On being 'hard'

Andrew Tate, masculinity and the 1990s.

I don’t have the best memory in the world. But I can still name (in order) the ‘hardest’ boys in my year at comprehensive secondary school in the 1990s. Not that you would care:

1. Dave W.

=2. Lennie W

=2. Ronnie O

4. Nicky M.

And so on. Sad, isn’t it? Sad that I can remember. Doubly sad, that how ‘hard’ you were at school was such an important marker of social status.

If you went to a normal comprehensive school, from a normal UK anywhere town, I reckon there’s a decent chance you could do the same. What’s that all about?

When my friend Barry punched through a car window and then knocked someone out for having looked at him wrong, he became a school A-Lister. And as for the regional tough kids – they were mini-celebrities, and often had extremely good hair, too.

Academics and others like to talk of the importance of understanding the ‘lived experience’. Unless you lived that, I’m not sure you fully understand how much this was a defining feature of teenage life for boys growing up around the country.

Mid-sized towns seemed to have it worst, although I might just be saying that because it’s where I’m from. Between the age of 13 and 19 I lived in Chatham in Kent. But if you went to almost any similar sized town over the weekend aged between 15 and 25 – even ones that appear ‘pretty’ and ‘pleasant’ and ‘historic’ and ‘wealthy’ – there was an air of constant menace. The most dreaded four words in the English language at that age were ‘what you looking at’? It could come at you from anywhere, and was the opening salvo for a punch-up. For reasons no-one can fully explain, looking at someone for a split second too long was - and still is - seen as an act of war. Once those four words were uttered, there was no way out. I was once at a fairground and a group of lads asked what I ‘was looking at’. I probably said something idiotic like ‘shit hasn’t got a label, mate’.

I got severely beaten up for that. It wasn’t my fault! A mysterious social pressure that meant any kind of weakness would have been social suicide.