Down The Pub with the lads. 2010

I want to tell you about Phil.

We have a regular drinking group—mostly men, mostly comfortable with each other in the way that men get comfortable when a pub becomes a kind of home. One evening, one of our number arrives with his phone out. He’s just come from his (new) girlfriend’s. He’s proud—of her, of himself, of the fact that he has these photos and he wants us to see them. They are intimate photos—explicit ones; taken, presumably, in the afterglow of the very intimacy he is now distributing across a pub table.

She will be joining us later that evening. She doesn’t know about the photos.

None of us wants to see them, somewhat to his surprise. I know, the moment I understand what they are, that this is very much Something Wrong. I say nothing. I stare intently at my pint.

Phil does say something. Quietly, which makes it worse—for our friend, I mean. Phil tells him the photos need to be deleted. Now. Where Phil can see it happen. And if that doesn’t happen, Phil will personally take him into the car park and give him a kicking.

The photos get deleted. Our friend becomes shame-faced and defensive. He didn’t meant any harm. He hasn’t really thought about it.

I don’t really think about it either—until Phil speaks, and then I think about nothing else. I feel the shame of sitting there, knowing it’s wrong, waiting for someone else to be the one.

Phil is the one.

I’ve been thinking about Phil in that moment a lot this week.

There’s a man called Andrew Tate who has built a substantial fortune on the organised degradation of women—a business model that runs, broadly, from humiliation to coercion to something courts in Romania and the UK are currently considering under rather more serious headings. He recently appeared on Substack’s bestseller list under circumstances that some journalists found worth investigating. Substack, which has form on this, essentially shrugged, muttering something about free speech whilst ringing the takings into its till.

I wrote about it. I’ve written about it twice now. I’m writing about it again.

You don’t rock the boat you’re sailing in. Phil rocked it anyway.

I want to be careful here, because the easiest thing in the world is to write about Andrew Tate and feel good about myself for doing so. I’m aware of that trap. I’m not Phil in this story—not yet, maybe not ever. Phil didn’t write a Substack post. Phil looked at something happening in front of him and made it stop.

What I’m trying to work out—what I think a lot of men are quietly trying to work out, if they’re honest—is what the Phil move looks like in 2026. I am looking for more than the performance of outrage and more than a hashtag alone, though I’ve launched one of those too and I stand by it. I want the actual, quiet, this-stops-now intervention.

I don’t have a complete answer. What I have is the memory of sitting in a pub in 2010, knowing Something Was Wrong, and saying nothing—and the particular quality of the shame that followed when someone who acted had to be Phil instead of me.

I’m trying not to repeat that.

Men are silent about men because being a man is about belonging. You don’t rock the boat you’re sailing in. Phil rocked it anyway.

That’s all this is, really. An attempt to be a little less silent than I was in 2010. To say, clearly and without much drama: this is wrong, and the fact that it’s also profitable doesn’t make it less wrong, it makes it more wrong.

And to say to the men reading this—the ones who already know it’s wrong, who would never show photos like that, who find Tate genuinely repellent—that knowing isn’t enough. Phil didn’t just know. Phil said something.

We could do with more Phils.

#THISFIGHTISOURFIGHT

If you missed this piece, earlier in the week, it provides some context for today’s writing.

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