.silentcult.

“Don’t tell me to be more like a man. I don’t understand”. As a boy, I was told to ‘toughen up’ a lot. Masculinity and manliness were seen as important qualities, and if you didn’t exhibit these then you were seen as weak, inferior, or somehow deficient. I never, ever understood that. Masculinity is often so toxic and it’s a contagious disease. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to do things that are stereotypically masculine, go for it, but don’t tell me I’m less of a person if I don’t want to do those things.

Growing up, men weren’t allowed feelings. Feelings were for girls. Feelings were weakness. Vulnerability was seen as something to be taken advantage of. Well, that is the most patriarchal nonsense I’ve ever heard. I’m fully aware that I’m a cisgendered male, but that doesn’t mean that my bandmates and I can’t be staunch feminists. Even though we don’t have bras to burn, we still want to smash the patriarchy, and that’s what this song is about: taking on the institutions that try and force you to ‘be a man’.

For me, there was nowhere this was more prevalent than the church. I went to a religious primary school where we had to go to hapel every day, and it was these ‘Fathers’ that seemed to preach about being a man as much as they spoke about fearing someone that you couldn’t see, who would damn to Hell you if you sinned. I soon decided that this wasn’t for me. I was already being called weakling, loser, f*g, so rebelling against such an obvious source of these toxic qualities seemed like a no-brainer. I don’t have anything against religious people, and I know that there are many good hearted people of faith in the world, so Heresy isn’t an anti religion song in general. But the lessons that those in my childhood tried to teach me were wrong on so many levels. Be tough. Don’t be gay. Fear God or he’ll punish you. Well, no thanks. I’ll sin as I please and deal with it later.

There’s a Sartre quote at the end of the video that says “If I have gained anything by damning myself it is that I no longer have anything to fear”. This song is for everyone who damned themselves to be free“