On The Shame We Share

Peter Lübeck, a prominent figure in Malmö's gamedev scene, recently wrote that he's ashamed to be a man. which is a sad thing to say for someone who is a role model to many.

The thing is, that he's not wrong about any of the things he's angry about. The Pelicot case. Epstein. The call centre CEO who spent years running what was, essentially, an abuse operation against his own staff. Women being harassed on a fucking secondhand clothing app of all things. These are real, and they're really awful.

I wrote a reply suggesting demographic shame was the wrong response. The replies taking me apart got significantly more support than my point did. A few suggested I was strawmanning.

Fine. Worth talking about then.

His Strongest Point

Men commit approximately 97% of reported sexual offences, consistently, across every Western jurisdiction that tracks it. Not contested. Not arguing that this isn't the case.

The Pelicot case is the sharpest version of this argument. Within a small geographical area, dozens of ordinary men (truck drivers, firefighters, IT guys, fathers) raped an unconscious woman who had been habitually drugged by her husband. There was no shared pathology, nor obvious common thread. Just men who lived nearby and said yes when asked. One walked away when he realised what was happening, but he didn't call the police.

For Peter; this kills his more "comfortable" idea that male violence belongs exclusively to disturbed individuals. He's right that this idea was wrong. Ordinary people, without obvious pathology, do terrible things when the conditions allow it.

I'm not going to argue with that. The question is what follows from it.

What The Language Is Doing

Peter writes that all men know men who have "stepped out of line, spoken derogatorily of women, or wouldn't take no for an answer."

"Stepped out of line" is doing enormous work in that sentence.

At one end: someone who told a bad joke fifteen years ago that went unchallenged. At the other: the exceptional depravity of the Pelicot case. His evidence supports the first, but he reaches for the second. Most readers won't catch the slide, which means they end up somewhere the argument hasn't actually taken them.

Asking people to comment about being uncomfortable when someone tells an off-colour joke: Entirely reasonable. Carrying collective guilt for crimes committed by strangers: a smidge less reasonable. He requests the second but only lays a passable argument for the first.

What Speaking Up Costs

Look, I've stepped in on domestic violence twice. The phrase "men should speak up" hits your ears very different when you know what it means.

The first time was on a street between Charing Cross and St Martin's Lane in London, on my way home from work. The attacker rose to meet my condemnation with further aggression- directed at me, I hesitated (in the UK you think twice; wrong move and you're the assailant in the eyes of the law) and he put me on the ground, destroyed my laptop, a bag I couldn't afford to replace (or afford in the first place, realistically) & my nose - then went right back to what he was doing, angrier. The second time, the woman being dragged around by the back of her neck became furious at me for interfering. I was around 22 years old. I'll tell you concretely: ieither felt like I was doing the right thing in any meaningful way, I was attacked and scolded and it changed nothing. Both were frightening, and bare in mind: I grew up in violent places and had martial arts training.

There are other options, of course. Calling the police, filming it, trying to gather people nearby. None of them are free either. The police often don't arrive (and if they do: it's post-fact, obviously), filming can escalate in the same way confrontation can, persuading bystanders to act together under pressure is harder than it sounds from a safe distance. The point isn't that physical intervention is the only option. It's that the cost of intervening is real regardless of the form it takes, and not everyone is built to absorb it. I think those people aren't "lesser men" for it.

The Part He's Right About

Men are responsible for the culture immediately around them. I think Peter is right about that, even if I'd put it differently. (IE; that men are not unique in that aspect).

Most of it isn't dramatic. If someone makes a joke you found disagreeable and you changed the subject, to me that is a signal. A real one. Most people calibrate their behaviour on reinforced feedback; jokes that don't land stop getting made. People corrected without being destroyed tend to actually change.. but these aren't the great sacrifices being called for: but they're low-cost and they compound over time. The ask should be that: the ordinary, undramatic correction of the culture within reach. Not martyrdom. Not career destruction.

I've been in Malmö's gamedev scene for twelve years. If you want to know what that culture looked like on the ground: men performing contrition for existing, internal mailing lists weaponised for social-justice pile-ons until they had to be shut down, and at least one occasion where I was told, without irony, that my next hire had better be a woman (a move strongly defended by the other men in the studio). Serge^{[more on him later]}, meanwhile, was running his operation completely untouched. The people with no institutional power were being punished for their demographic. The person with all of it was unreachable until a criminal court got involved. People subsequently pointed to Serge as proof the punishment of the former was justified. I've never quite worked out the logic of that, but I can say that it was stated with great confidence.

The pinch

Peter says there's a lack of solid male role models. I agree.

Look, though, at what his post models as the correct masculine response: shame. He doesn't mention that if you're ashamed, you're confirming maleness is the problem, and implicitly, if you're not ashamed, that proves you're part of the bad stuff men do. The framework doesn't seem to distinguish between men who feel solidarity with victims and men who are complicit; absence of visible shame reads as evidence that you are comfortable with the suffering women face at the hands of some men. It's a closed loop. Congratulations: you're guilty.

Some people reading this will say that shame about male behaviour doesn't have to mean shame about being male: that you can feel ashamed of what some men do the same way you feel ashamed, as a human, about what humans are doing to the planet. That's a coherent position. That's not what is happening.

And, what I'm arguing against is that it is not the position the post builds. A teenage boy reading Lübecks emotional appeal doesn't take away "here's how to be part of the solution." He takes away a debt he incurred before he was old enough to have done anything.

Peter ends with terror for his daughter, which I understand completely, but he forgets that son's exist too; and what is he putting into the world for them to grow from? Collective guilt that can never be put down without being labelled as "the problem".

My friend Charlene.

The structures that enable abuse don't much care about the demographics of who's exploiting them. They care about who has access and who won't be believed.

I know this more concretely than I'd like to.

I had a friend at school- Charlene, the year above me, six months older. We used to make up rather inventive stories together. One of those stories, as it turned out later, wasn't made up: men coming into her room at night to lie in her bed with her. I was eight. I thought she was joking. I didn't tell anyone. (See, I was part of the problem!)

My mum had caught wind that social services suspected a paedophile in the family home, and she assumed it was the father. Reasonable assumption; he was violent and angry. Though not, as it happens, in the way anyone assumed.

It was the grandmother. Selling access to her granddaughters to people from the pub.

The assumption my mother made (reasonable, statistically defensible, the kind anyone would make) meant the father was kept away at exactly the moment it mattered most. Which goes some way toward explaining the violence and the anger, if you think about it. Social services eventually cut funding for the family home on the basis that the mother had maintained a living situation around a suspected abuser. They came to stay with us while they figured out what came next. The father wasn't permitted to come.

Granny slept in my room. With me.

They moved to Blackpool shortly after, directly from our house to avoid social services. Charlene disappeared some time later. Nobody has ever been convicted.

I don't think all grandmothers are doing this. But then, that's rather the point. She happens to be a hundred percent of the paedophiles I've personally known about.

It wasn't institutions that protected her. It was assumptions. It was her own daughter; who hid it, covered for her, kept it going even while it destroyed her own children's lives. Nobody had named the father. Nobody needed to. There was a man in the house and a suspected paedophile, then that has to be the same person. He couldn't be there for his daughters because we drew the "obvious" conclusion. While granny slept in my room, with me.

Meanwhile, In Malmö

Serge Hascoët was Ubisoft's chief creative officer and a generally rather unlikable cunt.. It's relevant to Lübeck because it's: Ubisoft Massive (as-in: roughly 30% of Malmö's entire gamedev scene) that is in his collective view. A French court finally convicted Serge of psychological harassment and "complicity" in sexual harassment, if you know the rumours then you know that this is a fucking joke. Eight years of complaints buried, staff silenced, total systematic suppression, all while the company rolled out DEI initiatives to bring more women in presumably for the aforementioned harassment. He got one suspended sentence. No jail time.

The person whose job was specifically to stop this was Cécile Cornet, Ubisoft's global head of human resources. Named in the lawsuit as directly responsible for maintaining the conditions that let it continue. Also a woman.

The point isn't that her presence exonerates anyone. It's that she held the one institutional role designed to catch exactly this, and she failed the victims just as completely as the men above her. I worked at Massive, which means I share Malmö's general collective shame for the whole thing. But the idea that I bore more institutional responsibility than Cornet, because I happen to be a man, doesn't hold. She had the power and the mandate. What would my speaking up, had I even known, have cost me? I know exactly what. I also know it wouldn't have been enough.

The variable that predicted abuse at Ubisoft wasn't demographics. It was impunity, and the cost of ending it landing on individuals rather than institutions.

The structure underneath

Strip away the specifics and you have: a demographic commits crimes at elevated rates, therefore members of that demographic carry collective guilt.

Apply that to any other group. You probably already have one in mind. Notice the discomfort.

That discomfort is the argument.

The standard objection is that the analogy breaks down because gender involves structural power in ways that race/religion/whatever doesn't. But the objection to collective demographic guilt was never only about power: it's that guilt doesn't transfer between individuals who share an immutable characteristic. That principle either holds or it doesn't. Deciding it holds for some demographics and not others isn't a principled position, it becomes bigotry looking for a justification.

What Would Fix It

Think about what speaking up about Hascoët would have cost anyone, not just someone at the bottom like me. Your career at Ubisoft? Definitely. Probably your reputation in an industry where everyone knows everyone too. Some of the people who said nothing weren't moral cowards; they'd watched what happened to the ones who spoke, and they knew they couldn't afford to be next. Rose McGowan spent years being surveilled, smeared, and quietly blacklisted before anyone would print a word. I still feel bad for the ones who did the maths and stayed quiet, not as much as the victims of course, but I can't see it as black-and-white.

"Men should hold men accountable" doesn't grapple with any of that. It asks individuals to take career-ending, sometimes physically dangerous personal risk to compensate for institutions that won't do their job. You can't build a functional system on the expectation that enough people will keep volunteering to take the hit. At some point the pool shrinks to nothing, either by attrition or because the only people left in the room have already decided the culture suits them fine.

The calculation changes when speaking up stops being a personal sacrifice and starts being a protected act. Right now, a complaint at Ubisoft went to Cornet. Cornet buried it. Eight years of that. The person who reported got nothing, maybe even a reprimand and a private blacklisting; the person who buried it kept her salary and her title. That's the sum the system is currently running.

Obviously: fix the fucking sum. Reporting needs somewhere to go that isn't inside the organisation being reported on. Consequences need to land on the institution when complaints are suppressed, not solely on the individual brave or foolish enough to file them. When the career risk runs in the other direction (when burying a complaint is the thing that ends careers), the culture shifts without requiring anyone to be destroyed in the process.

That's not a "men's problem" to solve, it's collective: it's legislation with actual teeth, aimed at the organisations that currently let this run for years on the very real assumption that nobody will pay for it.

anyway

Peter asked, in good faith, what male role models look like. Here's one answer: a man who thinks sexism is wrong, that abusers should face consequences, that when someone comes forward the response shouldn't be to bury it, and who also thinks his gender isn't something to apologise for.

Most men in this industry won't say that. I've watched, over twelve years, that the cost of dissent become progressively less negotiable, and the quiet normalisation of contempt for men treated as a reasonable position. The pool of people willing to say anything shrinks accordingly. The silence makes a bad argument look unanimous when it isn't.

For the juniors, the students, the boys reading this: you don't have to accept demographic guilt to be a decent person. Do what you can, when you can. Support victims. Don't be an arsehole. That's it.

Sexism doesn't stop being sexism because it's well-intentioned.

And, don't feel bad for being a boy.