Man Up E-Book

Jack Urwin

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 353

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'Jack Urwin writes like he speaks: accessible, funny and interesting. His Vice article got people talking and now, almost two years on, he is right in thinking that the time for a big discussion about masculinity has arrived.' Telegraph WHAT DOES MASCULINITY ADD UP TO IN THE 21ST CENTURY? Jack Urwin traces modern ideas of masculinity from the inability of older generations to deal with the horrors of war, to the mob mentality of football terraces or Fight Club and the disturbing rise of mental health problems among men – especially young men – today. While we struggle with the idea that there is a single version of masculinity worth aspiring to, depression and suicide among men have reached unprecedented levels. Man Up looks at the challenges and pressures on men today, and suggests ways to survive.

Leseprobe

MAN UP

JACK URWIN

SURVIVING MODERN MASCULINITY

MAN UP

Published in the UK in 2016

by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

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ISBN: 978-178578-069-1

Text copyright © 2016 Jack Urwin

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in DIN by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Contents

Introduction

What Makes a Man?

The Dawn of Man

Boys Don’t Cry: Childhood, Social Conditioning and Mental Health in Gender

Fight Club: Aggression, Risk and Mob Mentality

Man Down: Masculinity in the Military and Institutionalised Violence

The Ideal Man: Body Image, Consumerism and the Superficial Face of Modern Masculinity

Man & Wife: Families, Personal Relationships and the Destructive Nature of Emotional Repression

Masculinity Beyond (Straight) Men: The Impact on Women’s Rights and the LGBT Movement

Losing It: Sex, Rape Culture, and the Frustration of Male Virginity

We Need To Talk: What We Can Do To Change

Acknowledgements

References

Introduction

He was fucking with me, I am sure of it. 13 years of analysing the final words I heard my father speak, and I have no doubt whatsoever that those two syllables were delivered with the same black sarcasm as every other sentence to ever pass his lips. The bastard. The brilliant, awful bastard.

Like that of most dads, Richard Urwin’s sense of humour was an acquired taste. Sometimes, the depth and complexity of his jokes would reveal the brain of a one-time Mensa member (he was too tight to renew his subs after the first year); other times, they’d eschew any sort of wit or taste whatsoever and you were left questioning in what society this man’s IQ could be perceived as being above average. My brother and sister recall an incident in which our dad timed how long the extractor fan in the bathroom would run for after the light was turned off, calling them upstairs and clicking his fingers at the exact moment it stopped, expecting them to be impressed at his ability to command power over household appliances or, at the very least, for waiting seven minutes to determine the length, and a further seven minutes to execute the prank. If he’d known he wouldn’t make it to his 52nd birthday, maybe he wouldn’t have wasted fourteen minutes of his life waiting for a fan to turn off (oh, who am I kidding, he absolutely would have).

Much to our horror, he regularly wore tight Lycra cycling shorts; a curiosity, for in none of our lifetimes did we ever see him ride a bike. A family friend once remarked: ‘I never know where to look when Richard wears cycling shorts.’ In all probability, the appeal of the shorts, like the bathroom fan, like so much of my dad’s personality, centred on the one thing he loved doing more than anything else: fucking with people. Such was the man’s commitment to insincerity, when I asked how he was feeling after a few days off work with the flu, he stood up, proclaimed ‘Better!’ and made his way to the bathroom to die.

It’s possible he had no idea that in a matter of seconds he’d be slumped unconscious beside the toilet. It’s possible he lied in order to protect me. But the final explanation, and the one I choose to believe, is that he knew he was dying and was determined to get one last shot in. And I respect that a hell of a lot. It gives me an odd sort of comfort to think that as his vision faded and his lips turned blue, my father’s final thought before submitting to the cold grip of extinction was a gleeful: ‘Hahaha! I got you, you little shit!’ I think he would have enjoyed that.

Three weeks later, I celebrated my 10th birthday (I got a new bike, I ate some cake, I did all the normal things you do when you hit double figures). A few months after that, I took home the title of ‘funniest pupil’ in a classroom awards ceremony, something which previously would’ve seemed impossible given my strait-laced, hard-working, borderline-teacher’s-pet attitude to school. Deflecting my grief into something that made others laugh felt much better than breaking down crying several times a day – which, in reality, was what I wanted and probably needed to do. It’s hard to deal with that sort of trauma in a healthy way, though: especially if it’s your first real taste of what a shitty world this can be. You latch onto any kind of positivity after something so painful, and I suppose for me this manifested itself in the laughter of my peers, something I found validated me and gave me some purpose. Plus, let’s face it, no one wants to be the kid constantly crying about their dead dad; a total fucking buzzkill.

When the coroner was finished rooting around inside the vessel that had, for 51 years, housed my father, a fatal heart attack was recorded, and off went dad to his fiery conclusion in the Loughborough crematorium. The post-mortem, however, also revealed significant scar tissue indicative of a previous attack sometime in the months or years previously, which was news to us all. Shortly afterwards, my mum found over-the-counter angina medication in the pocket of one his jackets, so it was clear he knew something was up, but apparently chest pains which had been nearly-deadly once before weren’t something that he deemed worthy of professional consultation. Classic Dad!

After he died, jokes took preference over sincerity in almost any situation for me, because the idea of picking at wounds and revealing the fragile human beneath was about the most terrifying thing I could comprehend. It’s a trait I now recognise as one of my father’s greatest flaws, ultimately contributing to his downfall. It’s also an inherent characteristic of so many men, and it’s this which gave me my first inspiration for what you’re reading today.

The stubborn lost-bloke-refusing-to-ask-for-directions might be a handy caricature – one that’s helped people like Martin Clunes sustain a career in television for over 30 years – but it’s also rooted in a very real, very destructive notion of masculinity: which the Oxford Dictionary defines as the ‘possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men’. We’re conditioned from an early age to believe that acknowledging weakness is somehow a weakness in itself, and there are plenty of bleak statistics to confirm what a huge problem this is.

Even accounting for reproductive health, in any given year men are half as likely as women to visit their GP1, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out how little sense this makes: it seems pretty unlikely that women simply get ill twice as often as men. In the UK, the rate of premature deaths (under 50 years old) is one and a half times higher2 among men than women, primarily due to cardiovascular disease, accidents, suicide and cancer – that latter cause offering perhaps the strongest evidence of men’s reluctance to seek help. For example, while affecting men and women equally, skin cancer kills twice as many men3 because we avoid addressing the issue until it’s too late.

The disparity in suicide rates is another eye-opener. In spite of depression being more common in women, British men are three times more likely to take their own lives4.

A 2012 Samaritans report5 concluded that the social constructs of masculinity were a major cause of this imbalance, noting that ‘the way men are taught, through childhood, to be “manly” does not emphasise social and emotional skills’, and that, in contrast to women, ‘the “healthy” ways men cope are by using music or exercise to manage stress or worry, rather than “talking”’.

Alcoholism is also significantly more prevalent in men, linked largely to self-medicating mental illness. My paternal grandfather fought in World War Two and survived by technicality alone, the untold horrors he’d seen gouging away at his sanity until he was able to do little else but drink. Born six years after D-Day, my dad grew up like so many baby-boomers, with a father whose deep emotional repression left him unable to love, let alone talk about any of his feelings. It’s a hereditary condition: men raised by men unable to communicate emotionally, the symptoms of what we now know as PTSD becoming synonymous with masculinity. It’s all wildly fucked up when you stop to consider it.

Of course, the destruction doesn’t end there. While widowed mothers deal with the fallout of our distrust for doctors, men are doing a terrific job of sabotaging any attempt at romance in the first place because of our inability to communicate. Not content with merely reliving my father’s death for these words, I came up with the definitely-not-terrible idea of asking my ex-girlfriend Megan to reveal the specific problems that arose during my tenure as her shitty boyfriend.

‘I think the biggest thing was that your lack of communication made it difficult to process your emotions within your own self,’ she said. ‘Even more than your inability to communicate it to me, you were so practised at pushing things down that you’d lost touch with the reality of your emotions. So, even when I could identify a problematic situation, you would deny it. In addition to having to work through difficult issues, I first had the insurmountable task of getting you to acknowledge they were issues in the first place.’

Communication is the key to a successful relationship, as any happily-coupled person will tell you (also, not sleeping with your colleagues; that helps, too). The worst part is, we know this. It’s been drilled into us by every book and TV show and film that deals with these kind of issues. But still we ignore it, forging ahead under the misconception that those rules only apply to others.

So what the hell can we do about it all? It’s easy to write the problem off as a lost cause, too embedded in our culture for it to ever truly change. You can’t alter the personality of half the world’s population overnight (and thankfully so, as there’s a lot to be said for self-deprecation, cynicism and low-level passive-aggression). But you can always start trying by doing one simple thing: talking. We do it every day, so why not do it when it comes to stuff that really matters? You’ve had a lot of practice opening and closing your mouth to make sound come out of it, just slightly alter those sounds and it could end up doing you a lot of good.

I’ve got much better at talking in the last couple of years, but it’s still difficult, so I started instead to write down these thoughts and share them with complete strangers; it provides a sort of detachment and allows me to open up in a way I often struggle to when speaking directly to my loved ones. Of course, that’s not possible for everyone and I am indeed very lucky to have been given a platform from which to talk some asinine bollocks on occasion. Much of what you just read originally appeared in an article I wrote for VICE in October 2014, titled A Stiff Upper Lip Is Killing British Men6. Ironically, that piece ended with me calling for men to take some time and address the issue in a timely fashion because I didn’t want to write a whole fucking book about it. More crucially, I figured, no one wanted to read a whole fucking book about it since, essentially, it all came down to acknowledging the existence of something we’d prefer to remain ignorant of. Prior to publication of the piece, I had anticipated what the response might look like, imagining the bulk of the few comments it drew being an apt denial of the issues at hand; a predictable slew of below-the-line unpleasantness, and a few laddish types telling me that I just needed to, well, man up.

I would have been content with a couple of Facebook likes, the obligatory handful of sympathy tweets from my friends and an email from my mum telling me she was proud, but in my next piece I might consider the following changes to my style and content, and did I have to swear so much? – you know, mum stuff. But no, you pricks had other ideas didn’t you? You had to go and show me a more hopeful and kind side to the web, you had to break down my prejudices and crush my soul with a barrage of positivity and encouraging rhetoric. You got in touch and thanked me for writing it.

The piece went live on a Friday morning and I prepared to go about my day as I always did, before you lot came along and I ended up spending the rest of the daylight hours in a sort of detached state, watching in awe as it made its way around the world. Much of the afternoon involved me sitting at my laptop occasionally making odd, confused whimpering noises, punctuated with maniacal laughter and a lot of instances of me asking ‘what the actual fuck is going on?’ Journalists and writers I greatly admire began praising the article. Irvine Welsh called it ‘fabulous’: the twisted, fucked up, incredible mind that created Francis Begbie thought my whine about dead dads was good, which was hardly a reaction I’d expected.

In its first few hours of life, A Stiff Upper Lip… clocked up tens of thousands of shares around the world and saw praise from the kind of people writers want to be praised by. It was an awful lot of fun, if I’m being honest. After the initial shock subsided, I started to ask why this had happened. What about it had turned heads and ignited conversation? I briefly considered the fact that just maybe I was a brilliant writer, until I read my own clumsy words again and remembered I don’t understand the most basic grammar. (I’m not kidding when I say about 90% of the time I’m totally winging it – thank fuck for editors.) So with that theory buried, it looked likely that the answer lay in a truth most people accepted long ago, but which had rarely been discussed.

While I was largely writing about a personal experience, its universality became clear. Every single person who read that piece could relate to it. In my father they saw themselves, their own fathers, their brothers, their boyfriends. For so many people to identify with a middle aged, Lycra-adorned pharmaceutical sales rep from the Midlands was astounding, but it indicated how desperate we were as a society to have this conversation. So that brings us to MAN UP.

In those initial 1,500 words I covered a few themes in a very shallow way. There’s a lot more to say about these themes, and a whole world of topics to address for the first time. I don’t want this book to be a judgment on any individual, because that’s precisely the attitude that has caused so much upset and illness already. I want this to be a book for every man, and, particularly, ‘the everyman’. Most of us, myself included, don’t have a grounding in gender studies or sociology, and I don’t want this to be a dry, academic tome – because otherwise you’re not going to get through it. Hell, I wouldn’t be able to get through it! But I will pull in experts where needed, because I am not every man and I want intelligent stats behind what I’m saying; I’ll be tackling these issues head on, and on behalf of all of us.

In the interests of those idly thumbing through this introduction, trying to figure out if it’s worth your time, let’s just get this out of the way. Who is this book for? This book is for everyone who is in some way affected by masculinity (put simply, this book is for everyone). Our societal perception of masculinity brings harm not only to emotionally-stunted men, but to every single person who inhabits this world regardless of gender, sexuality or any other factor. What the hell, you say, you can’t just tell us your book’s about something that obviously affects everybody in some respect and implore us all to read it. Totally can, mate. Totally can.

But I digress. The reaction seemed very apt. This discussion on masculinity and a stiff upper lip had not really happened before, hindered, presumably, by masculinity and a stiff upper lip, which I think was largely why so many people cared. By the time I showed up to my weekend job at the Buffalo Bar in Islington that evening, I’d had to turn off all notifications on my phone. I sat in the office on a break and had a quick peek at Twitter, where I saw Irvine Welsh’s comment. Excitedly, I told Michael, the manager, and he demanded I get the piece up on the computer so he could read it, which he did, and praised me for it. If you had the good fortune of meeting Michael Buffalo before developers turfed us out of that building, you might understand why that was such an exciting moment for me: with his thick Geordie accent, foul mouth and occasional tendency to refer to customers as cunts, to their faces (in his defence, only when they were really being cunts), this was a man you’d have no trouble describing as ‘traditionally’a masculine – and so his approval meant a lot.

A few days later I got a text from my old housemate Cameron. I love Cam to bits, but as someone who works in finance and bases his free time largely around sport, he’s embedded in what I’d call a pretty laddish culture, and he and I are very different people. In his text, he told me that he’d read the piece and loved it, and that it made him think a lot about his own inability to talk. His words are a big part of why I’m writing this. Pleasing the very liberal, social-justice types I tend to surround myself with is one thing – but getting through to Cam made me realise what a powerful thing this debate could be. More than anything, it gave me hope that maybe, gradually, we could make a difference, bit by bit.

As I write this in January 2016, I can’t help but notice what a whirlwind 15 months it’s been for masculinity and the conversations about men we’ve started to have. Last year saw the rapper Professor Green explore his father’s death in the beautiful documentary Suicide and Me, which felt like a real breakthrough in how we approach that devastating issue. But we also watched Reggie Yates delve into the world of ‘Pick Up Artists’ and show us a darker, more regressive side to men and masculinity. Men’s Rights Activists – a kind of ginger group for antifeminists – have continued to harass and blame women for the woes faced by the male gender. Toxic masculinity – a phrase I will be coming back to regularly throughout this book – has driven violence, mass murder and rape just like it always has. Some of it’s getting better, much of it is not. We need to address this before it’s too late, for the sake of every last one of us.

If he’d learned to open up a bit more, maybe my dad wouldn’t have spent his life avoiding help and would still be here. He could have spared the world yet another gratuitously self-indulgent book penned by a millennial about an emotionally distant late father, and I’d have someone to mutter at me disapprovingly every time I mentioned how my career and housing situation and life was going. Hypotheticals will get us nowhere, but until we address our inability to open up, we’ll continue to die early and needlessly, and destroy the relationships we have while we’re here. It may not start a revolution, but if even just a handful of people read about why we’ve ended up like this, how we’re hurting those around us, and what we can do to make men more of a force for good in this world, then it’ll be worth the fucking hours I slaved over online forums discussing when to use ‘that’ vs ‘which’, and the crushing realisation that I’ll probably never remember.

Footnote

a. I draw your attention to the quotes here, for reasons that should become clear as the book goes on

What Makes a Man?

Before I launch into the mammoth task of breaking down what I believe are the most important issues surrounding masculinity today and then try to find some sort of solutions for all of our flaws, afflictions and destructive behaviours in the hope of improving mankind for the rest of our time on Earth, I should take a moment to establish what, exactly, a man is. (There’s probably some other stuff I need to think about prior to embarking on this mission as well, like ‘what the fuck am I doing writing a book, this was a terrible idea, I want to get off, oh god, oh god, this is a disaster’, but it’s nothing a night on Yahoo Answers won’t fix, I’m sure.)

In theory, this ought to be the least complicated part of the entire book. We all know what a man is, right? Great, next chapter: I am acing this writing thing. But while once upon a time this would have been the case, in 2016 we have a much broader understanding and acceptance of gender which doesn’t conform to the binary definition we tended to use historically. You might have heard an older relative talk about how ‘it used to be so much simpler, when men were men and women were women’ after reading something in the paper about transgender people. Hell, you may well have thought that yourself, a lot of this is very new to many of us and it’s okay to admit you’re a little lost – as long as you’re not going to be a dick about it. We’re all here to learn (I hope) and although some readers will already be familiar with the terms I’m about to discuss, I’d urge these ones to stick with this chapter all the same because it might give you a bit of insight into how I’m approaching certain ideas and clear up your questions about some potentially dubious passages later on. I also like the power of forcing you to read every last one of my utterly disposable words, because I’m a bastard.

If I start this by saying we need to look at three categories, all of which are interwoven but also entirely separate, I’m not going to be winning any awards for clarity. But bear with me, as I try to make sense of sex, sexuality and gender; what unites them, what separates them, and why any of this matters at all.

Sex

This might be the easiest to explain. Sex is biological, it’s what we assign babies at birth based on their genitals, and in most cases this is one of two options. If a penis you see, a boy he be; if a vagina down there, then, I dunno, I quickly lost interest in this rhyme, but your baby’s getting marked down as a girl on its birth certificate. Unless your parents are super-progressive, the chances are that your assigned sex at birth will be reflected in your upbringing and you will be encouraged to follow an explicitly gendered path, based entirely on your tiny infant organs. Less commonly, a baby may be born with a reproductive system that doesn’t fit the traditional definitions of male or female sexual anatomy and may display elements of both, which is termed intersex. This may be apparent at birth or may not become so until later on in life, and sometimes intersex people (including infants and children) undergo surgery or hormone replacement in order to visibly conform to a binary gender.

Sexuality

A person’s sexuality is who, if anyone, they are sexually attracted to (specifically, in this situation, which gender or genders). In the traditional view, heterosexual or straight people are exclusively attracted to people of the opposite gender, homosexual or gay people are exclusively attracted to people of the same gender, and bisexual people are attracted to both men and women. There are further labels once we step outside these binaries, such as pansexual, which refers to an attraction to all genders – including people who don’t identify as either male or female – while some people prefer more ambiguous terms like queer, for example, which may simply be used as an umbrella description for anyone who’s not heterosexual.

Gender

In most parts of MAN UP, this is the most important category. Gender is about personal identity, and is defined not by any physical characteristics but by an individual’s mind. It’s also, arguably, a social construct, a theme I’ll be coming back to frequently throughout the book. A cisgendera person is someone whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth, which is the majority of people. A transgender person is someone whose gender does not match the sex they were assigned at birth, so someone who identifies as a woman but was born with what we traditionally consider male genitals is a transgender woman, or trans woman, or, better yet, simply a woman. Some trans people undergo sex reassignment surgery in order to change their physical body so it aligns with their gender, but this is not the case for everyone. It doesn’t stop there, though, because some folks don’t identify as either male or female. Non-binary or genderqueer people may identify with aspects of traditional ideas of both men and women, or neither, and often choose to be referred to by gender-neutral (they/their) or other pronouns.

Are you still with me?

Well, are you? I hope so, because there’s obviously going to be a fair bit of talk about men in this book. More importantly, there’s going to be a lot of talk about masculinity, particularly masculinity at its most toxic. As far as I’m concerned anyone who identifies as a man, is a man; and because masculinity is a social construct and thus rooted mostly in identity rather than biology, masculine behaviour is exhibited by all men. Having said that, for the purposes of this book, I’m going to be looking at particular types of men much more than others, and while I will touch upon issues facing gay and trans men, as a cis, heterosexual (‘cishet’) man myself, I can’t in good conscience speak for these groups because I do not have the lived experience they do. Furthermore, a lot of the behaviour I’ll be exploring is quite specific to cishet guys (or at least a fair bit more prevalent within this group) – for instance, I’ll be looking at how particular kinds of showy hyper-masculinity are bred by a fear that others will think we’re homosexual, and, unsurprisingly, openly gay men don’t tend to be quite so bothered by that.

At certain points, the focus of the book will be what I guess you might call cis- or hetero-normative; at others it’ll be broader. For the sake of a clean, consistent writing style, I won’t always specify if I’m referring mostly to cisgender men, and in general things should be clear from the context. Similarly, a lot of the book will cover gender in a traditional binary light, making comparisons between men and women. This is not intended to erase or ignore non-binary genders, but is something I feel is necessary for understanding particular issues because masculinity is in itself a result of the concept of binary genders (to the extent that it regularly manifests itself as the polar opposite of femininity).

I don’t doubt that there will be people reading this who feel like these clarifications are an embarrassing sign of excessive political correctness, who think that I shouldn’t need to even acknowledge such issues, and they’re absolutely entitled to hold this opinion. I can’t hear them, though, because that’s not how books work, so I just get to keep ploughing on with the stuff that pisses them off, and that feels great. In all seriousness, this does matter to me, and if you’re open-minded enough to accept that problems such as male suicide need to be addressed, then you might eventually understand why I bothered with this section at all.

If you’ve made it this far and have a problem with anything I’ve written – maybe you disagree that anyone who identifies as a man is one – there’s a good chance I’ll discuss it in further detail later on and you might even find it changes your mind. Essentially, what I’m saying is: just get on with it and turn to the next page. Scared? Man the fuck up. (And discover why telling people to man up is a terrible idea.)

Footnote

a. The linguists among you might be interested to hear that while ‘cisgender’ is a relatively new term, the etymology of its component parts goes back hundreds of years. ‘Cis’ meaning ‘on this side’ was originally used when referring to places, so ‘cisatlantic’ would refer to the near side of the ocean while ‘transatlantic’ would refer to both sides of or, indeed, crossing, the ocean.

The Dawn of Man

Why do men behave the way they do?

‘Men, am I right?!’ would be the opening line to my hypothetical, sub-Michael McIntyre, observational comedy show, because, like, men, am I right?! No, but seriously, what’s up with men? There is no simple answer to this question, as I discovered shortly after I agreed to write this book and immediately began to regret every choice in my life that had led me to this point and wondered vaguely if my old boss at the greengrocer’s stall on the market would let me come back to work.

The male mind, being human and all, and humans, being the most uniquely complex, intelligent and technologically advanced creatures ever to walk the Earth and all, is still in many ways a mystery to scientists. While medicine has given us a thorough understanding of our physical bodies and how they work, much of the human brain is completely unchartered territory. Even in more familiar areas of study like those of certain mental illnesses, which we’ve been able to address to some degree, it’s not uncommon for psychologists to know that a particular treatment works, but to have absolutely no idea why it works. As far as I can see, developing treatments for the brain involves a load of scientists rummaging through the junk drawers in their homes and throwing whatever they can find at the patient until something seems to help. Marbles, solder, electrical tape, that Sports Direct mug that apparently everyone in Britain owns but without any recollection of how it came into their possession – anything they can get their hands on, until finally, when it does the trick, they mumble something about how they believe it stimulates certain synapses to produce a chemical they just made up. Basically.

So while we have some theories about behavioural tendencies, it’s not something conclusive in the way ‘exposure to radiation is gonna fuck you up’ is. That said, we can narrow things down a bit and categorise them so it’s a little less complicated. There are two main areas in which to explore influence on our gender roles: biology and sociology.

Gender as a social construct has been shaped in a big way by the historical dominance of biology, and in many ways still reflects this, despite there no longer being any real reason for it beyond that weird human desire to adhere to tradition even when it’s objectively more harmful to our society than progression. In this chapter I’ll be exploring both in separate sections, although there’s an immense amount of crossover in each. While biology will delve much farther back, to the beginnings of human existence as we know it, sociologically I feel there’s much more to be gained from focusing on very modern history (mostly the last century and a bit) for reasons that will become clear.

How biology came to define our gender roles

The evolutionary nature of the human race makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly when people became the people we know today: when we first started to display the characteristics that separated us from the primates who came before us. Anatomically modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until 150,000 years later that it’s believed we first achieved behavioural modernity – the traits that distinguished us from the previous Homo sapiens. In the context of modern masculinity, none of this is hugely important, but for the sake of definition we could quite safely say that it was around 50,000 years ago with the dawn of behavioural modernity that these male primates first became men.

While it may seem odd for me to mention this before leaping forward 49,800 years or so, this era is notable for gender being dictated by nature and not society. Up until 10,000 years ago, humans existed as hunter-gatherers and it was solely the biological differences between men and women that defined their roles. Women cared for the children and foraged, while the physically larger and stronger men were charged with the hunt. Some of the evolutionary characteristics each took on are still apparent today – such as women having more cones in their eyes, which it is believed gave them sharper vision and thus helped them gather fruits and vegetables more efficiently. Because of this, some people believe certain behaviours are also inherent within the genders as a biological condition rather than their having been socialised: aggression and violence, for example, are traits of masculinity because they may once have aided in our hunting ability. Testosterone (‘the male hormone’) is often blamed for the prevalence of this sort of behaviour in men, but the evidence to support this is far from conclusive, and while it’s likely our physical traits (such as size) are evolutionary, there is little to suggest most behaviours aren’t a result of upbringing and society. It may seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but this biologically-centred theory can have genuinely harmful consequences.

When people defend male aggression as an inevitable part of our nature, it’s simply a way for men to avoid taking responsibility for their shitty behaviour, and allows them to inwardly justify a dangerous attitude on account of it being perceived as masculine. It writes off tens of thousands of years of human evolution, during which empires rose and fell repeatedly, intricate languages developed, our ways of life changed beyond recognition, and technology advanced to the point where practically all the information in existence was available en masse and you could communicate instantly with a person on the other side of the globe. Our minds grew to allow us infinite creative potential, we filled the world with art and music and literature, turned food from a necessity into a form of sheer pleasure, cured and inoculated ourselves against countless diseases, made passenger flight a reality, walked on the moon, sent a robot to Mars… and you punched a guy in the face because your brain momentarily confused him with a woolly mammoth?

More than anything, these arguments tend to be reserved almost exclusively for otherwise unjustifiable opinions. Take a run of the mill ‘gay sex is unnatural’ homophobe and consider his day: he’s woken before sunrise by an alarm, puts on his polyester slippers, throws a couple of slices of Wonder Bread in the toaster, hops in his car to work, sits at his desk for eight hours, drives back home, flicks on the TV and there, being transmitted live in his living room, is a news story about gay marriage. ‘It’s just not natural,’ he thinks, taking himself off to bed and setting his alarm for another day. This idea that homosexuality is unnatural stems mostly from the belief that sex exists solely as a means of reproduction – and thus any heterosexual activity that doesn’t result in pregnancy is equally as wrong. Granted, some religious attitudes concerning people deriving any kind of pleasure from sex adhere to this, with everything from contraception to masturbation being viewed as a plague on their efforts to be fruitful and multiply, but, for the most part, in 2016 this is seen as an outdated vision. Yes, it’s almost certain our sexual desire is founded in a basic instinct to ensure the future of our bloodline and it has served us almost too well – but our behaviour has evolved so far beyond this. We have sex to reproduce – sometimes – but more often than not, we have sex because it feels really good. Like most of our behaviour in the modern age, it’s got nothing to do with nature, which was the point I was obviously making with the homophobic office worker: our lifestyles are so detached from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors in virtually every way imaginable that it is absurd to claim anything is either an inherent part of our nature which we cannot alter or vice versa. Fifty thousand years have passed since humans first started exhibiting characteristics common to the uniquely intelligent creatures we are today, and it’s been 10,000 years since we ceased to exist as simple hunter-gatherers, and you want to ignore literally all of civilisation’s growth and say we should behave exactly as we did back then?

Much of the justification for this seems to be down to how closely our physical bodies resemble those from the past, suggesting these roles remain pertinent – otherwise men would have ceased to be bigger and stronger than women in general. The fact is, physical evolution is an incredibly slow process. Look at how we’re all still born with an appendix: an organ that serves only to occasionally become inflamed and, if left untreated, to kill us. Scientists don’t even know for certain what function the appendix once served, it may have been for the digestion of certain leaves but that’s merely a theory. Our bodies evolve over many millennia, but our behaviour and beliefs change drastically between generations. Consider our social and political views: it’s rare for a generation to be more conservative than the one directly preceding it, and by extension any before that one too. If you look at the societal change we have made in the last century, it’s clear none of this would have been possible had each subsequent generation not favoured more progressive policies. That’s not to say there haven’t been blips of conservatism throughout, an inevitable side effect of democracy in a historically two-party system, as well as fear-mongering and scapegoating at times of economic hardship; current rhetoric surrounding immigration and the widespread dehumanisation by the media of refugees fleeing war zones can be practically indistinguishable from the anti-Semitism spouted in the 1930s and 40s as European Jews sought asylum from the Nazis in Britain. For the most part, though, we are moving forward. Indeed, it was under a Conservative prime minister that gay marriage was legalised in 2013 – twenty-five years after his party had introduced Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which banned the discussion of homosexuality in schools. Legalising gay marriage was hardly an act of political bravery, though: instead it merely reflected the views of the majority of the public and showed that even under the rule of a less traditionally progressive party we are not necessarily taking steps backwards.

I mention gay marriage not only as proof of how quickly humans can change their belief system and behaviour, but to highlight how uncommon and unfounded the idea is that such an act is ‘unnatural’. This argument is thrown out there most often by people who don’t want to admit that they simply find the idea of gay sex a little bit ‘icky’ – generally speaking, few of us would consider this a legitimate thought. Acceptance and support for gay rights today is a decidedly unradical stance, and I’m regularly amused to see outlets that were previously criticised for homophobia or misogyny such as The LAD Bible flying the rainbow flag. Everyone’s cool with the gays now, they’re just like us! They’re normal! They’re not unnatural! So why, then, do so many people still believe that gender plays such inflexible roles in work and home life?