Doug is a 28-year-old primary school teacher from London. He’s intelligent and charming, in a relationship, and plays football at weekends. He’s known some of his best male friends since he was eleven years old and, like most millennials, eight of them keep in touch daily via a group chat on WhatsApp: the encrypted messaging service owned by Facebook with over 1.5 billion active monthly users.

Sometimes, Doug (not his real name) and his friends use the chat to make social plans, share silly memes and innocuous anecdotes. “Boys’ group chats are really immature. It’s like the conversations we would have had when we were at school,” says Doug. Other times, the group shares more sinister content: videos of Isis beheadings, violent or pornographic videos and un-PC “banter” they wouldn’t dare say out loud. “WhatsApp groups provide a release for what we couldn’t say in public,” continues Doug. “Instagram is for projecting ideals, whereas on WhatsApp, you say what you really think.”

The men... exchanged messages such as “There was a bit of spit roasting going on last night fellas”, and “We are all top shaggers.”

Recently, all-male online groups have repeatedly made headlines. Last year, there were the Bournemouth freshers who, via a Facebook group chat named “Crew”, shared photos of a black female fresher (who they knew well) dressed as a Playboy bunny for Halloween, alongside unspeakable racist abuse, including references to slavery. The group chat was leaked to the girl they were slurring, who outed them on Twitter. Other similar incidents include the eleven suspended second-year Warwick University students who, in April, swapped disturbing rape fantasies and anti-Semitic messages in a Facebook group called “Fuck women. Disrespect them all” and the Belfast rape trial, where three Irish rugby players (Paddy Jackson, Stuart Olding and Blane McIlroy, all in their mid twenties) were accused of group raping a 19-year-old woman before boasting about it on WhatsApp. The men, controversially acquitted at a Belfast court on 28 March, had exchanged messages such as “There was a bit of spit roasting going on last night fellas”, and “We are all top shaggers.”

The story that caused the most furore, however, concerned the “Exeter Five” in March, about a group of third-year law students who sent messages in a WhatsApp group titled “Dodgy Blokes Soc”. As well as racist slurs against London mayor Sadiq Khan and finding inspiration in Enoch Powell’s “Rivers Of Blood” speech, the friends exchanged jokes about rape: “Let’s fresh plan the bar crawl as a welcome back, before we rape them lifeless again.” Eventually, one of the silent group members posted screenshots of the conversation to Facebook, saying: “I did not come out with it straight away due to the pressures of third year, consistent anxiety and worry of how to deal with the situation, so I just kept it to myself and distanced myself from university.” Matthew Bell, one of the chat’s most vocal members, who had a job offer revoked from Hill Dickinson LLP, said: “I would like to make it publicly known that I do not honestly believe any of the things I said.”

One of the chat’s most vocal members said: “I would like to make it publicly known that I do not honestly believe any of the things I said.”

So why did he say them? Was it, as Donald Trump said of his “grab them by the pussy” comment, just “locker room talk”? While these headlines are extreme and do not illustrate the private conversations of all men, there is something to be said for how many men I speak to can, in some way, relate. “I can see how that Exeter chat could have escalated,” says one, who admits to making up misogynistic experiences with women just to win “airtime on the group chat”, which he felt gained him popularity and respect. Jack (also not his real name), a sports journalism student at Sheffield Hallam University, told me the issue stemmed from “performative masculinity”, with men pressured to publicly conform with “stereotypical lads culture... It’s all about “who’s the bigger lad” and who can get the biggest reaction,” he says. “I didn’t know if others in the group were laughing out of shock or laughing to fit in.” When Jack called comments out, he was told to “stop being so sensitive”.

Martin Lloyd-Elliott, a chartered psychologist and consultant psychotherapist based in London, says “men use shock tactics and outrageous speech or actions as a way of trying to bond, impress, adrenalise or dominate.” It’s also, says Lloyd-Elliott, a sign of the times. “All men have a shadow – that part of them they hide, deny or repress. This includes aspects of our nature that society labels as shameful, forbidden, unacceptable,” he says. “In this age, when the right to be offended has eclipsed the right to be offensive, many men – and women – feel an urge to break the rules.” Lloyd-Elliott refers to private online spaces such as group chats, which, for many young people, are fast replacing face-to-face interaction, as “micro-cultures” in which “we often suspend our wiser judgements and act according to the particular rules of the exclusive particular space. The performative space normalises extreme exchanges, [as if to say], ‘This is not the way we do things around here.’”

There is a worry that this daily ‘banter’ makes it more difficult for men to express themselves

The popularity of online messaging is such that 49 per cent of teenagers even admit to messaging someone in the same room. Consequently there is the worry that this daily, surface-level “banter”, catered to by online micro-cultures, will increase and make it more difficult for men to express themselves emotionally. “Our group chat’s constant banter meant that when one of our boys tried to share his feelings, the others replied with the ‘man up’ mantra,” says Doug, who noticed that the friends dominating the online chat were actually the most withdrawn in person. “And we wonder why suicide is the biggest killer of men aged 18 to 30.”

So what can men do to break from the constraints of hegemonic masculinity, exacerbated by the echo chamber of online microcosms and impressed upon them by their peers? Lloyd-Elliott suggests joining The ManKind Project, the male community aiming to “return to the brotherhood community of men” by supporting a network of men’s groups meeting across the world. Boysen Hodgson, The ManKind Project’s communications director, says one of the organisation’s mantras is “I’ll go first”, which encourages men to share their feelings first, so that others will follow.

“Hyper-competitive performative banter is a gambit to feel significant or powerful in places where weakness isn’t viewed as acceptable,” says Hodgson. “All men have weakness. Men have deep emotions and are longing to express something real.”

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© Gavin Bond

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