If even Debrett’s can update its template for a “modern gentleman”, finding room for stain removal tips and Grand Theft Auto, surely it can’t be so hard for the rest of us. Not every change constitutes a crisis.
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Lost boys
By William Sutcliffe
Published: October 17 2008 20:32 | Last updated: October 17 2008 20:32
Men to Boys, The Making of Modern Immaturity
By Gary Cross
Columbia University Press £17.50, 368 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14
The Retrosexual Manual: How to be a Real Man
By Dave Besley
Prion £12.99, 127 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39
How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man’s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts
By Andrew Martin
Short Books £12.99, 219 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39
Debrett’s Guide for the Modern Gentleman
Debrett’s £15, 192 pages
When I turned 18, my grandfather gave me a framed copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”. I thanked him politely and put it at the back of the least accessible drawer in my bedroom. This moment has, I suspect, been enacted in endlessly varied forms between different generations of men for thousands of years. Older men, with a lifetime of experience behind them, want to tell younger men what they have learned about what it takes to become a man. And younger men don’t want to listen.
The publishing industry, which makes a considerable portion of its money doling out recipes for self-improvement, understandably wants to get in on this exchange of unwanted advice. And as competition for an audience intensifies, the tone of the advice becomes ever more shrill. These days, we don’t have problems, we have crises – and the media never tire of telling us that masculinity is somehow “in crisis”. A whole publishing genre has sprung up around this idea, offering advice, analyses and solutions. But can an entire gender really have a crisis? All at once?
A thorough attempt to answer this question comes in Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity by the appropriately named Gary Cross. Cross is disappointed about what has become of his sex. The title of his introduction, “Where Have All the Men Gone?”, gives a good idea of the tone and nature of his lament.
Cross, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University, believes contemporary men are refusing to grow up. They are “boy-men”, engaged in “a veritable rejection of maturity in all its meanings”. He elaborates on this: “Mocking of convention in celebrations of amoral violent fantasy, crude vulgarity and unrestrained appetite, the boy-man makes a fetish of the ‘cool’. He turns maturity into a joke, a pitiful loss to be avoided at almost all costs.”
Cross reserves particular vitriol for video games, criticising those obsessed with video games for being “in a state of arrested development”. They can’t see the difference between a toy and an adult pleasure, he says.
It’s damning stuff. At first glance this looks like a convincing case for some kind of gender-wide crisis, until you ask yourself how much video gamers really differ from their fathers or grandfathers. What are chess, cards and football if not childhood toys that for generations have continued to interest men throughout their lives?
Stanley Kowalski, for example, über-male of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, was obsessed with 10-pin bowling. Cross calls the men who came of age around the second world war “The Greatest Generation”, yet he never adequately explains why competing at rolling balls towards a pile of sticks is more mature than playing Grand Theft Auto.
While Cross’s book lands few meaningful punches on “modern immaturity”, Dave Besley’s The Retrosexual Manual: How To Be a Real Man (billed on the back cover as “humour”) is unintentionally the most depressing indictment of contemporary masculinity one could hope to find.
Besley seems to agree that “real men” no longer exist, identifying the “Golden Age of Man” as the 1970s. A man of this era “didn’t fret over the nitty-gritty of life; he got on with it. Work, beer, football and sex were all that mattered to the single bloke and the rest was detail that would work itself out”. He adds: “It was a simpler life, because he still dealt with things like a man, and women respected that.”
This unsubstantiated nonsense is, after all, “humour”. What’s interesting is that this fantasy is seen as marketable and amusing. While Cross’s lament made me think that perhaps nothing is particularly wrong with men after all, Besley’s bitter tongue-in-cheek sexism, which he appears to think is acceptable when his tone has a veneer of irony, is enough to make you think that something serious has gone awry. “What do you really want from a woman?” he asks. “Equal opportunities, feminism, parenthood, plastic surgery and even the Girl Power bollocks spouted by the Spice Girls have turned the quiet little girls of yesteryear into confident, self-reliant über-women who’ll happily grind your bollocks to sand.”
Whatever you think of men in general, Besley certainly seems to be having some kind of personal crisis. He is, however, confident enough to assert that women are becoming impatient with “the pathetic, wet, blubbing fops” that pass for blokes in the 21st century: “Modern women yearn for a man who answers back; who offers challenge or danger; a man who will look them in the eye and tell them to shut up when their neurotic whining has become too much.”
Besley is, I suspect, living proof of the “modern immaturity” that so riles Cross. But it’s curious how much the two authors agree. Besley’s introduction, “Where Did All the Men Go?”, asks the very question at the heart of Cross’s work. They both consider modern man narcissistic, manifested by vanity and foppishness according to Besley; laziness and irresponsibility according to Cross. Most importantly, they both agree that the “real man” is a phenomenon of the past, despite having opposing views of what this mythical figure represents. Cross sees him as more adult and serious than feckless modern youths who are only interested in instant gratification; Besley sees him as liberated and free to pursue his desires, as opposed to modern man who has been castrated by political correctness and no longer knows how to enjoy himself.
In short, they both agree that old models of manhood were better; they simply diverge as to whether that was because men were more mature or more immature.
Andrew Martin, a barrister, journalist and novelist, offers a third cure for whatever is wrong with men in How to Get Things Really Flat. His solution lies not in finding a historically superior model of manhood by rifling through history. Instead, he proposes we learn something from women. His subtitle, “A Man’s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts”, lays out his agenda. There is none of Besley’s slippery irony at work here: it’s really a book about how (and why) to do more housework.
The book is part memoir, part practical guide to housework, part meditation on the socio-politics of modern middle-class marriage. As with Besley and Cross, the introduction’s title reveals the issue most troubling the author: “Who Is This Book For?”. I read the chapter twice but it doesn’t answer the question. In the “What Is Wrong With Men?” genre, there is no agreement about what the problem might be, and a perplexing divergence of opinion about the possible solution. The only unifying theme is the assumption that there is a problem.
These books ultimately lead to the conclusion that if there is a pernicious narcissism at the heart of contemporary masculinity, it surely lies not in the new-found taste for skincare products that horrifies Besley, or a fondness for video games that shocks Cross, but in a desire to believe that our “crises” are somehow more profound and painful than those previous generations faced. The belief that the generation who had to come to terms with David Beckam’s enjoyment of shopping are somehow having a harder time than those who were conscripted into the army and sent abroad to kill people is simply preposterous. It is offensive and vain to suggest that the reward of feeling like a “real man” is an adequate compensation for the trauma of being sent to war.
The men who fought in the two world wars of the last century had to deal with a level of physical and psychological trauma that is simply inconceivable to men of my generation.
If masculinity has ever really faced any genuine crises, it was surely during and after those wars – those men returned home to find gender roles radically and irreversibly altered by their absence. Society may appear to be changing fast now but, by comparison to those two upheavals, contemporary man has it easy. Ever since the industrial revolution, men – and women – have had to change, generation by generation, to keep up with new demands made on them by a society in flux. The key difference between how the two sexes deal with this is that men, unlike women, are fixated on the chimera of some genuine version of masculinity that has always receded just out of reach into the past. Wherever we are, a chorus of voices seems to tell us that the generation just before us had it right – and we’ve now got it all wrong.
An antidote to all this “masculinity in crisis” self-flagellation comes from a surprising quarter: Debrett’s new Guide for the Modern Gentleman. This book advises on the finer details of tailoring, gastronomy and social etiquette, while also providing a considered opinion on LCD versus plasma TVs, a piece on “jean care”, and advice on “why you should wear a fragrance”. There is even an entry on 11 “essential” video games. It has no agenda and no argument but is so delightfully untroubled by the very things that are so often cited as symptoms of crisis or decline that the book ends up making a convincing case that perhaps nothing is wrong after all.
If even Debrett’s can update its template for a “modern gentleman”, finding room for stain removal tips and Grand Theft Auto, surely it can’t be so hard for the rest of us. Not every change constitutes a crisis.
William Sutcliffe’s latest novel is ‘Whatever Makes You Happy’, published by Bloomsbury (£10.99)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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