The Water We Swim In

remembering
the vast unknown;

you, dropped off
and on your own

There’s a particular life-skill I acquired in an English boarding school, a Catholic one in the 1960s. It isn’t Latin, though there was plenty of that. Not self-reliance, either, though that’s what its prospectus claimed. It was the skill of normalisation—of taking whatever the current conditions are and filing them quietly under this is just how things are.

Cold dormitories with eight iron beds on linoleum floors. Hierarchies learned painfully though trial and error: tough trials and frequent errors. Casual cruelty of boys on boys, managed not by intervention but by tradition. You don’t complain—I certainly didn’t complain—not to the teachers or housemasters or nuns and most definitely not to other boys. Complaining wasn’t forbidden but it did mark you out as someone who hadn’t yet understood the rules and therefore did not belong. And the first rule? No rules are to be questioned.

I was good at normalisation. Despite being underheight and overweight, I had registered an IQ of 148 at age eleven, which mostly meant I understood the rules faster than other boys and adapted to them more efficiently. Intelligence in service of compliance: a reasonable summary of what expensive schooling is actually for.

Join any parents in conversation and there will be talk, lots of talk, about what schools teach, how one school does it better than another, how that is measured, assessed, scored and reported. Often under an umbrella of what constitutes “a good education”^⁠1. Rarely is there a conversation about what they’re for.

This is not a conspiracy, it doesn’t need to be.
It just needs to be normal

The official answer—knowledge, critical faculties (allegedly), opportunity, developing young minds—is the prospectus version. The operational answer, if you pay attention to what’s actually rewarded, is different. Sit still. Produce the required output. Use your brain the way I tell you to. Repeat what I’ve told you in the life-defining tests. Don’t make it difficult. Science, maths and English are separate subjects with lessons you work at. Drama, art, music are proxy leisure periods where you do stuff you like, if there’s time—hobbies, not learning. Inner life is not on the curriculum.

What gets produced, reliably, across comprehensive and grammar and expensively elite schools alike (the differences here are of polish, not structure) is people who are good at functioning within systems and poor at questioning whether the system itself makes sense.

This is not a conspiracy, it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be normal.

I remember how at school in the 1960s, the idea of being “queer” was about the gravest insult for a boy; no one ever admitted to personal knowledge of homosexuality, let alone being one. The separation between Turing at Bletchley and Turing as an entrapped, castrated criminal was 100% watertight. Yet by the 1980s, gayness had altered the accepted meaning of a word, become a much-talked-about political topic and even created an attempted backlash in 1988 with the infamous Section 28. In political theory this is known as the Overton Window—the range of ideas that are, at any given moment, considered acceptable to discuss in public. Ideas outside the window aren’t forbidden exactly; they’re just understood to be eccentric, or dangerous, or naive, or simply not polite.

The window moves over time. Slowly, and usually in one direction at a time. What was unthinkable becomes debatable becomes mainstream becomes obvious becomes this is just how things are.

This is how ingrained, invisible male dominance maintains itself without needing to be actively promoted. It doesn’t sit outside the window, requiring justification. It is the window, the frame through which everything else is viewed.

When a woman tells me she won’t attend an arts event alone at night, she isn’t describing an aberration. She’s describing the weather. And I, standing there saying that’s awful before moving on—I’m not failing to notice the weather. I’ve just lived in it so long I stopped feeling the rain on my skin.

There’s another rule, quieter than school rules, older than the Overton Window.

You don’t wash your dirty linen in public.

It sounds like discretion. It functions as silence.

The linen in question—a husband’s away-day fun, prowess in drinking to excess, hands where they have not been invited, the photos on the phone in the pub—stays inside. Inside the marriage, inside the family, inside the friendship group, inside the institution. What happens here stays here. We tell ourselves this is loyalty, that it’s not making a fuss. This is us being the kind of man who can be relied upon not to rock the boat.

Phil rocked it; I’ve written about Phil elsewhere^⁠2. He’s an exception, which is why he’s memorable. The rule is: I saw nothing, I said nothing, I was somewhere else when it happened.

My silence—and yours, if you’re reading this as a member of the silent manority—comes from something more insidious than fear of being cast out of the group. That’s not cowardice, that’s a very old survival reflex—the complete internalisation of a value system so old it feels like instinct. Don’t betray the group. Keep it inside. The group, in this case, being men. The linen, in this case, being what men do to women.

Sometimes the linen covers more than embarrassment. An ITV investigation this week revealed organised online networks in which men share methods for drugging and raping their partners.^⁠3 The silence that protects a groping hand and the silence that protects a predator are not different silences.

What would it look like if it were different

I want to be careful here because the easy version of this argument ends with matriarchy good, patriarchy bad and that’s not what I mean—not least because a gender-swapped power structure is still a power structure, still a hierarchy with teeth.

What I mean is something about values, and which human capacities we decide to reward.

the skills on which everything else depends … are precisely what the school curriculum treats as hobbies

The capacities that evolved in men for “survival on the savannah”—speed, strength, dominance, the binary of threat-or-not-threat—are not well-suited to running a school, raising children, sustaining a community, managing an ecosystem, or conducting a democracy. They produce winners and losers, which is useful for some things and catastrophic for others. Even, or perhaps especially, in our adversarial justice system.

Contrast these with the capacities we’ve systematically undervalued and associated, not accidentally, with the feminine—relational ones, such as ambiguity tolerance, long-term thinking, care as a practice rather than a sentiment. And one of my favourites: the ability to sit with unresolved complexity without needing to analyse it into a hierarchy.

Let’s not call these soft skills. They are the skills on which everything else depends. They are precisely what the school curriculum treats as hobbies.

The measure of wealth in this alternative isn’t how much we have accumulated. It’s sufficiency plus relation—enough, and connected^⁠4. All of which sounds gentle but is actually a more radical challenge to the current order than anything any political party has proposed in my lifetime. Which is a long time.

I am a man who was made, efficiently and with considerable institutional investment, not to see certain things. I am also a man with five daughters, which eventually makes not-seeing quite difficult to sustain.

I don’t think I’m unusual. I think I’m fairly typical of a particular kind of man—educated, moderate, privately appalled, publicly quiet—who got to this point by the most ordinary route imaginable. The water we swim in. The window we look through. The linen we keep indoors.

The question isn’t whether I was shaped by these systems. Of course I was. The question is what I do with that, now I can see the water.

Starting, I suppose, with this.

Related Essays

1. The Silent Manority

2. Down the pub with the lads, 2010

3. The Void in the Middle

Next week: 5: Cometh the hour…

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