Should old men just shut-up?

Should old men just shut-up?

By John Higgins, February 2023

What is hard is that many… older 50+ men don’t have the language of vulnerability and curiosity, and have never had the chance to learn

(Anon)

In this essay I wrestle with the light and shadow of masculinity and age, trying not to collapse into adversarial binaries, owning my authority as author while working with the breadth of voice and perspective others gave me to draw on. It feels like a combination of autobiography and biography, where I’m exploring whether I should just shut-up, or should all older men shut up. Or maybe whether having a debate about shutting-up is a distraction from a nuanced understanding of what it takes to shift established social habits, where old men – individually and collectively – are an active part of the mix, inside the rest of humanity.

Part 1: The scripts we live by

How I show up affects your voice

(Megan Reitz, Foreword to The Great Unheard)

If I show up bombastic and certain, which is a behaviour laid down deep in the mud of my psyche, that shuts down the voices of those who don’t feel comfortable returning fire – the military metaphor being deliberate here. In other pieces I’ve written I explore the consequence of attitudes that can be seen as a worthy male default, in particular the praise uncritically heaped on those who ‘Don’t suffer fools gladly’, which begs the question: ‘What is it about these people that invites people to be foolish around them?’ I know I become foolish, silly even, when I feel intimidated by someone, or I’m expected to perform in a way that is not of my choosing, or I’m disappeared by the language of those around me.

Out walking with an old school friend, I wanted to know how his masculinity was these days. Comparing how he was now to how he used to be, he saw a shift from being a man who pronounced to one who engaged. These days he’s become a last speaker type of a man, one who wants to hear where others are coming from, keen to see if there’s a way to draw different threads together, find common ground or allow for another way of seeing things altogether to emerge. A critical eye was raised about this in another conversation, with a pointed query as to whether this speaking last technique was simply a subtler way of exercising control – pronouncement wearing the clothes of engagement.

Back to the walk with the old friend and our conversation moved onto display and how we’d been brought-up to display in a particular way. The way we were taught, and rewarded, was to do with the performance of individual display, something to please the judges in some version of ‘Strictly Come Bloke-ing’. But display can have a different side to it, when it’s an act of showing-up, rather than showing-off. The showing-up display, done well, gives people a rich sense of who you are, an understanding of what makes you tick, where your loose threads are. Too often male virtues have emphasised the perfect performance, as seen in the granite-jawed immobility of face, the mask of impenetrable gravitas or a wall of noisy bonhomie.

How does someone talk to a mask or performance of a man, without projecting nightmares and fantasises about older, establishment men onto them? Especially when that mask is painted with all the symbols that indicate confidence, experience and familiarity with approved of sources of power. Behind the mask always live other identities, any one of which can be a way of connecting with others without the scripts that come with the generalisations of labels and titles. This message came from someone I’d approached for thoughts around this theme:

I was curious about you positioning yourself as a white man. Unless I go digging and find out about you, I don’t know about you, I don’t how that map’s onto… your power and privilege as a white man. Who are you? Make yourself visible to the wider world, ‘Here I am.’… This means I can reach into you… it helps me understand you.

Labels and titles come up a lot in my work, important features in how people create their world. But the trick is to own and see the social label (whether it’s wanted or not) while at the same time seeing what gets disappeared by the label, which is usually the interesting crooked timber of our quirks, personalities and strongly felt experiences particular to our individual lives.

Part 2: Working with the voices of others

This is the written equivalent of what artists refer to as ‘taking a line for a walk’. In this case I am taking my thoughts for a walk in an essay, engaging with matters that are at the front of my mind, in this case the possible need for old men to shut-up. This problem, and it feels like a problem, lies at the heart of much of my thinking and being: What is the relationship between my voice and thinking and the voices and thinking of others? Where do I begin and others end? Making individual claims to knowledge does not sit easily with me anymore, as is the case with another of my thinking partners for this piece:

Studying a few years ago for a traditional PhD - I struggled with the idea of being the first to say something, to make sure it is unique, protect it from everyone else and claim it as being simply and primarily my own work. This felt odd - and still does. Very little that is wise and worthwhile is the product of one person.

The cliché of written or spoken conversation being a dance doesn’t get to the sweaty core of the experience, what it feels like when words and thinking mingle, which for me is far more inter-twined than dancing. It is shocking how much we can reach into and touch what we hope is private in each other, how much of what we are is a collective rather than an individual experience.

This is an essay where I’ve sought out the mental sweat of others, to mingle with my own, creating something which is mine (because I’m the one sitting here drafting and editing), but which is also not mine. This essay only has the shape it has because of the presence of others. This is self-writing, but rather than seeing the self as apart from the world, I have written my piece with a crowd of others. These others are not a passive audience, invited in as a polite safety check, but an active social network who keep getting up and changing what it is that I’m writing, bringing new characters and speeches into the mix.

Seeing myself as a conduit, a lightning rod, for many experiences creates a different sense of self from being the godlike author who sits above the world and shapes it for his pleasure. I am in the storm, not outside or above it.

Part 3: An invitation to an intermingling of voices and thinking

I sent the email below to a group of nineteen. All people I know to a greater or lesser extent. A rich mix of ages, gender and cultural/ethnic backgrounds.  

I am musing, and have got stuck, about the nature of the male voice (mine in particular). The title gives you an idea of my mood and below are a couple of paragraphs setting the scene. I'd value any thoughts you have around this topic - specific and general. My intention is to incorporate (anonymously) whatever comes back in an essay I'm writing in the coming weeks, around the theme of the transgressive male voice, where silence may be the most transgressive act of all

Title: Should men over 50 simply shut up?

Airwaves, podcasts, articles, boardrooms, meetings and pep talks continue to be dominated by confident men whenever they're on the premises. We talk, write and opine with great certainty over the state of the world and what needs to be done. The traditionally marginalised voices continue to be unheard, even when they've been nominally included. There is nothing we can't mansplain, or speak up about, on behalf of others.

It is hard to be the owner of such a loud voice and dial-it-down, trained as we are in speaking up with little shyness when it comes to presenting some vital insight or overlooked datum. What we are not trained to see is that when we speak, we silence others, suck the air out of conversations and sustain habits of voice that reflect our preferences and the social world such preferences keep going. This is despite the good intentions we know justify our contribution.

Maybe the best that men like me can do is pipe down - and let other voices be heard. Until we leave the conversational ground and let other voices take root, nothing will change. Only once this new ecology has become established can we re-join the world as one of the voices, not the voice.

Part 4: Why this age-old insight came alive to me now

I go through waves of repugnance at the sound of my own voice and people who sound and look like me, rolling out opinion after opinion, barely pausing for breath. Then I sit with the stories told by young women in particular and hang my head in shame, at the relentless filth that gets thrown at them by men of all stripes. It can all feel too fucked-up and too stuck for anyone to do anything, where nearly anything gets seen as normal in the end:

My main experience of receiving 'dick pics' was when I was younger and exploring online dating for the first time. It was pretty gross! Daily comments, the odd unwelcomed touch and genuine assault have also featured in my life as it has in most women's lives that I know. It is amazing how much we can normalise it and brush it off when it happens. I remember I used to feel afraid and strange about it. 

There was something about a recent brunch with a bloviating old fart, man-boy archetype, that tipped the scales, made me want to step beyond simply commentating on the state of the status quo, moving me to send out the invitation I did. The way everything got shrunk into his way of knowing the world, that anything that didn’t fit with his attitudes, assumptions and ways of thinking could be dismissively ignored. An aggressive lack of curiosity, where the ‘weak’ get what’s coming to them – including the young woman above.

What then, with my remaining summers of health, am I to do?

Before trying to answer that question, first some broader and more personal context. I’ve been musing about how I use my voice for a while; my writing partner Alison notices that I can disappear myself, often preferring to foreground the lives of others or take cold comfort in the glacial abstractions of pure thought.

I’ve put myself in situations of late where my gender, race and age have been factors I have to pay attention to if I am to be a good partner to the others I want to be with. The male voice can easily drown out the female one; likewise, the white voice the black one and the old the young. Especially when you’ve been trained-up to be a peacock and a warrior as I have been.

The temptation these days can be for me to shut-up too quickly. This can be for good reasons, to ensure that other voices, which can be easily undermined, are given the space to establish their authority, to be an alternative to the habitual male trope of volume and certainty. And it can be for uncomfortable reasons as well, the shame that comes from the uninvited history I benefit from, spelt out in one contribution I received:

Is the fact that you are even posing the question [of asking if old men should just shut up] a form of ‘Patriarchal Dominance Trauma Recognition’ (my form of words)? So, the shutting up would be a traumatised response, where the response gets muddled with the feelings of recognition - shame for example.

This can be overwhelming, it certainly got me in the guts when I first read it. I don’t want to feel or admit shame; so much easier to put the discomfort onto others and stay with the sense that I’m okay. There’s a comedy sketch by Mitchell and Webb in which two actors who enjoy being extras in Second World War shows, suddenly realise that they, dressed in Nazi and Wehrmacht uniforms, are the baddies.

I’ve enjoyed being a forceful voice in the world, learning how to speak up, be a manly enough man, challenge the status quo while never risking not being part of the gang. To realise that I’m one of the baddies, one of the active agents who sustains the silencing of others, is hard to digest. Stepping into shameful silence is much easier than asking a more difficult question, namely: ‘If this is how the world is, and I am part of this world, what can I do that feels better than simply washing my hands of the situation and saying this is too much like hard work at this stage of my life?’

The temptation to walk away is a strong one; so much easier than critically examining many of the assumptions I’ve lived with and which, if I don’t question them, seem to make every day comfortable – in short, why rock the boat when I don’t need to, when the status quo is my seeming friend…. But, but and again but, at the back of my mind is the unforgettable knowledge that something is lost in my life if others are less present than they could be.

Part 5: Silencing is not the answer

Power is at the heart of whose voices do and don’t get heard. The job of those experienced as powerful is not to absent themselves, leave a vacuum, but to name and explore how their power is currently playing out – and how this power can be used differently, not solely as a source of invisible shame or self-belief. In the spirit of using my authorial power differently, below is one of the responses I received, whose perspective I want to foreground pretty much in full:

When I think about your question, I suppose my instant reaction is that silencing white men (older or not) might feel similar to 'cancel culture'… I can see that offering up what would have been your airtime to someone else… feels totally justified and part of the progression towards balance and equal respect. And I think I have white male friends who would be in agreement with that approach, and I hope have started or will start to move toward that, one conversation at a time.

But I would fear the resentment from men who would feel like they've come under fire, who do not realise [that it’s] far from personal, sparking a #notallmen fiasco. I use the word 'fear' in this context because, yes, white men hold the most power and therefore can create the biggest backlash when society holds up something they, as a collective, do not like. Which then only confirms your thought process that a white man takes up most of the space if and when given the opportunity. I wonder whether a white male friend/colleague saying a version of 'I quit, I'm not giving my opinion anymore' means that they remain the main event of the call to action.

The phrase 'I'll defer to' rings in my head - when you're talking about giving space and airtime to a non-white male, I imagine a press conference or interview where the white man is asked a question and he 'defers' to another member of the team/panel… I don't think there's any way of quashing the white man's right to speak without quashing the white man's ego if it is executed on an industrial level. I genuinely think there are too many white men who are too fragile for that.

That is a harsh perspective and of course, I'm leaving out the part where being white and male and all the connotations of that… means it's harder to speak out about mental health, emotions, trauma, domestic violence, sexual violence etc. If it is possible to start - and continue - creating small opportunities that start the ripple in their own personal and professional lives, that may end up being extremely impactful on its own.

Perhaps another problem that I could flag up is, if a man doesn't want to listen, they won't, and probably with fewer consequences. Again, sweeping generalisation but not without some truth.

When you ask people to contribute to your thinking watch out! They may say things that bring you up short, feel close to the bone and who knows lead you to know the world differently. The email above was a wonderful hall of mirrors, taking me into realms of complexity I sort of knew were there, but didn’t know how to name. For me, she weaves a brilliant tapestry of insight, that provokes me to pay attention to where simplistic binary thinking can lead. If you tell people to shut up, they’ll get pissed off, and you’ll run into the blowhard blowback.

Part 6: Missing voices, personal prejudices and blindspots

While talking to one of the contributors to this piece a few days in, I spoke in softly self-congratulatory tones about how pleased I was with the breadth of life perspectives I’d invited and included. This had happened without conscious calculation, but with a felt sense of affection to those I’d approached. What a nicely connected man I am!

She asked whether I’d included any young men, who after all are just as stuck in the world of norms and expectations as anyone else – and burdened, maybe, with a sense that they are now inheriting the sins of the father. They’ve been schooled into the bad ways of men. And when it comes to my oversight of them, it was a reminder that just when you think you’ve got your blindspots covered off, they come leaping out of the shadows shouting: ‘Surprise!’

Within a short while of approaching three young men, I got these responses, which I’ve interwoven with the words of one of the older male contributors:

This is certainly a topic that I have reflected upon a lot… The preeminent narrative on men, particularly white men, is that given the position of privilege we occupy, we are failures if we do not produce profitable outputs, in this case some interesting rhetoric. The value that silence affords for reflection runs so totally against the great maxim of jampacking content into every waking moment of consciousness. As a young man, I am perhaps even more exposed to the strange world of social media where you only see the person talking but never see the invisible audience of people listening.

There is a beautiful anecdote about how Nelson Mandela learnt from his father that the wisest and most influential voices always speak last; after they have listened and internalised the range of views around them. I hold to this idea very strongly. 

Once again speaking last is highlighted as a constructive alternative to leading with pronouncing male perspectives – and in the story below a subtle rider is added to this around the need to be invited to speak:

I notice that I have an inbuilt expectation that when I speak - I will get attention - and may feel rather put out when I do not. I notice that is very much when I have my professional. and "English" head on. I was struck that having grown up in Obote's and then Idi Amin's Uganda (and as an exile) Kenyatta's and Arap Moi's Kenya - opining about anything - and raising one's profile was not only foolish - but also downright dangerous. I also note that the wise man (epitomised in my African head as being elderly and experienced) speaks infrequently, after others have spoken and often only when invited. 

The other young men also challenged my framing, one by noting that “suggesting men should merely pipe down” is simplistic and anti-democratic, while also sharing the shadow that can come when men keep quiet, of being experienced as patronising towards those they are creating the space to speak up into. The third young man highlighted something quite different, pointing out that not all old men are powerful and there are a lot of older men who are broken and destitute, who’ve already been shut-up.

Part 7: What is to be done

This is the recommendation, hope and secular prayer from one of the women I approached:

In an ideal world, men would be teaching men and not leave it up to us [women] to educate them. That’s always what it comes back to for me in terms of the power of the male voice. Please don't shut up. Listen when you can and help educate!

I increasingly accept that self-silencing is a cop-out, while also feeling: “This is too difficult.” It’s a weighty endeavour to engage with the negative impact of the older male and their/our pronouncing ways. Especially when I know that the option of keeping my head down is there; the world of the white male hegemony may be crap, but I can withdraw into my private world and ignore the outside.

Or is it better to see that starting from where we are, which includes feelings of shame and discouragement, is the only place to begin:

Is one solution to speak from where you are i.e. a male with this length of time in a male society, with curiosity to learn how others see it? Like anything, where new understandings and agreements are needed, through dialogue and curiosity

I would be sad if you shut up, and I have experienced you as acknowledging and being curious about what you represent, and what you might see from where you are. And you know what it is like to have ‘it’ done to you.

What is hard is that many older people, and probably more older 50+ men, don’t have the language of vulnerability and curiosity, and have never had the chance to learn...

Part 8: Reflections on being the voice of the author in this essay

It is impossible not to participate in the world. We all have some degree of agency, some capacity to choose how we engage with the world around us. People like me, with establishment labels and advantages, have a greater degree of choice than many, probably most.

In most settings I will have, or have the potential for, an authoritative presence – and I have choice about how I put that presence to use, and absenting myself is in itself a form of presence. I become present through my absence in a way that more marginalised absences won’t be.

With such a form of power I believe should come responsibility. If I abdicate that responsibility, deny my power, then I make it undiscussable and so make it an even more invidious source of authority. Power becomes the invisible hand, the proverbial elephant in the room. The fantasy of egalitarianism, of ‘freedom’ as a universal experience, invites a pseudo-conversation to take place, where power as a defining quality of human relating is disappeared and we play a game of ‘let’s pretend’ that we are all equal - when our labels and life experiences tell us the opposite.

How I write this essay is part of this social game, it is wrapped up in my sense of self and how I see myself in the world. It has been an exercise in intermingling the voices and experiences of others, without disappearing my authorial presence and judgement. I am the one who has invited contributions from others and who has set myself up as the arbiter and curator of taste – as to what shall and shall not be displayed. It is not a matter of knowing best how to orchestrate these voices and thoughts, but more a matter of owning my subjective and authorial presence, owning my judgement and paying attention to what grabs my attention and also what I am prone to overlook.

With the authority of the author comes a requirement to keep noticing what it is I am taking for granted – which is a better suggestion to old men, than simply instructing them/me/us to shut up.