Have you ever been with a group of men, who are having an absolutely uproarious time, lots of jokes and raucous banter flying around, multiple conversations loudly overlapping each other? However, you are in the middle of it, and you are trying to talk to them about your week and how you've been. Finding it hard to hear yourself speak, let alone be heard. You get the feeling that no one is really wanting to listen.
Though all this male bonding over the sharing of ribaldry, well, it might have the appearance of friendship, but is it largely hollow, a bogus bonhomie? One has the sense that there is always an unspoken fear in any gathering of men - the fear of being publicly ridiculed were you to go deeper in the revealing of yourself. So, let's keep this light shall we?
This is not the first time I've experienced a feeling of being ignored or isolated in the presence of other men, unable to join in, stuck on the periphery, as though I were a bystander on the outside looking in. Left to watch this whole masculine performance going on before me like some bizzare charade. I find these sort of situations disheartening for myself, and for those men too.
It's a bit of a cliche these days to talk of masculine friendships being formed through the sharing of an experience or enthusiasm, of working alongside on a practical task with other men. And though I can see that this can be the case, it is, as a friendship strategy, a weak one to put too much reliance on. The likelihood of finding such a situation, and it working, well that is rare. The possibilities are limited. The lack of these circumstances maybe one reason why there is a decline in male friendship more generally. Are men becoming more isolated from other men? Do they find it more difficult to find and be within collective or communal activities? Or is that just me? Perhaps the more 'friendships' exist via social media the less easy it becomes to deal with real relationships in real time.
I've heard some men say they've found relationships with women were becoming too difficult, so they'd simply decided to just not go there. To give up on it. My experience of many heterosexual men is that when they talk about their relationships they often sound emotionally under resourced. Women, on an emotional level, are able to run rings around them. Men then find themselves in situations they either don't understand, don't know how to handle, how to defend their own corner, how to get themselves out of, or feel they're being manipulated by. The more complicated their emotional landscape becomes the more lost they are.
I can understand why the message of those dodgy 'men's liberator' gurus like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson appeal. Because they give the appearance of 'offering' a clear way of responding from strength, not weakness - with masculine over assertion, aggression, belittling ,denigration, dismissal and domination towards women. In truth what they are 'offering' is absolutely nothing new. Just proffering a sly slippery deceit to the young, naive or bewildered man. It reaffirms existing, albeit limited, masculine skill sets - that a man who feels powerless in a relationship can in the end always resort to - Coercive Anger. This being the one emotion men are well versed in the use of. There is little or no emotional, let alone relational, intelligence here. This too is quite sad to say.
Myself? Well, I can find anger a difficult emotion to be with, whether within myself or in others. With myself I try to contain it,whilst I try to calm myself down a bit. But containing, I find, can quickly and deceptively degrade into avoidance or denial of it. The failure to acknowledge, respond or give voice to any emotion becomes an act of self harm, a form of self betrayal.
If I am with, or near, someone who feels threatening, or is angry with me, I become emotionally paralysed. I don't know quite what to do, fearful of saying the wrong thing and hence making the anger worse, or even responding from my own rising anger. No longer in contact with how I feel. I take emotional retreat into a befuddled silence, with the consequent loss of initiative and self assertion. A position from which I can find it difficult to extricate myself, particularly whilst the sense or threat of the anger is still present.
At that point I'm a bit like an armadillo curled up in an automatic defensive position. All my emotional resourcefulness, is trapped like wind or deserts me until I can feel safe, unwind and fart. Whilst I understand where this response may come from ( Being bullied as a young man ) I do wish I could move on from protective over reaction and find a space I can be more open and creative within. 'Locked Out' from a group or 'Locked In' with myself, seem linked, to me, as responses. Both deny full presence in a specific moment or situation, and, paradoxically, the opportunity for deepening relationships.
Three years on, its 1976, its the Leeds Polytechnic Graphic Design Department's Christmas Party. A few weeks before, on the 6th December the Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK Tour had finally found a city that would allow them to play, and the venue was Leeds Polytechnic. This photo shows my appearance as already morphing from heavy progressive music fan to punk. The trousers are the same pink flared jeans worn in the last photo, now paired with a red rugby shirt, a Rupert Bear style waistcoat picked up from a Jumble Sale, updated with a flourish of safety pins, chains and badges. This hesitant, carefully modulated affinity with punk's rebellious creative freedom, looks today like the faux dressing up that it was.
Because of childhood bullying I tended to shy away from any overt displays of aggression, whether in cloths or behaviour. Risk averse, I lacked self- defense skills, unsure how to assert myself. I didn't want to turn myself into a fist magnet. Still discovering who I was, there wasn't much yet to assert? I'd left the parental home for the first time the year before for an Arts Foundation Course in Hull. In my memory the defining characteristic of that period were emerging internal conflicts, the boy/man in late teenage getting to grips with managing himself and adult life in general. Frustrated to discover I was an introvert. Why couldn't I be effortlessly extrovert and turn it on like a tap? I mistook success as residing in an outgoing ebullient personality. I started doing research, absorbing Nietzsche, reading about psychology in books and magazines. R D Laing got very close attention, scouring The Divided Self and Self & Other, looking for clues to why I was like I was. I seemed to believe something was either missing or innately wrong with me.
In Leeds a new lifestyle, more representative of me and my interests, was forming. For the first time I was surrounded by more like minded 'Arty' friends. Adopting, however mildly, a few street punk tropes placed a tentative toe into another way of being me. Underneath I remained the rather mild mannered chap I was before, but with punkish trimmings thrilling around the edges. I wanted to be a firmer, stronger individual. Punk offered a way to outwardly display that. Perhaps this would keep the thugs at bay.
Look into the soft moons of my eyes, there is no attitude problem to be read there, just the open iris of vulnerability. I'm 19, with a young man's body, slim, a wee bit of tummy fat, not particularly fit, you'd be hard put to find anything resembling bulk or muscle mass. But then this is the seventies, and my type of male body was common place, almost the default for the majority of wiry young lads. Developing vein bulging muscles and a firm ribbed washboard of abs was then thought to be weird, baffling behaviour. Only vain self obsessed people would do such a thing to themselves. Muscle men were novelty acts on TV variety shows twitching their biceps in time to 'Wheels Cha Cha' whilst sprayed in silver metallic paint. It was all a bit gross. Well ripped men inhabited super hero comics or if you knew of them, the gay drawings of Tom of Finland. But most men in my Lincolnshire village drank far too much beer to be anything other than chubby hunks, with flabby love handles.
The well sculpted body form, is not a new thing, but in recent years its started to produce an unhealthy preoccupation in younger men. Teenage boys, much younger than I was in this photo, are now obtaining and using body enhancing steroids. The pressures on them to look a particular way are immense. Visual provocations and reminders bombard them. Every male film star looks like they were carved out of stone by the divine hands of gods. These days we understand the link between the way women are portrayed in the media, expectations of who and what they're meant to be like. This body fascism has broadened to incorporate men, with the rise of this pumped up hyper male. That it is raising no huge concern, is that its happening to men. Men are supposed to not be weak, to be physically strong and overtly express their power through their physique, so this is just business as usual, isn't it? But improved physical health is not being matched by improved mental health. So 25% of people with body dysmorphia are male, hospital admissions for men with eating disorders have doubled in the last eight years, not to mention the escalating mental heath and suicide crisis in men?
Dwayne Johnson
You are a young lad living in a country backwater, average looking, average in the intelligence and charm department. How will you succeed in relationships, in the world, in a career, with life? Perhaps emulating Dwayne Johnson or any other Hollywood chunk of tanned muscle, might mean you feel better, more confident about yourself. Not everyone inherits the looks of a suave dashing man. Yet even an ugly looking brute with a broken nose can obtain a hot body. Go on, get fit, be healthy, take back control of your destiny, forget the face or personality let your body be the babe magnet. Its not hard to spot guys who are addicted to the gym. They are built like leather sofas with a pea sized head, shaved smooth perched on top.
So men tend to massively overcompensate, using their external bodily appearance, their flesh and muscle as mental armour. The same sad masculine story, build a body impregnable to break ins, so no one discovers that beneath the Rambo lies Bambi, characterised by a lack of confidence, weak self knowledge and arrested emotional development. There are many many ways to live a healthy fulfilled life, being built like Hercules is not necessarily at the top of the list.
Heracles
Fetishistic obsession with the perfect male body in the West has its origins in the Ancient Greek world of Gods, sculpture and Homer. The archetypal image we have of the warrior hero has a direct lineage traceable from Hector and Achilles through to modern day 'ninja' street fighters. The supremely fit man, toned into a perfect form representing the outward manifestation of a superior mind with the strength of purpose held within. Well, at least that's the myth and presumption. It is also the root of 20th century Aryan notions of the Nazi's and Soviet images of revolutionary workers in Russia.
Armour once taken off, is a clanking, cold, hard shell, a void echoing from within. Men appear to feel safer when soldered up in a restrictive metallic casing, whether literally or as a metaphor for physique. Tattoos are a decorative addition to contemporary body armour, displaying the allegiances and insignia of urban tribes. Its a war paint permanently drawn on the skin, shielding you from evil, protecting in the midst of clashes over territory in our towns and cities.
Poster image of Hitler wearing armour
Masculine armour, though usually physically manifested, does have its mental and spiritual correlates. The words we chose to use can be armour. The beliefs we hold can be armour. The politics we espouse can be armour. Our public persona can be armour. The things we own, our possessions can be armour. Some people use their spouses as armour. Anything can be used as a means of protection, of displaying strength. Projecting an unyielding hardness is a masculine addiction. We demand it of our politicians, whether male or female. Our leaders, like our country, must be strong, stable and well defended. Pull up the drawbridge, prevent invasive foreigners from getting in. Men are like nations, islands unto themselves. You wear armour if you're feeling vulnerable. Armour protects, but does so by cutting you off from the outside world. Armour isolates. When wearing armour you're always alone.
Soviet Poster
By 1976 I know I'm gay, but have not yet come out. Still faking being straight, I think I'm hiding in plain sight, that no one sees this side of me, which was doubtful actually. An art college is probably 'the' place to find yourself regularly in the company of a galaxy of oddballs and queens of all shapes, sizes and outrage. There was Big Joe, well over six and a half foot tall, a massive hulk built like a concrete wall, wearing day glo hot pants, makeup, necklaces, earrings, a shoulder bag akimbo, a voice loud and proudly effeminate. Simultaneously both provocative and a warning. I found people like him inspiring. they gave me confidence that being out as gay would not be just OK, but fun too. That it was possible to be honest and open about who I was, started here. Though I was still a few years away from coming out to friends, and over a decade from telling my family. So the momentum was slow in building.
Though 1976 was nine years after being actively gay had been decriminalised, it was still far from straightforward being an out gay man. Big Joe was attacked by a gang, he gave them what for, being mentally brave and unbowed, but he was nevertheless physically bruised. In Quentin Crisp's book The Naked Civil Servant published in 1968 and made into a TV film in 1975, he describes his life as an out gay man many decades before gay relations were legalised. Defiantly himself, despite the oppression of his time, Crisp was to become a major hero for me. Though, strangely, he could never quite bring himself to consider his homosexuality as being normal. Nevertheless he became something brilliantly arch. Defiantly individualistic, he declared everyone could do as he had done, to be true to yourself but larger than life. Crisp was critical of 'camp' because it had become a series of behavioural cliches, an affectation adopted in order to identify yourself as part of 'the oppressed group'.
" I would not wish to be shunted into a siding. The trouble with gay reservations is they breed a terrible conformity. They claim to be a place where people can be themselves but very often that involves the most boring form of camp which has nothing to do with individual style and everything to do with a fear of 'breaking ranks". *
Quentin Crisp in his youth
For Crisp developing individuality in your way of being, was to find 'your style'. This 'style' blossomed out of self-understanding and required courage to live out who you really are. Regardless of whether you are gay or straight, being who you really are builds an inner strength more resilient than any outwardly constructed form of defensive armour. However, on the journey to self-knowledge, for a gay man, affecting camp has its role to play because it makes the invisible visible. There were times in the 1980's when I cranked up a camp appearance simply because it made it easier if people knew what I was without needing to be told.
I don't have any photos of myself during this 1980's phase of wearing jewellery. Acquaintances who knew me at that time, referred to me as 'Flamboyant Steve' The single pierced earlobe was becoming quite common place among men, but I decided to have both ears done. Overtime I progressed from wearing pairs of colourful studs, pink triangles, zigzag snakes, silver lizards, jade drops, to earrings closer to candelabras or tubular bells, dangling and swinging like wind chimes from my lobes. Along with a hand full of rings, this was jewellery as public power statement. My clothes didn't particularly partake in this flamboyance, they remained straightforwardly generic. Unconsciously what I seemed to be trying to communicate was that I was an ordinary guy, who also happened to be gay. Let's not sweat over the details.
There were moments of panic, when I did feel far too exposed. I worked in an art shop, in a multi-cultural district of North London, where no one was detrimental about how anyone dressed. I did tone it down when I visited my family. A few years later I become uncomfortable with anything that felt like an affectation. Did this baroque appearance really represent anything that was true about me? The earrings gradually reverted back to just studs, A decade later I wasn't wearing earrings at all. For a while jewellery had been this outward expression, a way of advertising my sexuality, my chosen form of theatrical peacock display. Gay armour, like any armour, performs this dual function as visual statement and voodoo protection.
I came out to my parents, and though they always remained appreciative and loving, they didn't talk any further with me about my life as a gay man for ten years, until I brought the matter up. They just found the whole subject too disconcerting, and may be I did too, because I hadn't talked about it either. Most gay men hold some bitterness, hidden in their being. Its the hiding, the pretending, the fear of not feeling accepted for who you naturally feel yourself to be, this is inherently difficult existentially. It can't help but dent your self view, your joie de vivre in some way. Gay banter, the bitchy cattiness towards others, though a cliche, becomes a resource that gay men call upon to fight back. It can be cruel, unkind, saying what ought to be unsayable, exposing human flaws and fallibility, to hurt, despise and ridicule. Though its frequently funny and pointed, it emerges from essentially a soured place in the heart. But you do have to laugh through the hurt, don't you?
When I became a Buddhist the negativity embedded in my speech, became an area I had to really work on. I was too prone to letting rip with the witty spur of the moment put down. By then my life had had a few stalled, a few aborted, attempts at taking a different career path and then the closing of a failing business. For ten to fifteen years following 1976 I'd wandered down a more self exploratory but often quite punishing path, of which a degree of bitterness and spite were consequences. Words became a defensive armour, to stop people coming too close and perhaps perceiving how internally fractured, at that time, I could sometimes feel myself to be.
Four years have passed, its 1973 and more than my height has changed. The side parting forsaken for centre parted longer hair that never grew quite long enough. My fine hair when grown long became greasy and lanky rather than the full bodied wildly romantic wind blown curls version of my dreams. Deep Purple and Hawkwind were current musical heroes, so the hair, coloured flairs, necklace bling and a denim bomber jacket with badges (not in picture) were de rigueur for any self-identifying fans. Though the pink flip flips, perhaps not.
I'd had a 60's childhood where Cilla Black ruled, by the early seventies Marc Bolan pouting in a pink satin suit was the new queen. By 1973 with much more seemingly at stake masculinity wise, 'macho 'progressive' music ruled my turntable. Full of dramatic, flamboyant musical flourishes and wildly inventive over indulgences. My enthusiasm hovered between envious voyeurism and vicariously basking in the fame and glory of these revered giants. I so wanted to be that hairy.
Five men flaunting frizz, fur and their feminine side
Such musical heroes offered solace. I felt that my abilities and interests largely fell outside the traditionally held areas for boyhood pursuits and prowess. Pop culture presented to my teenage yearning, meaning and purpose, a place crowned with a transient specialness. A wailing air guitar in hand liberates you fron the circumstances of education, class, race, gender orientation and even talent. The classic seventies teenager, I imaginatively performed along with my favourite pop stars, alone in my bedroom, whilst broadcasting my choice of music through a wide open window. For the world will know me through this music and hear it loud and clear.
I was a sixteen year old holding out for a hero, looking for a distinct affinity, someone embodying a myth that I could emulate. The men I hero worshipped, appeared to model aspects of the dreamed of self. Whilst 'what you are' is still barely mapped as a territory, you can safely imagine yourself as a rock star. Whether you'll have sufficient talent, confidence, ambition, pluck or luck to make that a reality, remains covered in a mist of juvenile hope. Significant individuals who might help you fulfil your potential, are yet to be found. Encountering the trustworthy male hero is always the tricky bit.
Its hard to keep hold of male heroes, they easily slip off their somewhat wonky pedestals. One of my 1980's heroes, Morrissey, once seemed the charismatic opinionated challenging poetic outsider, has aged into a curmudgeon, spouting nationalistic garbage unbecoming of a supposedly intelligent person. Let alone someone who loves his country so much he lives abroad. Yet I can also see how that youthful waif could become the stodgy middle aged man, things fossilise as you get older. I adore the music of The Smiths, but that affection has been put under retrospective strain now their former front man has 'gone rogue.' The past and the present now at loggerheads.
An obstacle to admiring the achievements of anyone, can be their less palatable ideas, morals, opinions and actions. In the aftermath of retrospective scandals and revisionism, both judicial, historical and feminist, what a good decent male role model could be is even harder to imagine, let alone maintain. We know far far too much. Everything, though done to establish a much needed corrective, to create a more balanced view, can still be one sided. Our default position may just be switching from loyal unquestioning defence to slavishly pandering to puritanical dismissal. In our search for 'the truth' fault finding becomes a compulsion, an addiction to believing that only their worst side embodies the truth about a person.
In traditional folk tales heroes are often initially portrayed as flawed individuals,. The classic 'puer aeternus' - the naive unformed boy/man. This idealistic hero is the impudent possesser of foolhardiness, recklessness and flawed with imperfect behaviour. Paradoxically these help identify with his journey, and reassure us that the human potential for good, though often in a titanic struggle, will re-emerge and assert itself. The difficulties a hero encounters whilst on this quest forge transformative changes in them, as the twilight of childhood moves into adulthood. Sketching the first outline of the mature adult male. This is one male heroic archetype.
Today celebrity can rise up really quickly. We then observe their subsequent sins and often ignominious tumble from grace. For Jung, there is always a darker shadowy side to any human psyche. The principled often sitting uncomfortably perched upon the knees of the unprincipled. As the shadow side of a hero passes by, it bristles the hairs of our own shadowy side. What we consider heroic is an archetype being projected onto the face of fallible human beings. If they are to remain a hero they'd have no impure thoughts in word or deed, which is well nigh impossible for even the best of us.
Generally we find it hard holding uncomfortable moral contradictions, of the wholesome and the unwholesome when they are present in ourselves. so god help anyone else. The active presence of both pleasure and aversion towards someone, demands a resolution we cannot always find. Its easier to go into denial or dump our heroes as being altogether worthless. Is it feasible to fully face the complex messy mix of a person's qualities without writing them off completely because they failed the perfect hero test? Heroes, once fallen, are rarely forgiven or allowed redemption from past stains upon their character. As we are currently finding out, many talented men, brilliant in one particular sphere can be serial abusive sex pests in another. Talent, power and hubris leading them to believe they live 'divinely gifted lives' outside the application of normal moral standards. Yet on a collective level there is also social catharsis going on, as we put the archetypal 'bad man' into the stocks to give them a well deserved public kicking.
To maintain any human being as a hero requires selectivity in what we focus on and value. To admire the best in someone, without endorsing any of the dodgy stuff. This is morally tricky ground to traverse. But generally, if we already admire someone, we will, at least for a while, turn a blind eye towards anything that stains or contradicts our favourable constructed viewpoint. It's been common practice for a man's talent or genius to be used as a get out of jail free card, skipping over violent abusive behaviour as insignificant or even excused as eminently reasonable, for a man.
The painter Caravagio was an aggressive, tempestuous person, known to have murdered at least one man. Yet his artistic reputation and career survived this, for his paintings remain striking and significant pieces of art despite his recklessness in a sword fight. So many artistic heroes of the Renaissance were talented but violent street thugs. Genius, talent and, one has to say, historical distance, diminish how their frankly shitty behaviour is now seen. Too quickly overlooked or excused. Perhaps it is easier when you've never known someone personally and only admired their artistic output, to gloss over what a pain in the ass they were towards friends and lovers. Male reputations have undoubtedly benefited most from this. Yet this selectivity in what we focus on when turning people into heroes, is a process that goes on regardless of our gender. The heroic image always requires careful curating in order that it stays 'on message'.
No one who is truly human gets their lives morally correct in every respect. Male or female, we are all erratic beings, exhibiting a wide range of moral contradictions. However, in the anti-hero, human fallibility, eccentricity, of not conforming or fitting in, become the very stuff of greatness. We cheer as they cry 'fuck off' to the world even if they exhibit tendencies of being an cruel gangster. The anti-hero is an impure archetype, the shadow side of the pure hero. Living outside conventions, unwilling to conform to other people's social codes of behaviour, by nature self-indulgent, aberrant individuals with lives teetering, often drunkenly, on the edge of the gutter. You gotta sat yes to another excess, turns their lives into a squalid magnificence, It can be just a pose these days with self appointed anti-heroes everywhere. For the real authentic thing just examine the life, times and writings of the poet and author Charles Buckowski. a deeply rough cut man with more than a few irredeemable features.
Charles Buckowski on the loo
Tribal communities would ritualise the bringing of men and women into adulthood. This entailed removing young men and women from their parents and putting them into the hands of female or male elders. And its probably true that for the guiding mentor role your Mum and Dad are often not the best people. Parents stand too close, hampered by their love and the flaws in their own sense of themselves, they tend to see what you need to do through their own needs of you. So it usually falls to someone one step removed such as a grandparent, uncle, teacher, or an older more experienced friend, who might share a similar enthusiasm, spirituality or talent as yourself. And if this starts to raise safe guarding issues in your mind, this reveals another element bedevilling a masculine mentoring role - the default mistrust of masculine motives. Not without its own history and justification. But it has a consequence that further muddies the waters of how to recognise 'a good man's' face.
So most men continue to hold on to the traditional narrowly defined version of what it is to be a man. Even though this appears more and more like a doomed captain going down with his sinking ship. Its possible this may be concealing a more troubled level of conflicted impulses over quite what is best to do. What from the old style of manhood can stay, what must really go, and how will this all hang together? Alternative guidance for what any new type of man might be like, lacks clarity. There are so few reliable mentors and no manuals. Insecurity then may be making men stay put, holding on grimly, even aggressively, to that which is familiar. Modern masculinity would then seem stuck in this bardo of indecision, a between place, that is neither here nor there.
Robert Bly once commented that young men lacking adult guidance and a defined route into adulthood, will try to create one for themselves. They'll form gangs, cults, allegiances to niche groups of one sort of another that come together to share a task, a lifestyle, a political ideology, an enthusiasm, or ownership of a space, and forge a collective sense of personal identity from it. Bly also said that this attempt at collectively growing up would inevitably fail, as it is the blind leading the blind
I certainly used my taste in music to define me. I constructed an image of myself as the sort of guy who liked weird arty music, the more outlandish and challenging the better. The downside was that there was no obvious gang for this, very few people to share my enthusiasms with. But a singular isolated individuality, alienated from the general mainstream, can also serve a dysfunctional function, creating a vision for oneself as this distinct individual with an 'extra special perception.' Obscurity creating a delusive aura of uniqueness. The hidden, unacknowledged man, self defining, the isolated loner, living in a fantasy world of their own creation, this is an all too common occurance.
To have not encountered beneficial role models, nor found a vocation, nor feel yourself purposeful is sad. Yet to over identify with the trash you own, the team you idolise, the computer games you play, the music you revere, the lifestyle you possess, as compensation for this shortfall in fulfilment can be even sadder. Underneath all of their frontal bluster, all men understand what a shallow unexamined life looks like, because its seen in the dim lifelessness of their eyes that faces them every morning in the mirror.
What makes any hero a hero appears to be a willingness to go beyond a narrowly defined sense of themselves, to push out into less familiar territory. To feel themselves moving forward towards something, as yet undefined, that could be better. This does not sit easily with the sense of stability and creature comforts that comes through staying put. Yet just keeping going requires stoical heroism. Humanity stagnates whenever it stands still for too long. Refusing to adventure or move on prevents the evolution of who we are. This is when masculinity turns toxic.
I've been writing here about heroes mostly in a knowingly mono gendered way. When I look at my own list of heroes there are a some fabulous women present there too. Women whom I admire, and exemplify qualities or talents I'd love to see more of in myself. Whilst I believe it is important for men and women to find heroes and role models within their own gender, because it helps us understand that gender, what it is and what we can become, it's also clear that this doesn't have to be exclusively the case. Heroes can transcend gender designation. Heroes in the broadest sense imaginable can help form ourselves into a more rounded human being.
What is heroic in a man can extend way beyond the narrowness of the macho male cliche. Yet what is it to be heroic now? Is there a heroism that goes beyond the stereotypes? Heroism manifests across humankind, regardless of culture, time period, gender, race or class, rich or poor. What a shame it would be, should we fail to discover the life changing inspiration of another human beings life, because we were wearing racial or gendered blinkers at the time, or were expecting them to be perfect in every aspect of their lives.
'Where have all the good men gone And where are all the gods? Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds? Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed? Late at night I toss and I turn And I dream of what I need
I need a hero I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night He's gotta be strong And he's gotta be fast And he's gotta be fresh from the fight I need a hero I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light He's gotta be sure And it's gotta be soon And he's gotta be larger than life! Larger than life'
***
Except from the lyrics to Holding Out For A Hero
written by Dean Stanford & Jim Steinman. PS.
Cliche ridden lyrics written by men, sung by a woman with a voice rubbed in coarse grade sandpaper. Yet they do highlight other pressures to conform outside of men's expectations of themselves and from other men, such as women's expectations of men. However, women appear to be lumbered with the role of having to keep pushing rather reluctant men to change their views, not just of women, but also of themselves and how they operate in the world. Yet in the desire to liberate themselves from their own gender's stereotyping, men in general are still barely half awake and lagging way way behind.
In this photograph I'm with my Dad and though 12 years old I'm getting to be almost as tall as him. This snap was taken no doubt as a result of my Mother instructing my Father to get his camera out so someone could capture how smart she's badgered me into dressing. This level of control over my outward appearance would diminish over the ensuing teenage years. Yet here I am, on the cusp of that crucial period in 1969, with this nervous self-conscious aura surrounding me. The side parting, the floppy fringe that would often grow long enough to partially obscure me from view, my hands anxiously gripping onto each other. A boy/man, insecure about who he is or what he will become. As puberty and sexual orientation finally hits, a secretive side develops, something to really focus the status anxiety upon.
Teenage years, whatever the gender orientation, are for exploration and self-discovery in a succession of short lived but all consuming enthusiasms. Men tend to define themselves through the things that they do in preference to the more opaque mystery of who they are, and believe personal success in real life comes through focused single minded activity. I wondered at the time where any of my experimental ventures might lead - 'is this who I'll become, or is it this. or this, or this? The possibilities and prospects were, imaginatively at least, wide open. Yet I remember affecting a vague indifference about what my ambitions were, to disguise the conflicted views I held over what my actual desires were. The future was left as just this dreamy bubble, with a fear filled crust of the unknown forming around it. This forged psychological barriers and all variety of confidence sapping monsters to rise up into my mind. These sort of things you can spend years trying to expunge.
I was never the all conquering self-confident Alpha Male. But at that age I admired such men, or was it lusted after? Well, it was just the Six Million Dollar Man actually. I desperately wanted to attain whatever it was he was portrayed as having - the strength, the stubble, the pumped up hairy chest, the whole assertive swagger and style of him. What I didn't know then was that Alpha Males have developed a way of sounding confident, to always know the best thing to do, to appear as the fount of all truth. Whilst in reality the substance to back it up could be somewhat lacking. It takes a while for you to realise that these men are just confidence tricksters, with an 'I take no bullshit' persona , a thuggish quality, that keeps everyone else in a position of awe. Assertive arrogance gets easily mistaken for self-confidence.The Six Million Dollar Man was not a full or real man. He was part cyborg, cold and emotionally removed which its worth noting is what enables him to always know whats best to do.
Confidence and self esteem are acquired traits, unlikely to be an expression of your gene legacy. No one pops out of their Mother confident, it's more usual for it to be nurtured in you by them. Who your parents are, your upbringing, wealth, class expectations, public or private education, has an awful lot to do with it. Given the right circumstances its easier to build self-confidence. You may not have the required talent and skills for a job, but you're able to talk as if you have. To charm a picture of your potential into the eyes of others. My parents were both kind, honest, straight forward people though they didn't have huge amounts of social self- confidence to pass on, keeping what ambitions they had to the smaller scale and manageable. All dreams were heavily tempered by the practicalities of what was thought to be 'realistic'. What my teenage self understood was that as a man I would be measured according to my level of self-confidence, irrespective of whether that was faked or not. This is the male confidence trick. Another bit of the presentational armour men seem required to wear.
Multi-millionaires have found a way to feel potent as a man through business success. Their wives, when they are on show, appear on the surface at least to tolerate being paraded as arm candy. However, these sort of men are not renowned for being gentlemen of great moral integrity or exemplary role models for future generations of men to emulate. They often get what they want by being willing to ride roughshod over anything and anyone that stands in their way, whether that's trading regulations, governments, employee well being, climate change, moral qualms or adherence to the truth. Your Elon Musk, Mike Ashley, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Phillip Greene, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, are all successful men behaving badly, whose indiscretions, missteps and violations are too readily treated as just 'so inimitably them.' These 'confidence trickster men' develop an erroneous sense of their own superiority that appears to put them beyond effective constraint or censure. The big dosh of big dickheads trashing all attempts to restrain them.
The egoic impulses to be competitive, exert power, be ambitious and accumulate huge wealth, are presented as the inevitable outcome for men who possess self-assertive confidence. Research has indicated that successful directors of multinational companies often share dominant psychological traits with those of a psychopath. Male behaviour in general and hence success in business could then be, at least in part, driven by the absence or weakness of perceived limits on behaviour. Men often contain within themselves the unfortunate conjunction of a narrow emotional range of expression with a moral compass that is fragile, faulty or broken. This enfeebled ability to recognise and respect moral boundaries finds expression all the way down the line of male hierarchy via masculine toxic behaviour, the many oppressions, violations and rapes of people and places, at all levels and classes of society The paramount need for self-assertion, often couched in terms of their free will or free speech, over respect for other people, civilised society, collective needs and responsibilities. This manifests even in 'the small rebellions of little men', those minor infringements of civil and social norms that are transformed into these totemic expressions of liberty, that are in reality a desperate need for power over an existentially powerless situation. Its like sticking two fingers up to the wind.
I didn't understand then how anyone became self-confident. You certainly couldn't buy it mail order. I learnt slowly through life, through experimentation, my own mistaken notions, the determination to not fail as a man and the suffering that followed when I felt I had. Pain acting as a harsh truth teacher. I think I've got a better grasp now on what causes a more authentic self-confidence to develop - mainly it comes down to a genuine self-knowledge - knowing what your values are and living by them, what provides purpose and meaning for you, doing the things you love doing, caring for the welfare others as well as your own, keeping an honest and balanced appreciation of what you are good and not good at. the relative strengths and weaknesses of the person you have become - and finally just being fine with all of that. These form a securer foundations for who you are. Most of these are learnt from reflecting and learning from your life experience. What makes a man a man is never about how confidently you wave your big dick around, that serves only to demonstrate how unformed and infantile your sense of yourself is. Self assertion is a lot lot subtler than that.
Things changed in me overtime, but some aspects stubbornly did not. You need to acknowledge that this shadow side exists too, without guilt and with a degree of humility. To resist punishing yourself for the intransigence of perceived character flaws. Living in the shadow of comparisons with other men can be a painful state. Trying to match up to the fake masculine ideal and its prevailing culture of manhood, that this was what you should to be like, but are not, can leave you feeling as though you are constantly failing. Once I could begin to drop these sort of pernicious ideas it was something of a relief, because a large amount of the angst left with them. I could discover a way to relax into my own skin. Become more confident in finding my own way of being a man. Based on an individually authentic and more truthful form of self-confidence.
In this photograph I am five years old, a half awake, sweet natured, yet bleary eyed child, that still survives somewhere in my psyche's back catalogue. That I was, and some might say still am, a bit of a day dreamer, is caught there for all to see. My parents would chide me for living in a world of my own, trying to ground me by stating the self-evident practicalities of life. Though there's little content wise to distinguish dreaming from day dreaming, you are after all simply mulling over possibilities, they are viewed differently, one is seen as aspirational, the other as delusional. Whether children, teenagers or adults we continue to day dream, its how we emotionally engage with the future direction our lives might take. There should always be a place made for it, because as adults we tend to dismiss our day dreams out of fear, insecurity or reductive practicalities.
A young child doesn't know how separate their dreams are from reality. The young boy in this photo appears too soft, too open, too vulnerable, too emotional, too unguarded and too easy a target for being bullied by other boys. At an early age boys discover there's a very easy way to enhance your masculine credentials, to do so at the expense of other boys by tormenting or beating the hell out of them. Boys have to make the choice between fight or flight, and suffer whatever the dents or bonus to their self-esteem may be. These linger off stage like a gremlin whispering prompts into the ears of the adult actor - cheering or jeering at you.
I'd no idea how to toughen up and never became a fisty-cuff fighter. I became adept at spotting risky situations where there might be a need to defend myself. Being called out across the street for being 'a sissy', was frequently accompanied by the sound of my legging it. I understood that my masculinity, however unformed, was publicly being called into question. That this ought not go unchallenged, because no one voluntarily chooses to be a 'sissy', do they?, Five year old boys, though only 'proto-men', do sense what they are expected to be like. I instinctively understood that the macho sporty competitive physical type was not me, so I only half-heartedly tried. I would never be a forward striker in masculinity football. I actually found it hard to really understand what all that blokey punching, kicking and posturing was all in aid of. Nowadays, I still find it unnecessary, if not slightly bemusing. Back then it definitely wasn't funny.
Girls are not boys. For young boys, girls are where femininity resides. Keeping your distance from them appears a worrisome thing for 'true boys.' Wherever 'the feminine' is, you are supposed to be wary of it, reject, ridicule, or if you discover you have it, for god sake try to hide or expel it. Any boy who betrays 'feminine qualities' exposes themselves to the fate of girls; driven from the boy's playground, belittled, patronised, teased and made fun of. Playground behaviour lays the foundations for our confidence in future social interactions. It also sets a self-justifying tone for future misogyny and hostility towards, not just homosexuality, but to anyone else who might have the misfortune to be considered 'foreign','alien' or 'different.'
The word 'sissy' itself comes with its own prejudicial baggage, of a skinny, weak muscled male, not willing to fight, whose masculinity is gentler and sensitive, perceived as not robust, flawed by virtue of the feminine traits present. You don't even have to be the stereotypical effeminate man. You simply have to show interest in subjects devoid of physical prowess, such as maths, science, art or culture, and the 'sissy' badge and T-shirt will arrive in the post.
Boys learn its important to demonstrate their manhood, to show what they are and are not. More grown up men than you might think, straight or gay, play along with macho masculine behaviour simply in order to get by unnoticed and unharmed. A strategy hardwired from an early age. All men become trapped within the narrowly defined constraints of what constitutes a man. a few lay siege to it, whilst most loyally defend. The frustration and anger that unfortunately readily surfaces in men, arises quite often when a self-perceived failing, a falling short of that unattainable male ideal surfaces. This can gnaw away at the core of a man's sense of his own manhood. Violence towards themselves or others becomes a form of cathartic release. How I coped at Primary School was by retreating to the girl's playground, because that was the place where I felt accepted, where 'sissy boys' could safely hide from the brutal oversight of other boys.
There is no guidebook to what makes a man a man, every boy learns the hard way through their missteps. Picking up suggestions from how older boys and the men around them behave, or male role models in comics, art, history, advertising, books or films and TV. These show you strong, tenacious, resourceful men in full control of their lives, oozing self-confidence, cleverness and ambition, able to assert themselves, take risks, holding hard to a sense of their own power and success. This stereotypical man holds mastery over themselves and their world Few have cause to question whether this is a fraudulent fiction. They keep up the pretence, that they are all of those things and more. Its as though the whole edifice of traditional masculinity is like a house with very few firm foundations, but with a lot of very heavy props and prompts holding it upright.
So, even if they say otherwise, no man is cutting the full masculine mustard. They must, however, still be seen as possessing power, even when life circumstances and their own feelings scream at them that they do not. Their true selves concealed behind the masculine facade, continuing to play the game according to the known rules. Few men will expose you, for fear of a reprisal. But if your are bequeathed a persona that is 'a bit queer', then this is a game changer for adherence to those rules. In order to survive you'll be forced to turn the way you are into an act of defiance, a vivid, visible and often verbal assault on the revered statutes of traditional masculinity. You have to do what Quentin Crisp recommends: ' the time comes for everybody when you have to do deliberately what you used to do by mistake, this is the only way to get the joke onto your own terms'
Boy-men of any age who call someone 'a sissy' or a 'puff', avoid the questioning finger being pointed at them, by being first on the offensive. Domination is the last refuge of a man who is feeling powerless. Men fear being publicly shamed by women or gay men, and shown up as weak. Their cutting banter sees the flaws and punctures with relish the masculine armour. A macho man is ,paradoxically, at his most vulnerable, emotionally and psychologically. Heterosexual men uses banter differently as a form of subliminal control. Disguised behind lighthearted friendly joshing, its ridicule and teasing is a reminder to not step out of line. If a man's masculinity is publicly exposed for what it truly is, it would not be just humbling, but deeply crushing and destabilising. They would truly lose it.
Its like a citadel whose walls will crumble under the stress of constant siege. If life throws a few curve balls at a man, losing control of his life, career, partner, children or home, only then might they start to dwell on discomforting questions about what they have become and who they really want to be. Many men,unfortunately, continue to avoid or fail to find the answers to these questions, and end up opting out on life completely.
Men, speaking very generally, see no need for self-analysis, remain blind to the privileges of their position as a male, and probably when drunk will espouse the self-evident superiority of their gender. They have little reason to question the toxicity or otherwise of their behaviour as a man, because its still kinda working for them. The world, after all, remains largely run according to the male viewpoint. There are few signs of men self-liberating themselves from the masculine constraints to which patriarchy chains them. He who has risen to be the Lord of the Manor finds it hard to say 'It's a fair cop chaps' no matter how many peasant revolts they have had to suppress.
If you are a woman, a person of colour, a gay person, or anything between and beyond these designations, you'll spend a good part of your life having to become more self-aware in order to discover what you really are. Struggling in the face of prejudice, oppression and ignorance, to become a truer representation of you, to the best of your ability. One way or another you'll have to discover how to 'sissy that walk,' of yours
