumstances, the one time it happens to implicate them personally and might therefore actually count for something.
On one level, I can understand why. Breaking down the distinction between Good and Bad Men is painful and counterintuitive: it forces men to be vulnerable and self-critical, two things we’re relentlessly socialised to see as inherently un-masculine. It means tearing up our friendships, our social personas, and our understanding of ourselves. It puts us at risk of public criticism or ridicule. Men have long lacked the linguistic tools and empathetic skills required to grapple with questions this fraught and combustible. But that can’t keep being an excuse for our inaction.
Shame, in the context of our complicity, has too often left men afraid to speak the truth plainly, or confront reality. But it can and should be a catalyst: a way to recognise that Good Men are perfectly capable of awful things, and that Bad Men have far more in common with us than we’re willing to admit. Whether we like it or not, we all sit somewhere in the overlap between the two.
From the beginning of the #MeToo era, if not long before, men have been repeatedly offered the same choice: to use each new revelation of abuse as the starting point for a broader and more self-reflective conversation about societal misogyny, through which future abuses might be prevented; or to outsource all of the blame to individually-named Bad Men, and reassure ourselves that there’s nothing else the rest of us need to do. Time and again we have chosen the latter, then been surprised when nothing changes.
Instead, each horrifying new headline should be a shameful reminder that the work of confronting and dismantling misogyny - in the world we inhabit, in our relationships, and within each of us as men - is universal, and ongoing.
Wherever that process leads, it surely needs to begin with a far deeper and more honest conversation than we’re currently having: one which goes beyond simple exhortations to believe women and speak out. Those of us who aspire to be Good Men need to reckon honestly with the harms we’ve caused and contributed to, both directly and indirectly, within dance music and more widely. We need to take on the shame of that realisation, integrate it into a fuller and truer understanding of our own masculinity, and use it as the foundation for radical change in how we think, speak and act.
None of us are perfect. This will be hard, humbling work. But until we take it on, no matter the discomfort we feel at its implications, we forfeit the right to be outraged when, inevitably, we find ourselves back in the same place once again.