The parade of high-profile men doing wrong is getting exhausting

This coming Thursday is International Men's Day. Unaware of it? So are most carbon-based life forms, even though it's been around for about three decades now.

Google Trends advises that the term "International Men's Day" bumps along at low rates of interest most of the year, with two identifiable annual spikes; one smaller, one larger.

The smaller occurs around now, in the lead-up to the day itself — November 19.

The larger spike occurs in early March, around International Women's Day. It doesn't take an expert to decode the March spike; men who've just seen a poster for International Women's Day (IWD) and want to know why there isn't a day for them, or women juggling a tray of IWD-themed cupcakes who've just been asked that question by a male colleague and are googling it with the other hand to confirm their vague recollection that it's not that there isn't one, it's just that nobody organised a brunch and a speaker for it.

It's coming along, though, and there are events planned for Thursday, a day on which we are encouraged to reflect on the broad patterns of male experience that are visible from space: higher suicide rates, shorter life span, higher likelihood of violent death, lower performance at all levels of education.

This year's theme? "The Future is Everyone."

How awkward, then, that the November pre-sizzle to International Men's Day has so far consisted of a daily, multi-nation parade of high-profile men for whom the future — and indeed the present, and the past too — are mainly organised around a far more specific and compelling figure: ME ME ME.

In the United States, there's a president for whom even a crushing performance review from 125 million constituents cannot dislodge his conviction that what struggling Americans really want is more detail about the chandelier-count in his billion-dollar ballroom.

Or Jensen Huang, the "godfather of AI" who over three decades single-handedly built a company silicon-paving humanity's path to a future in which we either lounge about doing craft projects on a living wage or are torn apart by robot dogs (nobody's quite sure which), only to undo it all using only his penis.

In the UK, formerly beloved TV stars and writers Russell Brand and David Walliams are confronted with the carefully catalogued consequences of their actions and conclude that the real victim is … themselves.

And in Australia this very week, we find ourselves once more ensnared in an intense argument among Australia's best-known cricketing men about exactly who knew what, and when, about whether sandpaper was going to be secreted in the jocks of a bowler in Cape Town eight years ago.

What purpose does this new outbreak of finger-pointing, flounce-outs, self-justification and mic-drop moments serve? Apart from ensuring that a fresh new generation of junior cricketers can be as confused and disappointed as their predecessors were back in 2018?

You can dress it up as the pursuit of justice, or the righting of wrongs, or the promotion of a book, but let's call it what it is: a handful of guys who feel they were personally wronged by the way the last village-burning went, and are now torching the joint again to correct the record.

This whole month feels like one of those old choose-your-own-adventure novels, where every single storyline leads to a dude who has let everyone down but still wants to go for a coffee about it.

So, what is it about this parade that has caused anyone with an internet connection and two X chromosomes to want more than usual to go for a lovely lie down in the snow and never get up?

I think it's the shamelessness. The relentless, insistent, main-character energy that leads some humans — having done a wrong or been proved wrong — to argue the toss or return to the scene in the garb of a victim, rather than do the normal human thing, which is to go to bed indefinitely in a soup of self-loathing and hope that someone else will soon take the heat off you by doing something exponentially worse.

In a way, it's transfixing. Also, to a bone-deep level, exhausting.

Let's go to the details, starting with Russell Brand, whose conviction and 10-year sentence for rape rather crystallises the speculation that has mounted around him over the course of this century. This may or may not have inspired him to move to America, convert to Christianity, be baptised by Bear Grylls and engineer an entrée into the kind of conspiracy theorist circles where a sexual assault allegation is a fungible token of victimhood.

The re-Branding exercise allows this story to continue to be — for Russell Brand and his remaining fans — about Russell Brand, rather than the young women he groped, raped or abused.

Asked if he had anything to say to the women his son was convicted of assaulting, Brand's dad Ronald snapped at reporters outside court this week:

"The victim? What, Russell? The girls, you mean, who chased him and harassed him? Is that what you mean?"

Or David Walliams, another British TV star and writer long reputed to have used his celebrity as a pretext for approaching young women. Confronted with allegations of this behaviour after several journalists worked for years with multiple women, Walliams demanded their stories be suppressed, as their publication would — given his fame — cause him distress to the point at which he was likely to kill himself.

Fame, in other words — having for years delivered this guy just about whatever and whomever he wanted — could now be repurposed as victimhood.

In Walliams's public statement, the key paragraph ran to 36 words, five of which were "I" or "me":

"I am not a sexual predator. I have not broken the law, but I am devastated that some of the women I met 10 to 20 years ago have now expressed hurt or anger towards me."

Spare a thought for the other victims, though. Like fellow celebrity Jonathan Ross.

As MC of the 15th British Comedy Awards in 2004, Ross got a big laugh by likening the comedy gong to any other 15-year-old: "It's drunk, it's unpredictable and it's probably going home with David Walliams."

Four years later, co-hosting a BBC Radio show with Russell Brand, Ross was recorded shrieking "He f***ed your grand-daughter!" as Brand left voicemail after voicemail for actor Andrew Sachs (famous for playing Manuel in Fawlty Towers). In one of the messages, Brand croons: "It was consensual … and she wasn't menstrual …"

Ross would now like everyone to know that he didn't know anything about any of it, and someone else wrote the joke for him, and had he known his pals were actual creeps, he absolutely would have done something about it.

This is part of the exhaustion, for any normal member of the public who's bought the tickets, bought the T-shirts, bought the books, taken their kids along to the live events or the games or in any way boarded the bus, liked and subscribed, only to discover there's a whole VIP lounge up the back where everyone's necking champagne and braying at a joke from which cattle class have been excluded.

Finding this out is bad enough. But when the charlatans involved still think they can talk you back onto the bus? And would like you to consider just how rough this has all been for them? My God. Where does this level of shamelessness come from?

Not to dwell too grimly on the misdeeds of chaps we've actively invited into the lives of our children, but this Big Me Energy was unmistakeable in Australian writer Craig Silvey's 9,000-word apologia, published on Substack this month as he trudged off to prison convicted of possessing and distributing child exploitation material.

I haven't counted how many times the words "I" and "me" were deployed in this screed, mainly because doing so would involve Nvidia chips and I don't want to get pregnant, but they certainly appeared a lot.

Silvey devoted the bulk of his unsolicited essay to a discussion of his own trauma: sexual and physical abuse in his childhood; a brother who defrauded him; a lifetime of never feeling enough; a father whose transgressions are rather exhaustively listed, ranging from violence, to betrayal, to the lesser offences of coldness and being nicer to other kids at footy training.

These are deployed as "context" for Silvey's own transgression, which warrants one clipped and euphemistic sentence: "In January this year, while participating in an awful and inappropriate online conversation with another adult, I downloaded and sent an image of CEM."

A reader would have to cross-research quite doggedly through the court records to find that Silvey's online activity was not restricted to one conversation. That his lengthy consideration of paternal failing excluded, for instance, the court's chat room transcripts of Silvey confiding he was aroused by the idea of mothers having sex with their boy children, or that a child of eight was "the perfect age".

The essay rounds off with an assurance that Silvey has done the work in therapy and now is prepared to love himself again. All of which is welcome news. But there is no doubt who continues to be the main character of this story, and it's certainly not the children harmed by the material Silvey sought out and/or shared.

Nor is it Silvey's own wife and three children, from whose silkily present-tense mention in the essay ("people I love and care about devotedly") it might be inferred that the family unit remained supportively intact.

It fell to Silvey's wife to take a minute or two out of sole-parenting a toddler and twin babies to pen a rather more economical note, clarifying that "we separated as soon as I learned of his crimes".

Enough of all this! Humans are poor, sometimes damaged creatures, and we all fail in some way. Usually every day. And for powerful men who are accustomed to being the main character in their own lives, it's very hard to relinquish that role, even when they screw up incredibly badly.

To hedge against this terrible possibility, they are prepared to do extraordinary things. Brand changes his entire persona. Walliams threatens to kill himself. Silvey unveils a lifetime of suffering sufficiently grim to rival that of the children affected by his online activities.

It's too early to say how Jensen Huang, Destroyer of Worlds, will jump. Will we never see him again? Or will he be on the cover of next month's GQ, "speaking out" about his pain from the depths of a billionaire python-skin jacket (RRP $20,000)?

(Honestly, one hates to pre-empt the inquiry into how elite Chinese spycraft came to identify Huang as a promising target for a honey trap, but his practice of wearing a leather jacket every single day, at 63, cannot have been immaterial.)

Is there a more biblical parable than Huang's? He builds a company with the express aim of immortalising and super-proliferating human intelligence, only to knock about a trillion dollars off its value with the most conventional bit of human stupidity imaginable.

It kind of makes you proud in a weird way, doesn't it? That artificial intelligence can scrape the entire universe of human wisdom but still get caught out by the undigitised impulses of man's least governable muscles — the heart and the one to the south of the heart? Bless us all, in our fleshy imperfection.

International Men's Day could not come at a better time, with its quiet reminder that men in general are not reducible to the antics of an ego-obsessed few.

In Becoming a Man, a thoughtful new collection of essays by men published this month by HarperCollins and edited by writer Julia Baird with her teenage son Sam Baird Sparks, several contributors deal specifically with the phenomenon of men who place themselves at the centre of everything.

British-born WA creative director Sam Harris describes this creature as "spotlight man".

"A spotlight man will blind others with his talent, fame, wealth and success," Harris writes.

"He feels most alive when he's the centre of attention, with crowds cheering his name. But you'll see the real shape of spotlight man when the light's not on him, leaving him in a black hole of shadows. His dreams are more important than anyone else's — if you take his spotlight, he'll pull you into his black hole too."

Arne Rubinstein, founder of Rites of Passage, defines the transition from boyhood to manhood specifically around the changing sense of self. While boys might believe "I am the centre of the universe … I am always right and I will lie rather than admit I am wrong", manhood is about realising that everything is not, in fact, all about you.

"A problem arises when we end up with leaders and people in power who still have boy behaviours running their lives," Dr Rubinstein writes.

"Unfortunately, I believe a lot of our global leaders are boys, and that is a massive problem that puts the future of the world at risk."

So. This International Men's Day, let's understand properly that the victims of toxic masculinity are not just women.

Let's recognise the men who have completed the journey from boyhood to manhood and as a result are tough enough to confront the harshness of life — even its unfairness, even its humiliations, even their own inevitable mistakes — without requiring the world to drop everything to pity or exonerate them.

Men who have evolved past the childish notion that winning at life means having all the toys, all the praise, all the power. Who care for the people around them at work and at home, through good times and bad, not so they can be named Man of the Year, but because they're smart enough to work out that this is the most durable path to happiness.