THERE’S a crisis in masculinity, apparently. Again. I’m not being flippant. Not exactly, but I do cock a weary eyebrow at these cycle of crises that leap into public debate, sparking all sorts of Doomsday prophesies before fading away.
So far this year two books have been published with the challenging title `Man Up’ – discussing the problem of `modern masculinity’ and prompting earnest debates about the pressures and expectations (tormenting) men in 2016.
But it’s not as new a phenomenon as such publicity may make it appear.
The notion has been rearing up at regular intervals for quite some time – to the point that I imagine there were hunter and gatherers anxiously discussing the pressures of post-Ice Age cave living.
I’m also a little cynical when this particular crisis is invoked to explain everything from the rise of Donald Trump and (surely paradoxically) Bernie Sanders to the strong Leave vote in the EU and university campus sexual assaults.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a topic worthy of discussion – not because it’s something new, but because it isn’t.
I’m sure when hordes of 1950s housewives were slowly going out of their minds due to the behavioural straitjacket imposed on them by the constraints of society, there were just as many desperately unhappy sole-breadwinning husbands, suffocated by the weight of expectation placed on them.
Yes, they had carte blanche to be as sexist as they wished and by and large avoid the worst aspects of domestic drudgery, but it was a pretty limiting template of manhood, leaving little room for any acknowledgement of feelings or creativity.
Of course, then `The Sixties’ happened, man, and it was free love and personal voyages of discovery all the way. Right?
Hmm. That’s the myth we have been sold, along with the theory that the contraceptive pill somehow wiped away the patriarchy and smashed the glass ceiling, leaving women able to `have it all’. Not quite.
Hillary Clinton, who celebrated “putting the biggest crack in the glass ceiling yet” less than two months ago, is currently facing claims she is unfit for the US presidency after falling ill with pneumonia during her gruelling campaign trail.
As film-maker Michael Moore pointed out drily, Bill Clinton was praised for being “spent, exhausted, and barely able to speak” on the eve of his election.
Males are still being ordered to `be a man’, leading, as can be seen in the new documentary `The Mask You Live In’, to pressure to “fight for success and sex, to reject empathy, and to never, ever cry.”
The resulting depression, anxiety and violence, chronicled by film-maker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, is evident from the terrifying suicide rates among men – three to four times as many as women taking their own lives.
A heartbreaking scene in the documentary comes when a group of boys juxtapose how the world sees them with how they really feel, only to realise they all have written `lonely’ on the inside of their piece of paper – because what is more lonely than not being able share how you truly feel for fear of not being `manly enough’ for the society you live in?
The thing is, I know that these expectations are still being placed on the slenderest of male shoulders.
My own son, just two years old, fell against a table and split his head open at his eyebrow last week. The sound of the collision will stay with me forever. While it only required sterile strips to close it over, it was quite a crack and we had to monitor him for concussion.
He’s still at the stage where he gives a running commentary of everything that’s happened to him and every feeling he has and, having been released from A&E, he was happily recounting how “I cried”, only to be told: “Big boys don’t cry” by a couple of well-meaning relatives.
“Yes, they do,” I hurriedly interrupted. “If it’s sore or they’re sad then of course they cry.”
It wasn’t badly meant. It had been an automatic response, ingrained for generations. People don’t like to see the person they love hurt or upset. Crying usually means that they are one or the other. Stop the tears, stop the feeling – except it doesn’t work like that. The feeling is still there, but buried like a guilty secret.
One mother can’t counteract an entire society that repeatedly orders her son to `man up’ and subdue his feelings, but in the same way that women will struggle to achieve equality without the help of men, men will not escape the yoke of ‘manliness’ without women’s support.
At the very least we should not make it any harder for each other to walk this earth than it already is.
