INTO THE MANOSPHERE :::: WITH CHANEL Nº5 + SHISEIDO HANATSUBAKI

Several days later, I am still reeling from watching the Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix, Inside The Manosphere.

Although I was very aware of the likes of Andrew Tate and his disciples, and had read extensive articles on the topic of the newest misogny and aggressive bro culture that has infiltrated the minds of emotionally undernourished young men and boys worldwide (looksmaxxing anyone; smashing yourself deliberately in the face to make you look like a chiselled boxer?), I don’t think I had ever actually exposed myself to the reality of how these people operate; how they speak; how they denigrate; the sheer brutal hatred that shines from their eyes in the name of learning to ‘nut up’ or be a proper man. How they treat real, living women directly in view of the camera. I was horrified, flabbergasted.

There were several times in the programme when we gasped out loud. What these muscled up aggravators say to the women around them is so insulting, violent, awful, I could hardly sleep after and it has been going round and round in my head ever since. The pumped up aggression and body fascism; the gym addicted narcissism. The bedpost notches (‘the body count’). The horror of living in the Internet Age when any balance seems to have gone out the window and how this has become normalized for millions of hardened, frightened males around the globe. What it forebodes for the future.

If it seems as if I have been living under a rock, I really haven’t. We are all conscious of so much now but are unable to process it. The Tates and others like them are embraced at The White House: ultimately, we are unable to escape the Monster At The Centre Of It All, the great ‘POTUS’, whose influence in this regard has been incalculable; Epstein; Weinstein; #MeToo and then the swing back from it in completely the other direction in visceral reaction to the Pronoun Police and their left wing Gender Piety (which, for me, was also sometimes too calcified and unrealistic and oppressive) :I remember the moment that ‘Toxic Masculinity’ became the by-word for virtually all men and I though oh no, even if such a thing exists – and it does, surely; I hardly know a single woman who hasn’t been assaulted or affected by it in some way and macho behaviour truly is often very poisonous – but I also knew, instinctively, that there was no way half the world’s population was going to be tarred with the same brush and suddenly become ‘cancelled’. There would inevitably be an uprising; a rejection; an upward tsunami of testosterone in revenge.

And here we are.

I have been a victim of Male Rage quite a lot in my life, and others have been victims of mine. It is most definitely a thing (so is the female version, obviously but I am just talking from my own standpoint as I have not been able to experience that personally). Most men contain fifteen times more testosterone than most women; testosterone increases aggressivity. So there you go. There are male traits, characteristics; I demonstrate many of them myself. But surely the strict traditional binaries of gender are a still horrorshow for everyone – so restrictive, so much pressure to perfectly embody one or the other that it is difficult, sometimes to not go round the bend – I found growing up terrifying in that regard – constantly petrified I would be ‘found out’, that I was too girly; ashamed that I just couldn’t help myself dancing wildly to Shalamar’s A Night To Remember and autohypnotizing myself on my nine year old bedroom dancefloor to Blondie’s Rapture. I was just being myself – and I am still dancing to Debbie Harry -but words like sissy or poof still stabbed me like a mortal sword plunge through the gut. Hiding myself inside my young body; squaring my shoulders and trying to ‘walk like a man’. Folding myself awkwardly into a box that felt like an imprisoning straitjacket.

It is beyond my parameters to discuss an entire world of maleness, what it entails, and where it originates; so much has been written about how boys and men are ‘falling behind’ academically and in the work place; how they have lost their confidence now that traditional male behaviours have allegedly become so stigmatized that they don’t know what to do with themselves any more; how to act – and turning all females (their beloved mothers and sisters and daughters aside- one aspect of the documentary that was genuinely so pathetic; the tired old madonna-whore syndrome) into a despised enemy. To be conquered. Slighted. Raped.

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It sickened me. And watching the screen – here we go – you could see how they must smell. Doused in angry aromachemicals designed to phallically thrust their way into the female consciousness, a woman picked up on a tacky street in a tacky Spanish resort town invaded by horrible Brits and Americans and turned into a slaggish meatmarket of the lowest common denominator; an easily legible olfactory symbol to have her abject and ready. Here come the man. Scent; such a powerful, three dimensional forcefield around a person: one that can accentuate, and exaggerate certain aspects of a persona to cartoonish and grotesque levels; the ‘beast mode’ ‘and high projection’ high street perfumes now in circulation that denote a pig that ready to fuck. No subtlety. Just that bleak and furious viagra.

It needn’t be like this. What I was watching was insanity. Yes, you can say it is peripheral, a minority – but when governments are inviting these people into their buildings and administrations you know that that is not true; the influence these people have is real and monumental. Witness ‘Adolescence’ – that stunningly created drama that showed just what can happen when a vulnerable boy can come into contact with this vile pollution; it seems trivial to discuss smell in this context, perhaps, but the greater the ferocity of the Axe deodorants and the high street ‘perfumes’ contrasted with the moronic sugar of their female equivalents, I think it is fair to say that the currents in society are physically represented in the molecules that are heavily contaminating the literal air. What I was seeing in that programme is borne out precisely by what I receive in my nostrils the second I arrive back at the airport in the UK.

There are other possibilities, surely. In philosophy, of course, but also even in scent. Perfume can be the very opposite of a vicious assault on the senses aimed at your immediate surrender; it can so easily confer a magnetic aura; and enigmatic haze, an intellectual, emotional or erotic beckoning that augments you rather than turning you into a bombastic silo of x and y chromosome cliches that inevitably lead to a rut. Watching The Manosphere I could only guess what the ‘men’ in question – the rottweiler bros – would spray themselves with; the women too, who conformed to every possible stereotype of what you imagine the tacky ‘beauty influencer’ looks like; hair dyed cracked blonde; Donald Trump levels of foundation to dye your skin orange (why? WHY does skin have to look like this? I have never understood it, the reasoning behind it; the pancake up to the neck, it is so fucking ugly; who wants to caress someone’s cheek and come away with dark yellow panda prints?); that slathered on Kardashian eye makeup, those twitching, false lashes like dead butterflies caught in a glue trap.

I remember in the eighties when the first versions of harsh masculinity started appearing on the shelves. I detested them from the moment I smelled them – Dunhill, Tsar, Jazz – I felt personally infringed upon, as I did when Charlton Heston appeared on a screen. I have written about this before, in relation to Sauvage, so don’t want to repeat myself too much here (I can imagine some of you already rolling your eyes, yes yes Neil – we know you hate aggressive men’s perfumes), but as we were walking along yesterday in the Ofuna sunshine discussing our reactions to the documentary again – sometimes you ingest things so monumental and hideous you have no reactions to them; it is all so understood by the other person that it seems too pointlessly obvious to even go into it, but they inevitably resurface again later, and thinking about smell, I was saying to D, that once upon a time, perfumes, fragrances, ‘colognes’ if that is the only word you can handle using, were so much more subtle and mischievous; clever, even; sexually nuanced – less oppositional. They weren’t ‘transgender’ or compromising a person’s man or womanhood. They just contained multitudes. Iconic masculines like Fabergé Brut or Old Spice were powdery fougere carnations but innocently/lasciviously smooth and sweet; Elvis wore them, as did my dad and cousins. There was a cheapness, yes, but also a suave mystery that made you ponder; inhale. Look again. And this man’s lady – while he was slinking in Aramis or Givenchy Gentleman might have been wearing Cabochard or Miss Dior – sharp, deep, green, growling, reaching deep into patchouli’d sexuality and chic – or perhaps Chanel Nº5 – which I was wearing yesterday – also, in fact, no simplistic ‘bimbo’: with its layers of warmth and cold, masculinity and femininity; a bodily frankness in its plushed fading stages that suggests the pleasures of mutual entwinement; curiosity, and shared pleasure- not the callous, bed-notching hardfucking proposed by the dicks on the programme where ‘the opposite sex’ is a mere conquest, to be tossed aside afterwards like a bag of trash. You imagine the wearer of the original Dior, Eau Sauvage, or a rascal like Jules, being genuinely interested in the woman he is pursuing a night with – the chase of the seduction an excitement, sure, and why not? but you also imagine him wanting her, intrigued by her; worshipping her even………..not hating her.

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I think one of the reasons I am so (naively?) reacting so strongly to ‘Inside The Manosphere’ is because of where I live. Japan is hardly gender equality paradise – quite the opposite – there is certainly a lot of domestic violence here, Internet trolls are majorly on the rise, and just look how much groping goes on in public transport on a daily basis. There is an inbuilt resistance to women working in a variety of professions that are totally patriarchal in structure and don’t even try to hide it; even the language itself, in which men and women speak using different words to denote the self divides the sexes linguistically in a way that hard for the resistant native English speaker to adapt to (d and I can only say ‘watashi’, the basic, generalized ‘I’, never the standard masculine ‘boku’ and ‘ore’ – words I could no more bring myself to use than than I could say ‘atashi’ or ‘uchi’ – the feminine equivalents which would sound ridiculously camp and equally wrong, demonstrating that we have not really ever tried to adapt to the culture properly, stuck in our own particular lefty corner of gender liberal stubbornness).

As a perpetual foreigner, I will never really full infiltrate this culture and understand everything – the more intricate intricacies that still elude me. But at the same time, I have spent decades surrounded by Japanese colleagues and students, and what I observe and smell – there, but also out on the street, on the trains, everywhere in the cities – are my own genuine observations and inhalations. And the only ones stinking up the atmosphere with their bro-fumes are the increasing number of westerners, who smell so wrong in this air and stick out like toxic, rusting nails. Odourlessness is quite common; so are the natural smells – pleasant or unpleasant – that emanate from the average human body – neither smoking nor squiddy snacks do anyone many favours.But otherwise, when people are perceptibly fragrant, the pH balance is much nearer the centre than it in the western hemisphere; women in cedar/sandalwood, sweet boisés; or else fresh fruity or shampoo-like; or powder-kimono soft; but the boys also – clean; floral, savon-ish; cute+ Shiseido Tsubaki is a hair wash and conditioning combo I have mentioned before that is practically the National Perfume; washing powders and fabric softeners also sometimes have this rich, mid-octaved red floral smell that can sometimes be a little too loud in volume but still ultimately very pleasant; and actually, when up close, quite sensual, totally dependent on the individual. A person’s natural odour rising up with these scented additions. And therein lies the attractiveness; their breath, their skin essence , float up from within these abstractions, as in a vision.

Which is why I was really very fine yesterday wearing a rather pleasing limited edition perfume by Shiseido, Hanatsubaki – picked up, of course, for nothing from the junk yard (don’t you love the painted camellia on the box? – I do), and which is nothing original I suppose – an inheritor of some eighties and nineties fresher florality but which does have a convincingly fresh camellia-esque vernality and which smells lovely on the hair when wearing Chanel Nº5 – d said liked the combination when he leaned in – and so did I.

I am not, of course, that every male should be switching to a scent combination that could be read by many as being totally lacking in masculinity. But I felt entirely natural. A bit horny, actually. My body brings out interesting facets of the Chanel. Ambery, a bit naughty. Myself. And, as we walked under the blue sky, past the new cherry and peach blossom and the swathes of narcissi, I felt blissfully, blissfully, a million, million miles from those poor, misbegotten creatures in Marbella drowning pitifully – but so dangerously! – in their rabid anger, conspiracy theories, incel frustrations; their pointless, prophecy self-fulfilling cycles of woman-hating, noxious gender violence, and self hatred.