Does the West of Scotland man really exist?

Oot o' the East there came a hard man
Oh oh, a' the way frae Brigton
Ah haw, glory hallelujah
Cod liver oil and the orange juice

—“Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice”, a folk song written by Ron Clark and Carl MacDougall; popularised by Hamish Imlach. 

As a kid, growing up in the Borders, I was viciously bullied. In the playground, on the way home from school, while playing rugby. As a young man, the bullying stopped, but I was occasionally threatened with acts of violence — so much so that, at times, I had to avoid the high street at night. Once, when I did venture out after dark, I was thrown down an alley and pushed around, but I escaped a beating after a friend intervened. But since moving back to Glasgow aged 18, I’ve never had any issues. Never aggressed, never punched, rarely threatened. At university, the most toxically masculine of men weren’t my friends from Glasgow but those from towns and cities elsewhere in Scotland. My male family members from Glasgow are less masculine than those from the east coast. And the one time I can remember being started on as an adult was on a night out in Edinburgh. 

This is not to say that violent forms of masculinity don’t exist in Glasgow — of course they do — but rather that the form of masculinity I have experienced in the city isn’t any different from what I’ve experienced elsewhere. If anything, it’s not been as bad, largely because as a middle-class white man, I am insulated from much of the violence that does occur in Glasgow. One exception is Old Firm days; walking home from the shops after the League Cup final recently, a guy screamed in my face and lunged at me, before he and a friend burst into laughter — far from the first time something like this has happened on a match day. I don’t know the half of it though; in 2013, researchers at St Andrews University found evidence of a “significant” rise in physical, sexual and emotional abuse cases in the 24-hour period after an Old Firm kick-off. The majority of victims were female. 

Glaswegian men regularly play the role of nutters, enforcers and gangsters in popular culture. There is the TV trope of the Violent Glaswegian — harmful, reductive and omnipresent in film, TV and crime novels going back to 1935’s No Mean City. The hulking figure of the “Glasgow hard man” casts a looming shadow over the city’s folklore and fiction. He was comically immortalised by the Big Man in Chewin’ the Fat. Even Trainspotting’s Francis Begbie was played not by a Leither but a man from Maryhill.