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What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century?

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About three years ago I started writing my first novel, The Beasts of Belmont Park, inspired by someone I’d seen in the street; a handsome man, pushing two kids in a buggy. I saw him a couple more times over the next few weeks, and each time, he looked unhappy. I wondered why? It made me think back to the times when my own daughter was young enough to be pushed in a buggy and how much I enjoyed fatherhood, even as a single man, co-parenting my child when society assumed the only true course of happiness was to be part of that über -cliché, the happy family. I wondered whether this man was a stay-at-home dad, with a bread-winning wife. Maybe he didn’t like his role? Maybe his wife was more successful than him? What issues would that raise for a man?

This scenario formed the basis of The Beasts of Belmont Park, which explores the nature of manhood in this most egalitarian of centuries, not earnestly or stolidly, but very much in a darkly comic vein. Not that I wish to make light of such a serious subject, but I find with humour you can often take your readers on a journey they might otherwise avoid.

Paul, the protagonist, is deeply unsatisfied with his lot, feeling emasculated by his role of househusband and envying his best-selling novelist wife’s success. In attempting to square this circle, Paul encounters several strong male characters, each representing a different aspect of manhood, against which he measures himself. Ultimately the answer, for Paul, is to return to work; for that is the only way he believes he can hold his head up again as a man.

Are men expected to play a role that’s now obsolete?

Paul’s internal conflict resonates at the deepest level with many men I’ve met over the years, and is reflected in the conventional wisdom many ascribe to: that a man’s role is as a hunter, bringing home the bacon, not as carer, or nurturer, changing nappies and looking after the kids. In the conservative world of football, which I partake in regularly, this kind of attitude is commonplace.

But is there actually any basis in reality for this view of masculinity? I think today, more than ever, this concept is severely challenged by the facts. Women are just as strong and capable as men. Many women, maybe the majority, are, like my daughter, economically independent. What need is there for a man in the role of provider and protector? Nevertheless, many women I know tell me they still prefer this idea of a man, and they still want him to play this role, even if it’s a pseudo-role and not actually necessary.

Hud aged 22 resized

 

Hud, aged 22…

Many years ago I read The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan, written, in part, as a response to Desmond Morris’s (at the time) seminal The Ascent of Man. Her view of human evolution opened my eyes, for the first time it seemed, to a far more complex notion of women than I had previously contemplated. But what about men? In Morris’s book he paints a vivid picture of man the hunter and provider, a picture that even then, back in the 1970s, was at odds with the image of the average male I encountered in West London. Yet this atavistic throwback formed the basis for the popular consensus on what being a man was all about. And as a young man myself, I too ascribed to this view.

‘I was called a male chauvinist, aged nine’

I had particular reasons to do so. I was raised with my brother by an ardently feminist single mother, who along with her coterie of friends, subjected to me to a tough regime for a young man: being called a male chauvinist aged nine, being taken on a two-week long women’s camp in Wales when I was twelve (where I was the oldest male), hostelling with the women and kids from Erin Pizzey’s ‘Battered Wives Home,’ these were experiences that severely challenged my idea of manhood. So in order to right these ‘wrongs’ (as I perceived them), I developed a relatively macho personality that was in many ways at odds with how I truly felt about myself. But back then, it was a matter of survival.

How many other young men defaulted to the macho paradigm in order to survive childhood? Especially in a culture that did not celebrate the manifold aspects of masculinity, but focused on just a few: strength, power, dominance. It was a cliché that was simultaneously parodied as absurd and declared as fact in every form of media, from fairy tales to adverts. And now, a mere 30 years later, we have the converse: men conventionally mocked as bumbling idiots by the media and by the advertising industry in particular.

In reality, we are of course neither of these extremes, but in fact represent an incredible spectrum of everything that lies between. We have been bracketed and branded by the media for far too long. We are not narrow beings, and we are not tongue-tied lumps, incapable of expressing our feelings. We are every bit as subtle and sensitive as women. Yet I find even some of the most progressive of my female friends still propagate this reductive, emotionally unintelligent stereotype. Often gleefully. It makes me wonder how they expect men to live up to their expectations (the caring, strong, silent sexy, sensitive, emotive everyman we are told women want), when they keep forcing us into these cultural straitjackets.

We have all been guilty, at one time or another, of purveying this cultural narrative. But the time has come for us to stop. Men like Grayson Perry show us how wonderful it is to be a man who is truly himself, just as much as Bear Grylls or David Beckham do. And the army of stay-at-home or single dads shows us just how capable men are at being nurturers and carers. The only thing preventing us from fulfilling our true, wide-spectrum natures are the conventions of society itself. Brothers, let’s stand up and be counted for the marvelous, multi-faceted characters we really are.

By Hud Saunders

Innovative publisher The Pigeonhole releases Hud’s novel The Beasts of Belmont Park on the 5th of November. You can read more about it and an extract here

‘If you don’t initiate your young men into the tribe, they will burn down the village’

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There is an African proverb that says, if you do not initiate your young men into the tribe, they will come back and burn down the village just to feel the heat. Are we seeing the consequences in the UK of a failure to provide our young men with a proper path to manhood? Here Peter Chaplin, who organises male rites of passage retreats, explains what this ancient tradition means to him.

— This is article #29 in our #100Voices4Men and boys series

It’s a 500-mile drive from where I live in Surrey to Perth, Scotland, where the annual Men’s Rites of Passage event takes place. The long journey is part of the process for most of us – the separation from work, cars, supermarkets, families, wifi. The road rises after Preston on the M6 and that’s where I feel the distance beginning to have an effect. By the time I arrive, I’ve forgotten how long I’ve been travelling.

When I finally turn the engine off and hand over my keys, phone, books and music, it’s to spend five days under canvas in a field in company with 45 other men, who are also scratching their heads and wondering what they’ve let themselves in for.

Reframing a man’s life

My turn came in 2010, and it was a memorable journey back into a fuller appreciation of the eldership of mature men, something so badly lacking in the west.  Most of us have no initiations for such moments. Granted, we can be confirmed by our local bishop (a bit of a milk-and-water affair, as I recall) if we’re in a mainstream church, or can go through initiations in military and sometimes in sporting environments.  We go through rites of passage when we are named, married, produce children and die, but nowhere else.

But the rites of passage was very male, very masculine, full of power, passion, failure, humour and brokenness, grief and release. It was earthy and humane, carried a recognition of the inevitability of loss and a reframing of the second half of a man’s life in which the graph levels out and starts to turn south, the time when fighting and striving stop.

I and the men around me found a safe space to confront and experience our failures and griefs among a team of elders who had taken the same journey earlier. Our feet were gently held to the fire, so to speak. It’s not a retreat, and it’s not therapy either. We didn’t have to negotiate any language with women, or apologize for the parts of ourselves that we hide from them.

Bad traditions need to be retired, but having no traditions at all seems to me to be much worse

There’s even more need for this type of eldering/mentoring for adolescents. It’s a challenge to devise meaningful rituals for young men to bring them into conscious and competent manhood. There’s an old African saying that if we don’t do this, the young men will come back and burn down the village. Isn’t that what’s happening right now all over the west? Young men don’t know who they are – though it’s not so surprising, since we as their fathers don’t really know either.

We have cast aside the old ways and the wisdoms of our ancestors without a second’s thought, all in the name of individual rights, self-expression, my freedom, all of which are good and necessary things. Bad traditions need to be retired, but having no traditions at all seems to me to be much worse.

On the way home, we find out later, most men say little or nothing, and when asked at home how it went, they say “I don’t really know what to tell you.” Weeks later it can be the same. For that short space of time up in Perth, these men, many for the first time, got outside their heads and into something altogether deeper and less tameable by language and thought. Sometimes their partners just nod and smile and wait for clues to begin leaking out, for conversations they’ve longed for over many years. Something has changed that they recognise before we do.

To find out more visit the Men’s Rites of Passage website here.

Photo: Flickr/Michael Pollack

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not necessarily the views of the insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

Why are some young men drawn to terrorism?

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By David Plummer, Griffith University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

Recent coverage of counterterrorism raids in Australia featured hard-core gyms, anabolic steroids, nightclub bouncers, gangs and weapons. Footage from the Middle East regularly depicts truckloads of young bearded warriors bristling with ordnance.

Is this a view of masculinity that merely happens to be violent? Or does masculinity actively underwrite and sustain extremist movements?

The paradox is that while the world sees extremism as dangerously anti-social, the men themselves appear to see it as a profound social duty.

They exhibit dogmatic conformity to group social norms, they see an opportunity for masculine notoriety and to have a risky “boy’s own” adventure. Above all, they see it as the ultimate demonstration of manhood.

Understanding how this occurs should be a top priority – especially how young boys go down the path of terror – because this understanding ultimately paves the way for interventions, de-escalation and peace.

From quiet kid, to terrorist warrior

A number of alternative explanations exist for the prominence of hypermasculine imagery in reports of terrorism. The imagery may well reflect Western media biases and serve the propaganda purposes of Western governments. That is to say, the reports largely speak to Western cultural viewpoints and political agendas.

While this may well be the case, there is clearly much more to the story. It is also possible that hypermasculinity is a side-effect of the posturing of war. But this merely reinforces the view that masculinity is indeed a potent force at work here.

In addition to obvious hypermasculine imagery, three other features strike a chord with my own research:

  • First is the youth of the recruits, including many teenagers
  • Second is the transformation from quiet kid into terrorist warrior – think “lone wolf”
  • Third is the way that young men identify with a cause and affiliate with extremist groups

These features – young male, group identification, transformation into warrior – have much in common with, and should draw our attention to, the more familiar rites of passage that mark the transition from childhood to manhood.

The Boy Scouts is one way many Western countries have imparted masculine ideals to boys. Freeparking/Flickr, CC BY

The transition from boyhood to manhood is a crucial time in boys’ lives. Becoming a man is the ultimate social endorsement and personal accomplishment.

Most boys apply themselves to the task without question. In part, this is because the change seems so normal and because they rightly sense that failure is associated with some of the deepest social taboos of all.

Most cultures, including those in the West, have limited tolerance for members who “deviate” from accepted gender norms. For all intents and purposes becoming a man is compulsory.

Initiation to manhood invariably involves confronting fear

For most, becoming a man seems natural, probably because it appears to stem from the biological changes of puberty. But there are actually many pathways to manhood and many possible outcomes. The natural “feel” is deceptive.

There is plenty of research that shows that masculinity is highly variable and above all is a social achievement, which is largely independent of biology.

Different societies define manhood very differently: they define what a “real man” is, set the standards that boys ought to aspire to, and orchestrate the transition to manhood through a variety of mechanisms.

Indeed, becoming a man is potentially so variable that anthropologist David Gilmore reminds us that:

Boys have to be encouraged, sometimes actually forced, by social sanctions to undertake efforts toward a culturally defined manhood, which by themselves they might not do.

Traditional societies seem to have addressed the uncertainties in the transition to manhood by developing initiation rituals to guide young men through. These rituals typically entail some form of risky challenge, which boys use to prove their manhood and to earn the right to be called a man.

The boys always underwent initiation under the guidance of older mentors and in the company of their peers. The rituals served to make the transition orderly, meaningful and invested it with shared social purpose.

Boys teaching boys

Modern-day social change has witnessed a decline in all but the most basic rites of passage. Yet becoming a man is as important as always, and the transition to manhood remains very challenging.

This raises the question: how do boys navigate the transition now? I argue that many boys now invent their own rites of passage.

Research in the West Indies showed that social change has led to a loss of older mentors from boys’ lives due to long working hours and commuting times, fewer men in teaching, suspicion about men in youth clubs, changing family structures and so on.

These shifts have left a power vacuum that is vulnerable to exploitation. Boys are spending more time in the sole company of their peers: on street corners, in shopping malls and in their cars.

Instead of growing up with the role models and standards of older, more experienced men, most of their role modelling comes from peer groups. In the absence of alternatives, these groups resort to raw physical masculinity as the yardstick for what masculinity should look like, how boys should behave and who should dominate.

Terrorism as a passage to manhood

They also develop their own rituals to admit members, some of which are extreme, anti-social and high-risk. It is a willingness to take risks that is considered the hallmark of a “real man”.

So how does this relate to terror? Hypermasculine imagery is prominent in the media. Terror recruits are young, group-affiliated and primed to take risks. They are supposedly disaffected and therefore susceptible to mentoring by like-minded peers and older men, whose motives differ from those of their parents and community.

There are key similarities with classic rites of passage and key parallels with my own work on masculinity elsewhere. The social pressures and events around the transition to manhood are especially susceptible to exploitation.

It is difficult not to conclude that masculinity is a key force that underwrites and sustains extremism. In terrorism, we are witnessing a very specific configuration of the passage to manhood.

David Plummer does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Read the original article.

Photo: Flickr/DVIDSHUB

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