When I was a kid, let’s say around ten – elevenish, all us boys used to play skull.

It was a game passed down to us by the older boys. Older, therefore cooler and not to be questioned.

It wasn’t a very highbrow game. Nor a game, if we’re honest. It consisted in shouting “SKULL!” and hitting another boy in the bollocks. The victim had then ten seconds to hit another boy’s prick, otherwise he would be deemed gay, only in far less politically correct terms.

Why this game was called skull is a doubt I’ll carry to my grave.

Only very few of us small-town kids had a vague idea of what a gay was, but it had already been presented to us as a scenario you literally had to fight not to be in. Proof of the fact we didn’t really understand what homosexuality was is the fact that we demonstrated our not being gay by hitting another boy’s cock. Maybe the rules were slyly drafted by an actual gay boy in order to turn his own bullies into dick-chasing enthusiasts, who knows?

However it went, there are childhood friends around whom nowadays I’m scared to be next to without a cover over my crotch, not so much because I’m scared about being considered gay, but because I still don’t enjoy being punched in the dick.

There was also a nameless, less violent variant of the game, in which if someone touched your ear, you had then ten seconds to touch your own forehead or – again – you’d be labelled gay. (The goal was in being stealthy and not let the other guy realise you touched his ear, or pretend it was an “accident.”)

Still, the older boys who taught us skull didn’t just appear from thin air, and the chief suspect in the toxic masculinity case are the older men, the authoritative figures. All those men that at some point in your life will warn you to “fast your seatbelt, because you’re going to crash into a truckload of pussy.”

Maybe they change the metaphor, but at some point in every man’s life, you are approached by men older than you who will talk to you about women, about fanny, and about sex with an ease that you know you’ll never fulfil.

For example, your uncle shows up at Christmas and – without any malice, in fact, often this is the only way he knows how to bond with a prepubescent kid – tells you, eyes shifting to and from like he’s about to sell you a kilo of heroin:

“Boy, come here… I know why you’re not doing well in school: because of THIS!”

And he presents his hands, thumbs and index joined together to form a fairly loose vagina.

And you find yourself on Jesus’ birthday trying to interpret these signs, like you’re a gangbanger, and ask:

“Is that… is that a water drop? Is that a reference to Pokèmon blue, uncle? Because in that case, you’re right: that’s exactly why I’m not doing well in school, how do you know? Please don’t tell mum and dad!”

“No! It’s the pussy!”

And so you look at his hairy knuckles and nicotine stained long fingernails and think:

“The pussy is like Uncle’s fingers? I hoped something more! Maybe when the other day I failed to punch that guy in the testicles within ten seconds really turned me gay.”

Or, also, the school janitors, if males, would hound you every time you went to the toilet with an obtuse smile painted on and say:

“Did I tell you about that time…?”

And you were like yes, you did, I beg of you not to repeat that story again… and it was always a story ending in: “…And then I fucked her doggy-style!”

Oh, thank Christ that you regaled me with this story today as well. Now I can go back to study the Iliad with more confidence.

Or the coach, most important, as he substituted the paternal figure in the team dynamics. When I used to play football, the coach used to tell us, literally:

“Listen to me: on Saturday, don’t shag, otherwise you’ll get cramps on Sunday while you’re on the pitch.”

And you’re thirteen.

And the understanding is that you’re a person who has the kind of relationship with women and sex that on a Saturday night, when the inevitable swarm of women jumps on you to feed off your manliness, has to fend them off by saying:

“AH! No! Stop! For tomorrow we play in Stockport, and I wouldn’t want to disappoint the gaffer.”

Then, if you do get cramps on Sunday, you’re told to wrap your leg in a hot and moist wrap, not so veiled reference to a fanny, cause and solution of every problem in your life as a man, who, once injured, doesn’t have Ibuprofen, but a lady ready to brush her flaps up and down his shin.

And all this stay with men, who know that they will have to have this relationship with women, or they won’t be as manly as the men they saw growing up.

And I fear that men will never stop to do this because, now that I’m in my thirties, I see many men my age has started doing this with sons, nephews, younger colleagues, and so on.

If you’re a twenty year old man and you are at a work do, stay away from your older man colleague, because after two pints, he will try and teach you how to sleep with all the twenty-something year old ladies who work with you. Ladies with whom, when he was your age, he wouldn’t have spoken to, but now HE knows how to woo them. This bald, tipsy ghost whispering unrequited tips in your ears.

Spoiler alert: it’s always sexual harassment, like “Make her feel your presence, they love it” i.e. Thrust your cock against her while dancing, or “Show her you don’t get easily discouraged,” i.e. keep following her in what is literally stalking even though she said no to you several times.

I’m convinced stalking really stems from the fact that, growing up, we’re told by older men that women love a man who doesn’t give up, so that some men genuinely believe that a woman saying no is just testing their resolve.

So, to balance this, women should start doing the opposite.

Perhaps women should start telling younger boys how little they’re going to shag in their life. Just to balance it out. But, like, already when they’re only young.

For example, an eleven year old boy didn’t do his homework? If the teacher is a woman, she could go:

“Harvey, why didn’t you do your homework? Surely you weren’t shagging, because, I mean, with that face! MUAHAHAHAH!!”

“Why, prof? In front of everybody! Boooh-ooooh-oooh!”

Or if you’re a GP and a boy needs to drop his pants in front of you, just go:

“C’mon, just drop your pants, then. I can’t imagine when you’re going to have another occasion to do so in front of a woman, with that face! MUAHAHAHAH!”

“Oh no, why? Here, as well! BOOOOOH-OOOOH-OOOOH!”

You see, it won’t sort the problem out, but it’d be like contrasting waves.

So, what I’m trying to say is that toxic masculinity is to blame on women.

Just joking. It’s to blame on men, to nobody’s surprise.