The masculinity I admire: and why so many modern men have lost our respect

Are you a protector, or part of the problem?

It is a bitterly cold night in Hampshire, England, in the early fifties. The snow has drifted up high across the marshes and even the acrid salts of the seas bruise against the ice. Five men march across the frozen reeds and wastelands, undeterred by the winds. It’ll be another hour until they are out of the cold. But they have a mission. A man in a neighbouring village to Gosport came out of the public house that night, and molested a 15 year old stenographer coming home from the boat yard. The police don’t take things like that seriously in this era; but these men do. These men know what their role is. They don’t quibble over whether she deserved it, or whether it was her fault. They don’t look the other way. They don’t muse over her body count or how lonely the man might be. They don’t stare down at their TikTok and make it someone else’s problem. There is no question in their heads that they are going to stop this man ever doing that again. What happened to that man would be a story my grandpa would tell us forty years later. He was enormously proud of what he did that night. He never knew the young girl’s name, but he wanted her to know that the men in her community had seen her ripped blouse and bruised throat, and gone out that night into the dark after the beast that did that to her. Every girl and woman in Gosport was safer after what they did that night; because the predators were scared now.