Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (9 page)

MASCULINITY IS CRISIS

It’s a hot August night and significant parts of London are on fire. For three hours, we’ve been holed up in the front room of my boyfriend’s shared house watching Croydon burn, waiting for the sounds of breaking glass and howling sirens to come closer up the high street. It is the third night of the English riots, and all over the city, young men and a few young women have come out to loot shops and fight the police, organising online, swarming out of the inner-city areas that TV cameras only visit when there’s been a shooting, which in this case, there has – a young father shot dead at point-blank range by police in Tottenham. These young people come from areas where police harassment is a daily reality and every small service that made life bearable – the education support, the youth centres and the jobseekers’ allowance – is being cut in an austerity drive that has left the salaries of the super-rich untouched. But we are assured that there is nothing political about these riots. The problem is young men, particularly young black boys, and their lack of discipline. It’s not poverty and it’s not the police. It must be masculinity gone mad.

 Already on the radio, politicians and talking heads are speaking of a ‘crisis of masculinity’. Fear of testosterone poisoning is the final posture of a kind of class hatred that can’t face itself in the mirror, since managing and directing the energy of young men has always been about maintaining social order. It’s obvious to anyone desperate to ignore political reality that the young men tearing up the tarmac in Ealing and Tottenham and throwing makeshift Molotovs at police in Brixton and Hackney didn’t have strong male role models, weren’t beaten enough as children, weren’t real men, calm, orderly men, like the skinny-jean-wearing, Kasabian-listening sons of every political commentator freaking out on the news. Every time night falls and the inner-city kids come out to smash up another high street, the panicked media narrative disintegrates again, social media flashes and judders like the inside of an acid trip and nobody knows what’s going on.

I am a journalist. I need to cover this story, find out what’s happening to the city that I love. But I’m trapped in the living room because my boyfriend won’t let me leave the house.

I’m a journalist and I’m prepared to take silly risks to do my job, and right now he isn’t letting me. He says he has to keep me safe, even against my will.

Violence happens when people are frightened that somebody’s about to take away their power. I have understood something new about men tonight, but it’s not what they’re saying on the news.

In most search engines, ‘masculinity in’ autocompletes to ‘crisis’. The terms are so often connected that one can rarely talk about modern masculinity without acknowledging the sorry state it’s in, the once-powerful beast languishing on the slab waiting to be put out of its misery. We discuss the sorry state of men, real men, men’s men, dominant, powerful men, in lowered voices, lest we incite the vicious bitchwrath of the straw feminists.

In the year 2000, as Susan Faludi reported in
Stiffed
, ‘As the nation wobbled toward the millennium, its pulse takers seemed to agree that a domestic apocalypse was underway: American manhood was under siege. Men on trial, the headlines cried, the trouble with boys, are men necessary? Maybe manhood can recover.’
²
More than a decade later, the same headlines still circulate: boys in crisis, testosterone on the wane, girls overtaking boys, how will men cope?

Masculinity, of course, is not in crisis – to a large degree, masculinity
is
crisis. Whether or not an oppressive system of social control is malfunctioning depends entirely on whether you expect it to be concerned with making a large number of people happy and fulfilled, which the postures of masculinity have never been designed to do. If modern masculinity is keeping men, particularly young men, in a state of anxious desperation, lonely and isolated, unable to express their true feelings or live the lives they really want, taking out their social and sexual frustration on women rather than understanding it as a systemic effect of elitism inequality, then masculinity is functioning perfectly well. It is, in fact, in tip-top shape. 

Women, it seems, are allowed to talk only about their gender. Men are allowed to talk about absolutely anything except their gender. Discussing what it means to be a man is tacitly forbidden in most social circles. Masculinity functions rather like the film
Fight Club
, in that the first rule of Man Club is you do not talk about Man Club.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her excellent cultural study
The Hearts of Men
, dates the loss of this pact of the patriarchal family deal back to the Beat generation of writers and radicals, ‘the short-lived apotheosis of the male rebellion’
³
in which ‘two strands of male protest – one directed against the white-collar work world and the other against the suburbanised family life that work was supposed to support – come together in the first all-out critique of American consumer culture.’
⁴
The Beats, in common with Hugh Hefner and the burgeoning cultural ideal of the Playboy bachelor that would eventually lead to such cult creations as James Bond, relied on ‘rejection of the pact that the family wage system rested on’,
⁵
whereby men were obliged to seek paid employment to support women’s unpaid work, and the labour of both would be sealed in a system of sexual bargaining. If you’re thinking that this sounds like a shit gig, you’re not alone – and when many modern commentators speak of the loss of the ‘traditional male breadwinner’ role, they are speaking of a social arrangement that came to horrify both men and women in the mid-century when they realised there might be other options. Men’s flight from traditional commitment, however, was never met by a concomitant idea of liberating women from domesticity. The notion that women, too, might be ambivalent about homemaking never came up. Suddenly, tying men down to the traditional home became women’s full-time job.

‘Traditional masculinity’, like ‘traditional femininity’, is about control. It is a way of managing behaviour. There are two big secrets about ‘traditional masculine power’ that mainstream culture does not want us to discuss, and it is imperative that we discuss them honestly – men and women, boys and girls and everyone else pinned in painfully by the social straitjacket of ‘traditional masculinity’. The first big secret is this: most men have never really been powerful. Throughout human history, the vast majority of men have had almost no structural power, except over women and children. In fact, power over women and children – technical and physical dominance within the sphere of one’s own home – has been the sop offered to men who had almost no power outside of it. 

One of the saddest things about modern society is that it has made us understand masculinity as something toxic and violent, associated with domination, control and savagery, being hungry for power and money and acquisitive, abusive sex. Part of the project of feminism is to free men as well as women from repressive stereotypes. Only some young men, of course. Few tears are being shed or water cannons mustered for the crises in masculinity that may or may not be occurring on private yachts and in the dormitories of elite boarding schools.

The second big secret about the Golden Age of Masculinity, of course, is that it never really existed. There have always been men who were too poor, too queer, too sensitive, too disabled, too compassionate or simply too clever to fit in with whatever flavour of violent heterosexuality their society relied upon to keep its wars fought, its factories staffed and its women in check. Something does seem to be changing now, however: the myth just doesn’t work for enough people any more.

The truth is that one of the main reasons young women are doing a little better in this recession than young men is that they are more exploitable, and more willing to let employers take advantage, because that’s what good girls do. Men are burdened with too much ego for the kind of jobs that are going. ‘One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most humble among them is made to feel superior.’
⁶
Thus, a poor man working a job he hated could once expect to feel, at the very least, superior to his wife and children, to be master of his home even if he was treated like a slave outside it. That is no longer a privilege guaranteed to any man who keeps his head down, although it remains a perk of the job for a good many.

It is difficult for men not to grow up with the expectation of power over women – even when that power is supposed to be benign, loving power, strong power, the power to protect and dominate. Almost every story boys get to read casts them as the hero and women and girls as supporting characters, mothers and wives and girlfriends. Culture has not yet adjusted to stop promising men the beautiful sidekick, the lovely princess, the silent, smiling companion as a reward for whatever trials life throws their way. Women, by contrast, although we still cast ourselves in that supporting role all too often, are no longer mandated into it by law and lack of medical technology.

The power of individual men over individual women is more embattled today than it has ever been – and as a consequence, it is more vengeful and more fetishised, especially in pornography, where hurting and humiliating women has become how sex is done. What men want is assumed to be basic, brute and uncomplicated. Beer and blow jobs and raw meat, preferably pulled off the steer as it runs past and deep-fried in testosterone.

It is extremely tricky to pinpoint what men actually want, for three major reasons: firstly, there are three and a half billion men and boys on this planet, and the Internet has proved conclusively that a great many of them are excited and troubled by a lot of very strange things indeed.

Secondly, while men are permitted to express desire in a way many women and girls are not, that desire is very specifically directed and any deviance punished, often with violence. The passion of young men is policed twice over, by fear of masculinity gone feral on the one hand and by homophobia on the other. In many parts of the global north we have arrived, however tentatively, at a position where outright violence against gay men and lesbians is considered backward, and where gay people have fought successfully for the same rights to marry, cohabit and die in war zones as their straight counterparts. This is to be celebrated, but homophobia is about far more than merely punishing people who fuck their own sex. For young men in particular, violent homophobia is used to manage every aspect of gendered behaviour.

Thirdly, the difference between what a man is supposed to want, what he thinks he ought to want and what he really wants is muddled, just as it is for women. It may take a man years to admit to himself that he just doesn’t like beer. Or maybe he finds himself attracted to chubby or less stereotypically attractive women, or to loud, difficult, masculine women, or other men, but won’t let himself pursue them because of what his friends might say. Desire is socially constructed: what the heart and groin and stomach want is brokered by the basic desire to fit in and not make a fuss.

What right have women to speak about men and what they feel and desire? We have every right, particularly as men have been speaking about women, writing about women, making laws about women and trying to figure out what we want and feel for so many years, with women rarely permitted to speak back. We have every right, and until men start speaking about their own experience of gender and sex honestly, we may even have a duty. Because gender and desire are the sole topics on which women are permitted any sort of public expertise. From a young age, I was asked to speak on countless panels as a representative of what ‘women’ thought, as if I was plugged into some sort of magical hive vagina that meant I knew what all women were thinking at any given time.

So here are a few of the things that most men aren’t allowed to want: to be taken care of. To be cuddled. To do creative work that will not make money. To go out to a club dressed in tight pants and thigh-high boots. To cry in public. To be a full-time parent. To cry in private. To be fucked. To play with make-up. To have their vulnerabilities acknowledged. To care what other people think. To care as a career. To paint their nails and bedrooms day-glo orange. To listen unironically to Taylor Swift. To dance with abandon. To have women as friends. To meet women as equals. To know that being a man is as uncompulsory a constitutive quality of their selfhood as being a woman is to anyone born that way.

Here’s another thing most men aren’t allowed to want: deep and lasting social change.

IT DOESN’T GET BETTER

May 2012. Three in the morning on a red-eye bus through Pennsylvania, at some godawful service stop in the middle of nowhere. The bus is full of young men in their teens and early twenties snuggled together under coats, or wrapped in blankets in the aisle. All of them are activists from the Occupy movement, heading to Chicago for the NATO protests. Many of them are, additionally, homeless, jobless and multiply damaged, and have taken the opportunity of a free bus ride because they have nowhere else to sleep. These are the young people to whom liberals everywhere are looking, however briefly, to sketch out a new politics in chalk on the pavement, and they are precisely the young people for whom the simple story of escape, the myth that if you only work hard and get to college and stick out the tough stuff you will be rescued from your social circumstances, didn’t work, will never work again. They are not all right.

Forty-five lost boys on a journey between uncertainties, off to stake a claim in the world, however small. 

If being a man means being powerful and power means the ability to have an impact on society, situations of rapid social change have always been in part about boys getting a chance to show off – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In the student movements and occupations that helped form my politics, I saw boys hungry and anxious to find themselves, to prove themselves men.