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jazzy_daveGrayson Perry "The Descent Of Man" (Penguin)
Conceptual artist, broadcaster and transvestite Grayson Perry is always entertaining, and this is an accessible, if uneven, read on masculine identity and power.
The subject is notoriously fraught, though. As Perry points out, ‘A discussion about hipster fashions or who does the washing-up can rapidly spiral into a debate about rape, war, terrorism, religious oppression and predatory capitalism.’
If you want a simple, conversational introduction to these ideas that's aimed at men, then this is perfect – and there isn't much aimed at men out there (once you discard the various men's rights diatribes, whose main ideology is opposition to feminism). This means that, for instance, he is unusually sympathetic towards the kind of MRAs that hang out on extremist red-pill website, making an effort to understand their grievances. ‘A lot of men are sold the narrative of male domination, but lead lives of frustration and servitude,’ he suggests. ‘No wonder they get angry.’ On the other hand, he does not attempt to sugarcoat his assessment of men's overall influence on society:
I sometimes watch the evening news on television and think all the world's problems can be boiled down to one thing: the behaviour of people with a Y chromosome.
As a cross-dressing potter, Grayson Perry might be thought to have a particular relationship with masculinity (which he calls ‘the lumbering beast within me’). But in fact, what's in here is, I think, more or less what any thoughtful, vaguely leftist guy already feels about the subject – there's nothing particularly new or groundbreaking in Perry's man-ifesto, although one or two conclusions did take me by surprise a bit (he favours national service as a way of ‘dealing with unsocialized masculine energy’).
The great unspoken assumption behind it all, though, is the degree to which social factors shape ‘masculinity’ in the first place. He can't seem to decide where he stands, first arguing that nothing is inherently masculine or feminine, but going on to make several asides that suggest otherwise – commenting, for instance, that ‘in a typical masculine way, [architects] lacked empathy for an average user’. ‘I'm happy to believe genetics do play some part in gender,’ he eventually concedes, ‘but not much’. But this conclusion seems to be based mainly on the fact that it would be nice if it were true.
Perry does refer gloomily to the famous 2013 study Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage (which showed, basically, that men who do their share of the housework get less sex, ‘suggesting the importance of gender display rather than marital exchange for sex between heterosexual married partners’), but it isn't clear to me what he thinks we should conclude from it. To me it seems very scary for his thesis. In the last twenty years, as men have happily become more emotional, vulnerable, empathetic and less aggressive, the figure of the hyper-macho man has receded into a sort of powerful fantasy figure (as can be seen here by the prevalence of "alpha male" tags in the erotic romance lists). On the one hand, it's probably good that people are dissociating this kind of figure away from real life and into fantasy. On the other hand, though, as long as those ideas are out there, there will always be men who play up to them since, as an aggregate group, they'll pretty much play up to any archetype if they think it'll get them laid.
Still, none of this should be any excuse for shrugging our shoulders and excusing shitty or damaging behaviour, and the more men talk openly about the problems with male stereotypes, restrictive gender roles and questionable socialisation, the better. This short, clear, jargon-free cri de cœur is a great contribution to that debate.
This book should be read by everyone. The insight available and the potential solutions offered would lead to a fighting chance of rescuing a, very nearly, lost generation - and perhaps save the World from political extremism into the bargain. We should force feed people like Trump to read this.
Conceptual artist, broadcaster and transvestite Grayson Perry is always entertaining, and this is an accessible, if uneven, read on masculine identity and power.
The subject is notoriously fraught, though. As Perry points out, ‘A discussion about hipster fashions or who does the washing-up can rapidly spiral into a debate about rape, war, terrorism, religious oppression and predatory capitalism.’
If you want a simple, conversational introduction to these ideas that's aimed at men, then this is perfect – and there isn't much aimed at men out there (once you discard the various men's rights diatribes, whose main ideology is opposition to feminism). This means that, for instance, he is unusually sympathetic towards the kind of MRAs that hang out on extremist red-pill website, making an effort to understand their grievances. ‘A lot of men are sold the narrative of male domination, but lead lives of frustration and servitude,’ he suggests. ‘No wonder they get angry.’ On the other hand, he does not attempt to sugarcoat his assessment of men's overall influence on society:
I sometimes watch the evening news on television and think all the world's problems can be boiled down to one thing: the behaviour of people with a Y chromosome.
As a cross-dressing potter, Grayson Perry might be thought to have a particular relationship with masculinity (which he calls ‘the lumbering beast within me’). But in fact, what's in here is, I think, more or less what any thoughtful, vaguely leftist guy already feels about the subject – there's nothing particularly new or groundbreaking in Perry's man-ifesto, although one or two conclusions did take me by surprise a bit (he favours national service as a way of ‘dealing with unsocialized masculine energy’).
The great unspoken assumption behind it all, though, is the degree to which social factors shape ‘masculinity’ in the first place. He can't seem to decide where he stands, first arguing that nothing is inherently masculine or feminine, but going on to make several asides that suggest otherwise – commenting, for instance, that ‘in a typical masculine way, [architects] lacked empathy for an average user’. ‘I'm happy to believe genetics do play some part in gender,’ he eventually concedes, ‘but not much’. But this conclusion seems to be based mainly on the fact that it would be nice if it were true.
Perry does refer gloomily to the famous 2013 study Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage (which showed, basically, that men who do their share of the housework get less sex, ‘suggesting the importance of gender display rather than marital exchange for sex between heterosexual married partners’), but it isn't clear to me what he thinks we should conclude from it. To me it seems very scary for his thesis. In the last twenty years, as men have happily become more emotional, vulnerable, empathetic and less aggressive, the figure of the hyper-macho man has receded into a sort of powerful fantasy figure (as can be seen here by the prevalence of "alpha male" tags in the erotic romance lists). On the one hand, it's probably good that people are dissociating this kind of figure away from real life and into fantasy. On the other hand, though, as long as those ideas are out there, there will always be men who play up to them since, as an aggregate group, they'll pretty much play up to any archetype if they think it'll get them laid.
Still, none of this should be any excuse for shrugging our shoulders and excusing shitty or damaging behaviour, and the more men talk openly about the problems with male stereotypes, restrictive gender roles and questionable socialisation, the better. This short, clear, jargon-free cri de cœur is a great contribution to that debate.
This book should be read by everyone. The insight available and the potential solutions offered would lead to a fighting chance of rescuing a, very nearly, lost generation - and perhaps save the World from political extremism into the bargain. We should force feed people like Trump to read this.
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