CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
A straight white inner-city media personality who has somehow been gifted a platform as a social commentator has today found a demographic of people that could be arguably oppressing him.
After only really engaging in the Australian culture wars as an ally of whichever twitter user appears to have the most social capital, Ben Miles (28) is ready to confront his very own #MeToo moment.
The culprit, footy players and tradesmen from suburbs and small towns he’s only read about in Tim Winton novels.
“Australia has a problem with toxic masculinity” he says in his eighteenth tweet of the morning.
“We need to address this problem, and the impact it has on working class men, before anything else”
Ben says this problem has always existed in his peripheral, but only really became something big enough to tweet about after watching Steve Smith cry on live televisions during his ball-tampering apology.
“It’s perfectly healthy for a grown man to cry after spending a week getting hammered with venomous and nasty headlines written by people who don’t even like sport”
“I mean, I’ll put my hand up, I was one of them. But it was just such an obscure turn of events… But the people that laughed at him for crying just took it too far”
Despite not knowing how to surrender the privilege of being a privately educated straight white male with the safety net of his upper middle class home owner parents in the neighbouring inner-city suburb, Ben says it doesn’t really matter, because toxic masculinity is something that affects everyone in Australia.
Ben says his first experience with bullying machoism started when watching two opposing A-League fans biffing on a city train carriage while trying to emulate the European soccer hooligan culture of singing and passionate camaraderie.
Ben says Australia’s culture of toxic masculinity among men starts from childhood, and he remembers it very well.
“It starts with toy guns”
“The fascination young boys have with the universal concept of war and conflict is just so telling”
“I’m not a professional or anything, But I think confrontation, in any form, is something we should drill out of ‘our men’ – it’s just so problematic”
