Lad Culture Needs To Become Extinct, Says Reformed Rugby Lad Chris Hemmings

Lad culture and misogyny? What’s the difference? Is one not synonymous with the other? The lad, surely, is just the misogynists slightly more charming and friendlier-seeming younger brother, isn’t he? He’s the guy who’ll make a sexist remark but flash a Labrador smile and wink as the words leave his curling mouth. He’s the guy who’ll shout, ‘it’s not rape if you shout banter’ across the foyer of your university halls at 11pm and then, come 12pm the next day, disarm you by asking how you are in the common room.

Lad culture is where the offensive meets the innocuous, it’s the bit of misogyny which for a long time has been implicitly condoned as what Donald Trump would call ‘locker room talk’. Back in 2015, then Business Secretary Sajid Javid, called for a crackdown on lad culture in our universities. His announcement followed a survey conducted by the National Union of Students, titled Hidden Marks, which found that 1 in 7 women had experienced a serious physical or sexual assault during their time as a student. While over two thirds had experienced verbal or non-verbal harassment, including groping, flashing and unwanted sexual comments, and 12% of respondents had been subjected to stalking. And yet, two years later, as 2017 drew to a close, older men (and women for that matter) try to explain away sexual harassment in the workplace as ‘laddish’, falling into the ‘that’s just how powerful macho men let of steam and women shouldn’t be so sensitive’ school of thought.

Make no mistake, just as the lad is a direct relative of the misogynist, lad culture is the acceptable face of rape culture. One enables the other. And so, as journalists, celebrities and commentators call ‘the dawn of a new era’ in the wake of #metoo The Debrief seeks out Chris Hemmings, a self-described ‘former lad’ who wants to go into schools and universities to warn young men about the dangers of lad culture.

At university, I was ranked by boys on the rugby team, referred to as ‘points’ in bars by the very same group, labelled ‘frigid’ when I told them to shut up and worse. So, I confess, it was not without serious trepidation that I met Hemmings. How objective would I be as a journalist confronted with someone who, as he says himself, was at the forefront of such a culture during his own time at university?

We meet in Dalston near where Hemmings, author of Be A Man lives and lurks when he’s not working as a freelance broadcast journalist. ‘I was joking with my friend the other day about idea that in 20 years’ time there will be these underground clubs where lads can go and still be lads because society isn’t accepting them anymore’. I laugh and tell him that while I hope we can do away with misogyny, I don’t know if I like the idea of any more clandestine ‘lad societies’ than we already have.

Hemmings looks thoughtful, ‘the thing that I need to stress…and have been stressing’ he says, ‘is that I don’t want to demonise male comradery because it’s awesome, like being a guy in a group of guys is so much fun’. Why, I ask? ‘There is a lot of freedom granted to you in that environment. I think what a lot of guys haven’t recognised is they take that freedom too far. And we allow ourselves to act with this kind of impunity, that society is now finally saying well hang on a minute you don’t just get to do that. This idea of entitlement didn’t exist when I was behaving like I was behaving, you know. And we have to recognise, if we are to become functioning members of society, we can’t continue to behave in the way that we, as the collective we, have been behaving for so long’.

The behaviour Hemmings speaks of here is detailed in his book. It involved the usual: bullying masquerading as banter, urinating on people, shame and punishment, competitive drinking, pranks as offensive as wearing pointlessly provocative t-shirts bearing the slogan ‘homophobia is gay’. All of this, he says, was seem as permissive because, well, ‘boys will be boys’.

On one occasion, faced with a challenge from older students the target of Hemmings’ banter became one of his own friends. It was, he says earnestly, his ‘biggest shame’. The challenge was set: Hemmings had to pour a drink over the head of any woman who walked into the room he and his rugby lads were in at their student union. Lol lol lol etc. Game, set and match, in walked Holly (a good friend of his). Reluctantly, succumbing to peer pressure, he poured a drink over her head and watched it ooze down her face and going out outfit while the forty or so strong group chanted at her while he did nothing.

He recalls how he has since told this story to Sophie Walker, Leader of the Women’s Equality Party. ‘She explained to me that what I did, there, was a form of assault’, this seems to have really struck a chord with him.

One day, Hemmings decided he wanted out. When he left the rugby club he says he experienced something akin to ‘social suicide’, none of his rugby mates wanted to live with him and he was forced to make new friends. ‘If you’re the outlier who dares to say, “why are we doing this?” then you’re gone forever’. But, what was it exactly that made Hemmings realise that something needed to change? Put simply, his dad died and, he tells me, he didn’t cry at the funeral. ‘Both of my older brothers sobbed their way through their eulogies and do you know what?!’ he says, ‘I was proud…I felt moronic pride that that I didn’t cry at my own dad’s funeral!’

‘Did you know’ he adds ‘that you actually expel stress hormones out of your face when you cry?’ I don’t tell him, but I actually did know that bit. What is heartening, though, is the excitement with which Hemmings has discovered this fact. He has been through an awakening and done everything he can to find out about how he can not only be better himself, but help other guys to get back in touch with themselves too.

This former rugby-playing lad is evangelical about the importance of brotherhood but equally evangelical about its pitfalls. Talking to him there is, I think, nuance in what he says that perhaps wasn’t picked up widely enough when his book was released in early Autumn last year. We, rightly, condemn and deride lad culture and those who perpetuate it. And yet, we don’t often enough talk about it in the same breath as the following facts:

According to the Office for National Statistics, the male suicide rate has increased significantly since 2007.

Being told to ‘be a man’, as Hemmings found himself, does nobody any good. Instead, it causes damage to young men and those they encounter. There is a budding conversation about masculinity, involving Hemmings himself, and his role models Grayson Perry and Robert Webb whose new book *How Not To Be A Boy *riffs on Caitlin Moran’s feminist tract How To Be A Woman but it is not coherent and cohesive. If all of these men can come together and talk in unison this year then we might, might, just have the perfect foil for the important conversations being spearheaded by women when it comes to sexism, lad culture and their lasting repercussions. For these conversations to really take root, Hemmings adds finally, we need people like ‘the England football captain’ or ‘the England rugby captain’ to join in, it needs to go mainstream.

Be A Man, By Chris Hemmings Is Published By Biteback

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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.