Jordan Stephens: “I don’t like using the term ‘Toxic Masculinity’ anymore”

“It’s starting to hit home, the reality of what’s in the book and what people might say,” Jordan Stephens tells me from his living room over Zoom, as a dog yaps in the background. The actor, performer and writer, who rose to fame in the early 2010s as part of hip hop duo Rizzle Kicks, is a fortnight away from the release of his unflinchingly candid memoir Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak & Dogs. “Like … fuck! I’m much better at managing my ADHD now, but I feel like I connect with a feeling and say or write things, then it takes a while for my personality to catch up with what I’ve done. So I arrive at my own words at the same time as other people”

ADHD is ultimately a book about love, and seeing the beauty in ourselves. Jordan argues that society is bloated with men who, like he once did, hate themselves. To overcome this he goes on a journey that lurches into motion after an act of infidelity, and features wolves, enough cocaine to sink a boat, hedonism, six hundred thousand cigarettes, a Candomblé ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, and plenty of radical honesty. In order to understand and break free from his own cycles of self-destructive behaviour, Jordan has to dig deep down into the fears, pains and traumas he’s repressed since childhood. I was moved by Jordan’s vignettes of his dad, who is as pained and eager for love as his son, but struggles to communicate that with him.

Huck: What’s your earliest memory of your dad?

Jordan: The clearest memory and feeling was one that I wrote in the book. It’s my dad buying me Ribena when I was a kid. That exchange of Ribena was, in my eyes, an attempt at saying ‘I love you’ to each other. But in quite an unhealthy way. My mum wouldn’t let me eat or drink anything with artificial sweeteners or sugar in it. My dad seemed to be this breakaway from restriction, but because my stomach was acclimated to quite healthy products, I’d feel sick after having seen him. But the sickness was induced by his desire for me to love him, which I thought was quite poetic.

Huck: Did not living with your dad have an impact on how you felt about him?

Jordan: It was interesting reading Bashy’s column, and I loved his album too. Bashy’s an example of a male role model who’s fulfilling his duty of guidance to younger men. Hearing him talk about his father was interesting because his dad was obviously there, in the house with him. My dad never lived with me. But he was always around. My mum and dad were good friends when I was younger. There was only one year of my life when I couldn’t see him, because my mum made a decision based on the way he was treating himself. But I adored him. In all of my early memories, I don’t know much about us conversing, so in hindsight he probably could’ve given me more life lessons but really our relationship was playing football. I loved playing football with him in the big communal garden on my estate. Playing football with my dad was my dream. I adored it.

Huck: Who and what informed your early ideas around masculinity? How important was your dad in regards to that?

Jordan: It was tough with my dad in terms of him guiding me around what it means to be a man. I don’t think I’ve ever been proactively sat down by my dad and spoken to about it because he’s always been trying to stay afloat himself. And our communication was football and laughter and jokes. He’d love to treat me when he had a bit of extra cash. That was his way of showing his love. It was complex for him because he lost his dad when he was ten. So he didn’t really have any experience of a father guiding him. Outside of him, everything I learnt was on the estate or through my mum’s wonderfully diverse group of friends. I’ve got several godfathers. One is an incredible singer called David McAlmont. He was part of McAlmont & Butler. They sang this song called ‘Yes’ which was a big hit in the 1990s. He’s this proud, Black, gay man who had this insane collection of Barbies. I’d just marvel at them as a kid. He had this boyfriend called Bill who was like the smartest person I’d ever met in my life. I constantly thought, ‘if I ever go on ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' then I’d pick Bill as my phone-a-friend.’ This was all normal to me. I was fortunate to be around different genres of man. But no singular man was that hands on with me, other than my friend Kane’s dad Eamonn. He was like a second dad. In terms of body, physicality and language, he was the first man to really enforce boundaries on me.

Huck: It takes a village, right?

Jordan: I believe that, one thousand percent. I really don’t like an individualistic approach to raising children. In your community, you’re everyone’s dad. I think that approach is lost here in the U.K, and that makes me sad.

Huck: Something you do in the book which feels quite radical to me is how you really unpick the relationship you have with your mum. I think that’s a bit of a blind spot in conversations around masculinity. It almost feels taboo. What are your thoughts on that?

Jordan: For some of the issues I write about, gender started to become a bit reductive. Because there are so many other things that contribute to a person, like the environment they grew up in, their class, their race, their traumas. There are so many variables that contribute to a person’s outlook on life. When I started to think of it like that, I stopped avoiding looking at the relationships between my guy mates and their mums, which I’d been doing because those women are victims of patriarchy. And we know patriarchy fucks them over. I’d hear stories about their mums which became worryingly common. And I’d be like, ‘these are still adults.’ Even though they’d been through shit, these were adult women making decisions for a child. I started to think about these relationships because they can fly under the radar, because women deal with a lot of shit. And some of the things they do don't cause tangible, immediate damage. A father beating a son, for example. That damage is crazy and immediate. What about a mother subtly telling a son that he’s a piece of shit for ten years?

That’s not my experience with my mum. But what happened was when I decided I really wanted to form a relationship outside of my mum, to have a bond with another woman and commit to it and be intimate emotionally, I realised I had to cut loose from the loyalty I’d built towards my mum. I was mainly with her. I didn’t have siblings and my dad wasn’t in the house. I felt that was an essential thing to talk about because that’s part of maturing from a boy to a man. In order to become adults, we have to cut ties with whatever we needed from our parents in our adolescence. There are these normalised cliches around boys and their mums. If a man appreciates his mum, that’s a good thing. A man who keeps his mum around is a good man. There are all these connotations. But then I also hear stories about marriages where the man’s mum is quite an oppressive force. Or about men picking their mum over any other person in their lives, in any given situation. I thought it would be good to talk about that potential wounding because certainly in my life, my relationship with my mum has gotten significantly better since I pulled away from her. I think it became a co-dependent crutch. I imagine a lot of boys raised in single-parent households with my cultural background might have experienced the same thing.

Huck: What does the term ‘toxic masculinity’ mean to you?

Jordan: I don’t like using the term anymore, in spite of being a firm user of it initially. I thought it had a clear differentiation, with masculinity being in itself authentic and toxic masculinity being a toxic form of it. Equally, I wouldn’t be annoyed or upset if someone else used it. My focus now, because I think it’s the best thing I can do for feminism, is to try and help create boys and young men that care about themselves and love themselves. Because if people are struggling to separate the word ‘toxic’ from masculinity, then you end up with figureheads like Andrew Tate who promote a really regressive masculinity, and boys flock there looking for a space to access that energy and feel safe.

I do not think masculinity, being a boy or a man, is an issue, at all. My belief is that our current idea of what a man is and what masculinity entails is inauthentic. I really believe the true, almost divine nature of what masculinity is, is not synonymous with misogyny. It’s not synonymous with a disconnection from our emotional selves. It’s about balance and unity. You have to work in cooperation with the opposite force, which is femininity. Or you find that force within yourself. So yeah, I think the term has evolved and taken on a life of its own. And I would avoid using it if it stops boys from loving themselves. 

Huck: For me, the most vivid image of your dad in the book is him crying at your grandmother’s funeral. Was that level of vulnerability something you saw in him often?

Jordan: That’s the only time I’ve ever seen my dad cry, I think. Recently, he was on the verge of tears with my current partner, when we were talking about life. Before that, I’d only seen him cry at his mum’s funeral. It was a significant moment for me, mainly because I wasn’t crying. That’s why I bring it up in the book. Because I’m having that ‘inner child’ work done and I realise that the little me fucking missed my grandma with all my heart. I didn’t know what it meant for him to be like that. Even talking about it now, I still don’t. I think it just solidified how important my grandma was. I’ve learnt that my dad’s relationship with her was more complex and deeper than I could ever have imagined. But it’s my dad’s responsibility to tell me about that. I get little glimmers from him, now I’m older. The overwhelming reality of my dad is him just fighting, the entire time. In the 1970s, he was dubbed by Sound Magazine as ‘Britain’s First Black Punk’. And I dream of writing his story one day. Sometimes, I want to fucking wring his neck, because there’s a part of me that doesn’t give a fuck about his history, I just want a dad that’s present and gives me lessons. But when adult Jordan looks at the reality of things, he’s just been fighting, man. He was raised in Finchley as the only Black boy in the area, with two Windrush parents, and lost his dad when he was ten. He was the victim of unbelievable racism, like having rocks thrown at him and his parents at the school gates. When his dad died, he was pulled into the headteacher’s office and told, ‘your dad’s dead. Now go back to your class.’ How can I possibly understand what he went through? So if I have this idea of him as a fighter, a warrior with a big fucking heart, that was the one time I’ve seen it break. It was important for me to see that.

Huck: By the end of the book, I really felt like I had a better understanding of your dad and some of the battles he’s fought. But there’s also this existential weight, like you’re racing against time to learn as much about him before it’s too late. Because of my dad’s dementia, I’ll never know some of the things about him that I’d imagined I might one day. Do you think our dads’ silence was a generational thing?

Jordan: I think it could be generational, yeah. But I don’t think the issue is men not talking. I think it’s that men don’t feel the need to build that connection with people they love. I’m confident that if you walked into a random pub and started a conversation with a man you don’t know, that man would tell you their deepest, darkest secrets. You’ll get the wildest stories because you’re not connected to them. They feel safe. They don’t have to feel what they’re saying being reflected back. And that’s also proof that men feel the need to get those stories out. I guess men of their generation are battling with the consequences of their stories. Like, ‘if I say this, I’ll feel like this,’ or, ‘now I’ve told them this, they’ll think a certain way about me.’ I think it’s a protective thing. These men are not in control of their loved ones’ responses, so they’d rather not say anything at all.

Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak & Dogs is out on 22nd August. Pre-order your copy here. 

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