Free Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny

what you might find. You can’t save them with your love, no matter how much of it you have. You can wring out your heart on the floor in front of them but it won’t ever be enough to float them off to a better world. And I know you would, if you could. That’s what love means, at least when you’re young and broke and don’t know better. 
    This generation is lousy with lost boys, and loving one of them means hollowing yourself out to make a space for them to crawl inside. So you do that, because that’s what girls are supposed to do, and because it’s so good to be needed. Just for a little while. Just until your boyfriend gets a job and your best friend stops trying to kill himself.
    I learned the truth at twenty-two: you can’t save the world one man at a time.
    Watching these young men growing up into a very different world from the one they were promised, my first reaction has always been sympathy. It’s surprisingly easy to sympathise. For two reasons.
    Firstly because so much of our culture is set up to make it easy to sympathise with white, middle-class cis men, who get to be the heroes of almost every story. We are not encouraged to understand the suffering of women or the very poor in quite the same way. They are unlike us, even when they are us, these people shut out by prejudice and austerity and fighting for a voice at the edge of what is considered relevant discourse.
    And secondly because the disappointment of young white guys is so very raw. They grew up expecting the whole world in a lunchbox, and now, too often for comfort, they can’t even get themselves a sandwich. At least, that’s what I pick up from the number of anonymous men on the Internet who seem so desperate for me to make them one. 1
    When you were anticipating power and ease, not getting it stings like a slap.
    There has been much discussion of the cohort of young adults born around the fall of the Berlin Wall as a ‘lost generation’, their dreams of prosperity dashed by the global recession. But let us be clear. When we talk about the young people who became adults after the dream of perpetual neoliberal expansion had died, after the jobs had disappeared and the funding had run out and the police had come out of the inner cities on to the main streets of every capital city to smash heads, when we talk about kids who suffered and imploded under the pressure of unmet expectations, we’re talking about men. When we talk about the ‘lost generation’, we are talking about men. 
    It is men’s dashed dreams that seem to matter most. And it is men’s resentful rage that makes their frustration fearful.
    NO MORE NEVER NEVER LAND
    For people who have grown up relying on privilege without even having to think about it too much, the sudden loss of that privilege hits you like a fist to the stomach on a sunny day – it’s the punch you weren’t expecting. Suddenly all of the things you thought were just going to happen to you when you reached a certain age, along with pubic hair and tax returns, don’t; it turns out that being part of the dominant half of the human race, being sexually and socially superior to women, being first in line for jobs and promotion, being taken seriously at work and at home, having your ideas listened to on their own merit precisely because you are a man – none of that is encoded. It is not your genetic inheritance. And it can be taken away.
    How are men supposed to cope with this loss of power in a society that still insists that the only way to be a man is to grab as much power as possible, to be rich, to be capable of extreme violence, to dominate other men physically and to dominate women sexually and emotionally? The received wisdom is that they’re not supposed to cope. Without power over others, particularly over women, men are supposed to crumble, to lash out, to collapse in an extravagant welter of identity implosion that leaves a suspicious mess on the carpet. If this is really the case,