Is this the worst time to be a man?

But once the contemplative, supportive segment of the conversation has passed, once alcohol has done its thing and people become a little more brash and a lot more truthful, the tone, I have often found in recent months, will switch to something just as impassioned but slightly more panicked.

Most men, to slightly retool Saul from Breaking Bad’s phrase, know a guy who knows a guy who works with a guy. By which I mean a guy who has been publicly called out for his actions towards women. I have an acquaintance who, six months ago, was the successful head of his own company. He was not what I would call a friend, but if I saw him out we would speak. A handful of genuinely shocking Twitter revelations from women he has worked with later, and he is gone. And not just gone from his job. I asked a couple of people if they could put me in touch with him for this piece. I was told he was now off the grid. ‘I think he’s in Africa somewhere,’ one of them said to me.

Less extremely, another, closer friend is fairly high up in an organisation which has had a number of employees recently visit HR with allegations of systemic sexism. He is worried. Not, I hasten to add, because he has ever — as far as I know — been guilty of any reprehensible behaviour himself. And not even because he might possibly be guilty of turning a blind eye to what’s been casually going on for some time, and thus enabling it. He is worried that women he works with, and more so that women who work for him, might now be looking at him in a slightly different light. Might be wondering about him. Might be thinking that his sudden, subtle, unconscious change in day-to-day manner means he has something that he is trying to hide.

Well, boohoo, the poor little overprivileged white man, one might justifiably say. But this kind of paranoia, this kind of questioning of oneself — have I always, truly, been a good person? Have I never said anything that could be construed as sexist that could sink me? Do I in fact deserve to be sunk? — is starting to feel increasingly prevalent among men. The fact that I have, while talking to people about these matters over the past few weeks, heard the question that is now being used as the headline for this piece being uttered a number of times, is telling.

Now of course the answer to that question, broadly speaking, is, ‘No, of course it f***ing isn’t.’ To live in an era when your most immediate worry upon waking up is whether you have slept through an early morning spin class is, obviously, substantially better than waking up in a cave with the distinct possibility that a hungry bear may be leaning over you. To exist as a healthy(ish) man in 2018 is to know that the chances of being sent off to shoot and be shot at by other men not dissimilar to yourself are slim. To be encouraged to talk about your deepest-held insecurities. To be allowed to cover up your spots with concealer and not be laughed at. Much.

Four or five years ago, with men’s magazines far more likely to feature one of your heroes opening up about their battle with depression than pages and pages of naked female flesh, it felt as though a new template for masculinity was being established. David Beckham and then Ronaldo had made it okay to be brilliant at sport and also spend more than 10 minutes on your morning grooming regime. As a feminist, black president busied himself making the world a better place, Mark Zuckerberg replaced Warren Buffett as the archetype of a successful businessman, and the sensitive outpourings of (pre-Kanye) Kanye West, Drake and then Kendrick Lamar sold in enormous quantities while the aggressive, mysogynistic braggadocio of 50 Cent floundered and felt preposterously outdated. The career of Dapper Laughs… well, when was the last time you heard anyone mention Dapper Laughs? Men and women, together, laughed at characters such as Danny Dyer, whose schtick suddenly seemed almost quaint. In truth, the fact the latter seemed to suddenly be spending many of his interviews banging on about how he had been mentored by Harold Pinter was telling.

But then came Donald Trump: as emphatic a reminder that these old-world notions of masculinity were far from extinct as you could wish for. When the ‘locker room talk’ clip surfaced, people thought he was done. But he was not done. To much of America, and to a large section of American women, it ultimately did not matter. And here, in the era of Trump being empowered to be Trump, is a hypothetical that Trump-berating men might well ask of themselves: if you had been present in 2005 when Trump was bragging about being able to ‘grab them by the pussy’, would you, unaware that it would be recorded and played 10 years later, have pulled him up on it? Or would you have giggled nervously, thought ‘that’s a bit much’, and forgot about it? Going further — and moving, inevitably, on to Harvey Weinstein — would you, if you had been working at Miramax in the 1990s watching your intrepid boss shepherd Pulp Fiction into existence, have done anything about the stories you were hearing daily? Or would you have been one of the many, a couple of decades on, donning a Time’s Up pin and pleading obliviousness, despite the fact that Seth MacFarlane was making a joke about it at the 2013 Oscars?

I think most men, if they are brutally honest with themselves, know the answer to all of these questions. But if there is a positive to be taken from the revelations of the past six months, it is that the above mentioned era of what now seems like empty, surface-level feminist posturing is over. The questions that men need to ask of themselves should be far darker, deeper and more difficult than, ‘Is it okay for me to sign off my emails to colleagues with kisses?’ (For the record, no, it isn’t.)

It is not the worst time ever to be a man, but it is perhaps the most confusing. But confusion is fine. Confusion is what happens before real change is affected. And being part of real change is exciting.