We need to talk about masculinity

Recent reports of an all-female mutant crayfish population spreading rapidly throughout Europe seem to confirm many men’s worst fears. They may not be the reason for life, the universe, and everything else. Traumatic as this discovery sounds, it should ultimately come as a relief.

Masculinity in the 21st century is a bit like the internet in the 1990s – there are no fixed rules. No longer do you have to be able to read a map, assemble flatpack furniture, or fight back those tears when watching Wall-E. A new campaign by Harry’s Razors makes the case powerfully. It’s the story of an alien who comes to earth and is trying to understand how to be a man with the help of a young boy. As a result of the alien's many questions, it is the boy who realises that knee-jerk ideas of masculinity are sometimes too narrow for today's world. 

Men were not born to rule the world. In the grand scheme of things, patriarchy is a relatively recent phenomenon. The classical scholar Robert Graves pinpoints the early Greek period around 2000BC as the time when a Mother Earth-worshipping matriarchy was elbowed out of the way by a class of warrior kings. Zeus was enthroned as the kings of the gods, and we haven’t looked back since. The intervening 4,000 years of history have been a long historical sausage fest – men have variously worn the togas, the trousers, and the red Superman trunks, at least until the advent of power dressing at some point in the '80s.

Thankfully the playing field has been levelling of late. Women are enjoying success everywhere from the boardroom to the football field, while men are spending hours in the bathroom on personal grooming and outspending their female counterparts on shoes. But in recent months we’ve experienced the kind of Major Setback usually reserved for the second acts of Hollywood blockbusters.

Last October #MeToo lifted the veil on the pervasive culture of sexual harassment everywhere from Hollywood to the Houses of Parliament. At the same time, the “Groper-in-Chief” in the White House has seen nothing wrong in calling his daughter “a piece of ass”. So it’s clear that we still have a serious problem with masculinity. At times it seems like it would be simpler if the human race just followed Procambarus virginalis and opted for all-female parthenogenesis.

But before we dismiss all men as beyond redemption, it’s worth recalling that ancient Roman proverb – don’t hate the player, hate the game. From an early age boys are imbued with cookie-cutter notions of manhood that should probably come with warning labels. They’re supposed to be fighters, leaders, high achievers, providers, protectors, seducers, top dogs, and generally “boss it”. This one-dimensional man is reinforced in countless films and TV series, in competitive sports and video games.  Trying live up to such a straw man is an emotional minefield and can be extremely poisonous. 

Scientific studies show that boys as young as 5 years old repress their feelings, hide signs of weakness and bottle everything up. In other words, they’re already “manning up”. In this overcoded version of masculinity, they’re supposed to be everything females supposedly aren’t. No wonder calling someone a pussy is a timeworn playground taunt. After all, what could be worse than being a girl? 

The pressure to live up to this picture of hyper-masculinity creates all kinds of demons. The testosterone-fuelled, hyper-competitiveculture portrayed in The Wolf of Wall Street suffuses corporate boardrooms and trading floors across the world. Such reckless, kill-or-be-killed behaviour put the global economy within a hair’s breadth of meltdown in 2007-2008. The IMF director Christine Lagardequipped at the time that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, the economic crisis would have looked quite different. 

The tech industry equally at fault. In the recently published Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, journalist Emily Chang has shown that tech is rife with chauvinism. It goes to show that alpha nerds are just as capable of behaving despicably. And let’s not even get started on Gamergate...

It’s a simple fact that women rarely commit violent crimes, become dictators or begin wars. Men, meanwhile, account for “most violent people, rapists, criminals, killers, tax avoiders, corrupt politicians, planet despoilers, sex abusers and dinner-party bores”, as Grayson Perry points out in The Descent of Man. There’s mounting evidence to suggest that toxic masculinity plays a large part in this. The pressure to achieve or to impress pushes them to sociopathic behaviour when they fail to attain that success. Rather than seek help, many men prefer to suffer in silence. It has been cited as the main reason why suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK.

If that’s the bad news, here’s the good. Today we’re seeing increasingly flexible gender norms, more nuanced depictions of men in the media, and changing attitudes. Adverts like ‘Boy and the Alien’ from Harry’s Razors are helping to detoxify masculinity and create less strait-jacketed roles. What began in the 1990s with the softening of cultural attitudes towards homosexuality and the appearance of the metrosexual, a species of urban male in touch with his feminine side who wasn’t averse to having a facial or wearing a sari (David Beckham, take a bow) has led to a surge of man hugs and bromances, demonstrating that men are more secure about their sexuality than ever. 

Machismo has also had its comeuppance with the revenge of the nerd. After being bullied and shamed by frat boys for decades, films like Chasing Amy and Napoleon Dynamite to saw nerds and losers resurrected as heroes. This upward trajectory saw its apotheosis in The Social Network. 

The push for more diversity, meanwhile, has created new models of masculinity that aren’t constructed from a space of white privilege. Last year’s Oscar winner for Best Film, Moonlight, was the story of a gay African-American adolescent from the projects in Miami struggling against hyper-masculine stereotypes. It was almost a manifesto for a more fragile model of masculinity. 

In today’s post-binary society, it’s evident that there’s a broader range of possible role models than ever imagined. And in the end, as the ‘Boy and the Alien’ shows, a real man is a good man. Simple.