#MasculinitySoFragile — So How Do We Fix It?
As is well known, men are fragile, ego-driven creatures who can only concentrate on one thing at a time and are bereft of the ability to recognise any form of subtlety, nuance or gently implied meanings. We are more or less like Fred Flintstone or Tim Allen, drooling over the roar of our new power tools and getting angry when we return from the dockyard to find the wife hasn’t cooked the ham and eggs / meat and potato combo that our manly, lumberjack bodies crave. When faced with any degree of choice beyond porn and football we get agitated and restless. Often, simple tasks leave us flummoxed and bemused. Whilst fixing a shelf we drool from the corners of our mouths and grunt for a Mansize tissue, and in the shower we sweep away women’s toiletries with a grizzled, hairy arm — searching blindly for the Carbon-Ion infused shower gel that’s formulated specifically for our needs. We are, in short, useless, terrible and obsolete. These are the lessons of the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag that’s currently gaining popularity on Twitter, and the accompanying account @mascsofragile is devoted to highlighting instances where, in lieu of any real substance or form, masculinity is shown up to be a vapid and hollow concept.
These instances take many forms — the ‘Hero’ washing-up liquid for blokes, the energy drinks plastered with F1 chequered flags, the loofah shaped shaped like a hand grenade (no, really.) They imply a sense that men are little more than overgrown babies in distressed jeans, that our whole raison d’etre has been wiped out and we are now reduced to suckling on the hollow trinkets of what once was. In this post-industrial age, our strength is redundant. The muscles we build in the gym will never be used to fell a tree or grapple with livestock. We may have barrel-aged whiskey advertised to us, but we are balding recruitment consultants with sciatic nerve pain and a taste for weak, imported lager. We have sleeve-tattoos but they signify nothing, and the beard-conditioner and cuticle repair cream in our bathrooms bely any pretence of dirt-inducing labour. We are being called out, us men; left, right and centre.
As time goes on the malaise spreads further. Sometimes, in our foolishness, we remember how our grandfathers, with their battle-scars and rough hands, wooed the women of their day. They were brusque and electric, Hemingwayesque with their black, Brylcreemed hair. And yet our wires are perpetually crossed. We watch, head in hands, as blokes catcall on the streets, heckling women to remind them of their place in the pecking order. Sometimes this evokes a certain irony, as this BBC News Reporter felt when she was audibly harassed in the middle of filming a piece about the very topic of verbal harassment. We are governed by a man who put his cock in a pig, and the trickle-down mentality of ‘all us lads together’ permeates through every branch of our rotting culture. We are encouraged to have a WKD side but lambasted when our #banter goes too far. Think of poor old Dapper Laughs as he was publicly admonished by the ruthless headmistress figure of Emily Maitlis. Picture his downturned mouth and schoolboy rollneck as he was made to listen to footage of his jokes, live on BBC Newsnight. ‘She was gagging for it’, ‘She knows’ etc etc. What happened to old fashioned banter? We find ourselves asking. When did it all start to slip out of view?
The answer is a long, long time ago. Back in 1981, in fact, a report was published by Joseph Pleck called ‘The Myth Of Masculinity.’ Here, Pleck lays out his ideas of the ‘sex role strain paradigm’ explaining the multi-faceted issues that arise when men attempt to live up to what is little more than a mirage. He discusses the profound dysfunctionality of men who feel that to ‘toughen up’ is better than to share their problems, and links his ideas to financial and familial collapse, depression and suicide. Fast-forward to present day and this is the all-too-familiar narrative that threaded through CALM’s 2014 findings into mental health of males in the UK. It is worth bearing in mind at this point, that suicide remains the biggest killer among males under 30 in the entire country.
Though many men would never admit it, and though such a thought will doubtlessly draw the ire of many who (rightly) see men as the papal tower from which the world is viewed — it isn’t always that easy being a bloke. Whilst feminism has enriched women with the tools of reflection, and enabled females to delineate, refine, discuss and sharpen their sense of identity and position — men are often left with weak or unavailable role models, trapped in their own skin with no idea of how they should behave or what is expected of them. The narrow scope of masculinity provides an insufficient road-map to guide us, and the advertorial messages we are bombarded with are contemptuous in the real world. But we have to cling to the hope that there is more to us than a parade of Archbishop of Banterburys, that we are neither Ladbrokes Lads or the fantasy James Bond aspirants of GQ and beyond. We are, like everyone, fluid, complex humans in a demanding, anxiety-inducing world.
Encouragingly, there are signs of green shoots, potential pathways to a brighter future. Last year saw the annual ‘Being A Man’ festival founded at the Southbank Centre, a get-together of speeches and conversations designed to challenge the dominant modes of male identity. The charity CALM works closely with male stalwarts like Topman and Lynx in order to challenge gendered-stereotypes and rouse us from a stewing state of porn and video-game addiction, micro-aggressions and quickly-approaching obsolescence. Though nothing excuses terrible behaviour, we should be aware that hegemonic masculinity is a fetid, dank and harmful concept that needs to be burned on the scrapyard and rebuilt anew. Until then, we are doomed to witness increasing violence and suicides as more and more men circle the drain and succumb to the mirage of masculinity.
