On The Shame We Share

The street between Charing Cross and St Martin's Lane is narrow enough that you can hear a disagreement before you can see one. It was late, the city had thinned out, and the people still on the pavement had mostly decided where they were going. I was on my way home from work. I heard it, then I turned the corner and saw it: a woman against a wall and a man in front of her, and that shape is one you recognise before you've processed it.

I said something. I don't remember exactly what — something adequately stupid that announced my presence and made clear I thought he should stop.

He turned around.

There's a particular moment in these situations, a few seconds of absolute stillness while both of you work out what the other is going to do. I grew up in places where this kind of calculation wasn't unusual. I'd had martial arts training. I wasn't especially frightened. I was also in London, which introduced a variable I hadn't quite finished computing: in the UK, if a fight starts and you look like the aggressor, you're the assailant in the eyes of the law regardless of what started it. I hesitated on that. I shouldn't have.

He put me on the ground, destroyed my laptop, a bag I couldn't really afford in the first place and my nose for good measure. Then he turned back to the woman and continued, considerably angrier than before I'd arrived.

The police weren't there. They weren't going to be.

The second time was different in a specific kind of way that made it worse. I turned a corner to see a woman being dragged along the street by the back of her neck, stumbling, a man pulling her with the same contempt and aggression you would if you had been hauling busted furniture to the tip. I stepped in. He stopped, stunned at my audicaity, and the woman turned on me — not on him, on me — furious: who did I think I was, how dare I, this was nothing to do with me. She exasperated it with real heat and proper venom, the kind that comes across as if I had tried to steal something from them or like I'd taken a shit on their new car; so I stood there and took it because I didn't have anything useful to say. Just, stunned shame.

I was around twenty-two across both of these. Neither felt like doing the right thing in any way I could identify. The first one hurt; the second one was, in its own way, worse.

Peter Lübeck is, to a lot of people in Malmö's gamedev scene, the kind of man you'd hold up as a role model. He wrote a post that I've been thinking about since. I replied to it (because, of course I did...), got ratio'd into something approaching oblivion, and it was suggested that I was strawmanning.

Fine. Worth talking about properly, then.

He opened his newspaper on Valentine's Day (a choice of day I assume was coincidental) and found several stories sharing what he called a dark red thread.

One was about twenty-eight women, aged sixteen to twenty-four, being sexually harassed on Vinted. Not a dating app. A second-hand clothes app, of all things. The harassment found them there anyway. Wtf.

One was about a call centre CEO who spent years running an abuse operation. Escalating. Systematic. The kind of thing that requires an institution's active cooperation to keep going, and got it.

Then the Epstein files, which despite the names they've surfaced have so far resulted in one person in prison. That person is a woman.

And then there's the Pelicot case.

You may already know it. It still deserves to be said plainly. Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife, Gisèle, regularly, for years. He advertised on a forum. Men came. They were between twenty-one and sixty-eight years old. Truck drivers, firefighters, freelance journalists, IT specialists. Married, divorced, single, fathers. The investigators looked for a common thread- a type, a pathology, anything that explained it; and found nothing. Fifty men with one thing in common: they lived nearby. One of them walked away when he understood what was happening, but he didn't call the police.

If you were looking for evidence that male violence against women is the exclusive preserve of disturbed individuals: outliers, people identifiable in advance - this is a case that kills that idea. They weren't exactly outliers. They were a cross-section. The sample was, in the most precise sense: representative.

Peter wrote that he's ashamed to be a man.

What the language is doing

He's not wrong about any of it. The Vinted harassment is real. The call centre CEO is real. Epstein is real. The Pelicot case is real and awful and I'm not about to sit here pretend otherwise or minimise the brutality of these cases.

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

That phrase is some serious heavy lifting given the prior context.

At one end: someone who told a bad joke fifteen years ago that nobody challenged, perhaps concluding from the silence it was fine, and has probably told it since. At the other: the men in the Pelicot case, who drove to a stranger's house and raped an unconscious woman. "Stepped out of line" covers both of these. Both fit, technically.

The bad-joke boy and the Pelicot men are not the same thing. The first claim (that most men have watched casual sexism go unchallenged) is probably true and likely worth sitting with. The second (that most men knowingly associate with abusers and look the other way) is a much larger assertion that Peter doesn't actually even argue for. It's just heavily implied by being placed it next to Pelicot. A reader who doesn't catch the slide ends up somewhere the argument hasn't actually taken them.

It matters because those two things justify completely different responses. The first justifies: call it out when you see it, low cost, compounds over time, actually changes something. The second justifies demographic guilt. He reaches for the second while his evidence holds up only the first.

I don't think he's being dishonest. He's so immersed in the weight of what he's describing that the distance between a bad joke and a rape feels, from where he is, like a matter of degree rather than kind. Maybe it is. But the ask at the Pelicot end of that scale is considerably larger, and more dangerous, than the ask at the bad-joke end.

And that calculation is one I happen to know something about.

what speaking up costs

The broken nose and the destroyed laptop are not the point. I'm raising them because "men should speak up" sounds straightforward until you've actually done it and found it comes with real consequences - up to and including violence - and that not everyone is built to absorb that, and I think that should be fine. I grew up in rough places, had kickboxing training, and it was still frightening. Frightening and, on both occasions, completely without effect.

There are other options, of course. You can call the police. You can film it. You can try to recruit bystanders.

None of these are free either. The police, if they arrive at all, arrive afterwards. Filming can escalate identically to confrontation. Recruiting bystanders under pressure, in the moment, with a hostile person three feet away - yeah, harder than it sounds from a safe distance. Think: most people on a pavement at night have already decided they're not involved.

So: look at the one man who walked away at the Pelicot scene. We treat his silence as a moral failure, and Peter does specifically. Maybe it was. But ask the more useful question: what would speaking up have actually cost him?

He was in the home of a man who had just demonstrated he was capable of organising the rape of his own wife. Speaking up meant potential violence from Pelicot, from the other men in that house. And then what; the police? Why are going to believe him, exactly? Over a group of men with an agreed story and a woman with no pain and no recollection? They could easily frame a the man as a disgruntled acquaintance with a grudge.

Silence was free. It was speaking up that was expensive, which is the trend.

My friend Charlene

I had a friend at school, Charlene, the year above me, six months older. We used to make up stories together, the inventive kind that eight-year-olds make up when they're bored and showing off. She was good at it. Better than me, probably.

One of those stories, as I found out much later, wasn't made up. Men coming into her room at night. Lying in her bed with her. I was eight. I thought it was part of the game. 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. She assumed it was the father — reasonable; he was violent and angry, the kind of man who fills a room with threat. She was wrong about him.

The whole time it was the grandmother. Selling access to her granddaughters to men from the pub.

The assumption my mother made was statistically defensible — the kind anyone would make, the kind the system was built to make. And because it was made, the father was kept away at exactly the moment it mattered most, which goes some way toward explaining the violence and the anger.

But the grandmother had something the father didn't: nobody looked at her. And as long as nobody looked, she could continue. Her own daughter knew, and covered for her. Social services removed the one person whose presence complicated the story. The system, doing exactly what it was designed to do, cleared the path.

Eventually social services cut the family's benefits — for not doing enough to protect the children. Without the benefits they couldn't pay rent. They lost the home.

They came to stay with us. My mum's tiny two-bedroom house: four daughters, a son, a mother, a grandmother. The father was not permitted to come.

Granny was.

She slept in my room. With me.

The family moved to Blackpool shortly after, (directly from our house, to get away from the ire of Coventry Social Services) and Charlene disappeared some time later. Nobody has ever been convicted.

I don't think all grandmothers are doing this. That's rather the point, but she also happens to be 100% of the peadophiles I've knowingly talked to.

She had intent, and she had protection. Take any one of those away and she's catchable. All of them together, and she slept in my room.

The structure didn't fail her victims despite working correctly. It failed them because it was.

closer to home

Ubisoft Massive was, when I joined it, the kind of studio where the work was the thing. Not your background, not where you came from, not your seniority — whether you had good ideas and could follow through on them. That felt rare enough that I didn't take it for granted. I wasn't particularly engaged with the DEI conversations happening around the industry at the time. It wasn't indifference exactly; it was more that the problem the initiatives were trying to solve didn't feel like it mapped onto the place I was actually working. I showed up, I did the work, I went home.

The mailing lists were where I first noticed something shifting. There were several — internal, opt-in, covering everything from local events to industry news to the kind of rambling tangential threads that accumulate in any large workplace. One of them had a dedicated soda appreciation thread. Someone had posted a Pepe the Frog image in it — the green cartoon frog that had, by that point, been associated with alt-right communities online, though the association was contested and the frog had been around as a general-purpose internet meme long before any of that. The thread was wholesome. The image was clearly not intended as a political statement. It was a frog on a soda thread.

The response was not proportionate to the provocation. The person who posted it ended up in HR.

I remember thinking: that's going to change how people use these lists. It did. The pile-ons that followed similar incidents — someone using a word the manosphere had also used, someone suggesting, carefully and with visible caveats, that perhaps individuals ought to be assessed as individuals — got progressively less about the specific thing said and more about the demonstration that saying it was not permitted. The lists got so toxic they had to be shut down.

Around the same time I was told, without irony, that my next hire had better be a woman. The other men in the room strongly defended the position.

I noted it and moved on.

Some time later I was at an after-work dinner with colleagues. A very senior person in the scene — someone with real influence, someone people listened to — said, plainly, that she fucking hates men. I asked her to clarify, because that seemed like the kind of thing worth clarifying. All men, she said. The other people at the table — none of whom had harmed anyone, none of whom knew of anyone who had — leaned in and backed her up.

I didn't say anything useful. I've thought about why since.

(Some of my discomfort with calling it out was probably internalised sexism — the same trained instinct to defer that the culture had been, not without reason, trying to correct. Some of it was a legitimate objection to the thing being said. I've decided it's at least partly both, which is not a satisfying conclusion but is probably the honest one.)

I'm sure we all felt very clean about ourselves on the way home.

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.

Meanwhile, Serge Hascoët was running his operation completely untouched.

You may know the name. Ubisoft's chief creative officer, and generally a rather unlikable cunt. And Ubisoft, as in Ubisoft Massive — roughly thirty percent of Malmö's entire gamedev scene. A French court eventually convicted him 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 told to stop talking. Systematic suppression, all while the company rolled out DEI initiatives to bring more women in. He got one suspended sentence. Zero jail time.

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

She was also a woman.

The point isn't that her presence exonerates the men above her. The point is that she was the mechanism. Complaints went to her. She buried them. Serge didn't operate despite the system — he operated through it, with her active assistance. She held the institutional role specifically created to dismantle exactly this kind of culture, and she used it to insulate him instead.

So when someone says it's men's job to hold other men accountable: what does that mean when the person holding the actual lever — with the mandate, the authority, and the access — chose not to pull it? I worked at Massive. I'm a man, Serge was a man, and by the demographic logic that's the variable that's supposed to matter. But I had no power over him. She did. What would my speaking up, had I even known, have actually cost me?

I know exactly what. I also know it wouldn't have been enough.

(this is the bit nobody wants to talk about)

Here is what the framework, applied consistently, requires of men: speak out, regardless of cost. Hold other men accountable. Be prepared to sacrifice — your career, your safety — because the alternative is complicity. If you stay silent, you're part of it. If you object to this, you're proving the point. If you feel shame, you're at least being honest. If you don't feel shame, that's the problem — your comfort is the evidence.

There is no correct answer in that list. Every response confirms the charge.

Most people, I think, would find that framework uncomfortable applied to any other demographic. Not because the statistics aren't real — but because we broadly understand that guilt doesn't transfer between people who share a characteristic, that collective shame isn't justice, and that demanding endless contrition from people who haven't done anything is prejudice, not justice. If you're not sure whether you'd apply this framework elsewhere, try it. Notice what you feel.

The standard objection here is that the analogy breaks down because gender involves structural power in ways that race or religion 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's bigotry looking for a justification.

Peter says there's a lack of male role models who speak out. He's right. I think this is partly why — not because men are cowards, but because the framework has no place for a man who opposes injustice and also doesn't think his gender is something to apologise for. That position doesn't exist in it. The only exit is contrition, performed indefinitely, to an audience that will never declare the debt paid.

A teenage boy reading that post doesn't get a role model. He gets a verdict on his existence before he's done anything.

so what actually fixes it

Think about who was even left to speak up about Serge by the time it mattered. Everyone who'd tried had already been quietly managed out, blacklisted, or made an example of. Rose McGowan spent years being surveilled, smeared, and shut down before a single outlet would print a word — and she had a public platform most people don't. The silence around these things doesn't mean nobody objected. It means the people who objected aren't there anymore. I still feel bad for the ones who did the maths and stayed quiet — not as much as for the victims, obviously, but I can't see it as black-and-white.

So "men should hold men accountable" is asking the people who've already been removed from the room to speak up from outside it. It's the same dynamic as my opening section — I stepped in twice, got a broken nose and a woman screaming at me for my trouble, and both situations ended exactly as they would have if I'd walked past. You can demand individual sacrifice all you like. It doesn't change the outcome if the structure doesn't support it.

Right now a complaint at Ubisoft went to Cornet. Cornet buried it. The person who filed it got a quiet reprimand and a blacklisting. The person who buried it kept her salary, her title, and eight more years of doing the same thing. That's the sum the system was running. Every individual who tried to do the right thing paid for it. Everyone who didn't, didn't.

Fix the fucking sum.

Reporting needs somewhere to go that isn't inside the organisation being reported on. Consequences need to land on institutions when complaints are suppressed — not solely on the person brave or stupid enough to file them. When burying a complaint is the thing that ends careers rather than advancing them, the calculation changes for everyone, not just the rare few willing to be destroyed in the process.

That's not a men's problem to solve. It's not a women's problem either. It's legislation with actual teeth, aimed at the organisations that currently run this for years on the perfectly rational assumption that nobody will ever pay for it. Make that assumption wrong, and you don't need martyrs.

anyway

Peter ends his post with terror for his daughter. I understand that completely — the world the Pelicot case describes is real and she's going to have to live in it. But sons are reading that post too, and I want to say something to them.

You are the sum of your actions. Not the actions of men you've never met, not the actions of men who share your demographic, not the actions of men who lived before you were born. Yours. You get measured on those — the same way a woman does, the same way anyone does. That's equality. Not the version where you accept collective guilt to prove you're one of the good ones.

Most of it isn't dramatic. You don't laugh at the joke. You give the look when someone says something awful. You'd be surprised how much that actually does — most people want to be decent, but the moment they get social permission to act otherwise they find ways to tell themselves it's fine. Everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story. Nobody decides to be the bad guy. Quietly withdrawing that permission, consistently, is most of the work.

And the people treating you like shit for being a man? They think they're justified. They think they're on the right side of it — because isn't it men who abuse women? Well, yeah. Say "not all men" and they'll tell you "but always men" and feel clean about it. The same social protection that lets abusers act with impunity is working, right now, to let them take it out on you. Same mechanism. Different target. Don't fall for it.

You're actual and whole and complete. Just don't be an arsehole and you're good, mate. For real.

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

Don't feel bad for being a boy.