Look and slippers: Bottega Veneta, Hat: Borsalino at Mr.Porter.com, Bag: Aigner, Ring: Swarovski
The decline of man…and how to rebuild him
Text by Kevin Braddock
When the American artist Robert Longo made his “Men In The Cities” artworks in the early Eighties, they were read by some as a critique of the structures of power and hierarchy that were omnipresent in the artist’s New York, a city built on the vertical thrusts of business, finance and aspiration. The charcoal works principally show business-suited men in contortions and spasms, as if twisted by invisible forces much greater than them. The figures seem incapable of escaping their predicament, trapped and able only to submit. It’s easy to look at Longo’s works and consider them as a comment, on the career, the corporation and on hierarchicalism itself, and also as a pitiless look at the kind of male who embodied postwar America: the company man in his buttondown shirt and Brooks Brothers suit.
If Longo’s images have endured – they are quoted in these pages by photographer Ben Lamberty’s images of men submitting (rather stylishly) to gravity – then the narrative of shattered masculinity they allude to has also lasted and, in fact, radically broadened. From the woe and introspection of Tony Soprano to the doubting superheroism of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (hey, superheroes are human too…), pop culture’s recent and most penetrating depictions of men have tended to dispel the myth of masculinity’s supposed eternal virtues, those of power, certainty, purpose and domination over adversaries, systems and women. Even recent incarnations of James Bond have shown the character to be more as we know men to be: far from an omnipotent, ladykilling winner, but facing the truth of his own limitations. In the latest of the franchise, Bond was a lonely, defeated alcoholic facing redundancy from his job.
Not that it’s a terribly new narrative, or even one that began with Longo: as far back as 1958 George B. Leonard Jr. and William Attwood published “The Decline of The American Male”, a book which took a humorous glance at the life of the then-modern man, and included such questions as “Why do Women Dominate Him?”, “Why is He Afraid to be Different?” and “Why Does He Work so Hard?” More recently, the culture’s decline-machine has been gunning its engines anew with thoughtful publications such as Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men”, Guy Garcia’s “The Decline Of Men”, Peter McAllister’s “Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be,” and so on. In the UK, the sitcom “Men Behaving Badly” turned ineptness and moronism into TV comedy (though hardly for the first time) while in the US, “Jackass” suggested a philosophical response to the problem of men’s new purposelessness in the shape of performative self-harm.
The sociology behind all this is absolutely real in many western democracies: young women increasingly outperform young men in education and career; the changes effected by the feminist project have destabilised the autonomy of the traditional male role, which is sometimes defined in gender studies as “hegemonic masculinity”; and advances in gay rights have further called for a more nuanced idea of what masculinity is, does, and means.
Modern man’s identity crisis is also real, and decline is one way of expressing it. Decline can be charted as vector; a vector possesses the properties of magnitude and direction. The magnitude is… well, just look at those book titles. As for the direction, it begs the question of what has man declined from, and what he is declining into. Assuming that such a thing as “the real man” ever existed, apart from in cigarette advertising, films starring Sylvester Stallone and the nostalgic imaginations of men’s magazine editors, the attempt to redefine masculinity in this pluralistic, confusing era thrives nowhere more strongly than in the discourses of media and marketing.
A while ago they said that we’re living in the era of the metrosexual (the effeminate, image-conscious peacock). Fifteen years or so previously, The New Man (the bachelor who’s in touch with his feelings) was conceived and presented as a sales vehicle for aftershaves, furniture and other nice-to-haves. Since then there have been some truly silly coinages in the scheme of redefining masculinity for the purposes of marketing to it: we’re living through a “Manaissance”, where it’s acceptable to enjoy a “bromance”, and one may typologise man as a SPURMO (single proud unmarried male over 30), “toxic bachelor”, “heteropolitan”, “retrosexual” or “fauxmo”. In October this year, the news start-up QZ.com even went so far as to report that, “Thanks to the “mancession”, metrosexuals have become “manfluencers™”. Needless to say, these notions are barely convincing in their own fields of ad strategy and social comment; in the altogether more complex environment of three-dimensional reality, do they have any resonance whatsoever? Can we encapsulate the essence of man today – this bewildered, occasionally self-pitying and seemingly emasculated animal?
The answer to that surely lies in the posing of the question itself, and the sheer variety of attempts to redefine masculinity tell their own tale about just how splintered the identity has become. Uncertainty may be the only certain thing in a world of fluidity, flux and blur where the orienting structures of the corporation, the career and the hierarchy are in many cases collapsing – in all of which the man of Robert Longo’s imagination located himself. So too is it there in a required response to other social changes. There’s age: does a man become a man younger today, or older – and what are the rituals? And occupation: is a man still a man when he fulfils the traditionally feminine role of stay-at-home carer? There’s orientation: the recent suffixing of Q (for “queer and/or questioning”) to the LGBT paradigm accepts and valorises a new vista of possibility in what was once the straightforward equation of who-you-fancy-makes-you-what-you-are. And biological gender itself? The case of the South African runner Caster Semenya suggested, among other things, that the binary male / female opposition is hardly without its own grey areas. In other words, the meaning of the new masculinity lies precisely in the questions and contradictions themselves.
The psychological make-up of men may not have altered drastically since the Stone Age, but the behavioural demands upon them have, imposing new conditions on existence. It’s become easy to bemoan modern man and his perceived weakness, especially as strength has for so long been held up as his cardinal attribute. But while he may not be able to construct a shack using flints and vines or slaughter a wolf to feed his brood, for better or worse, contemporary capabilities such as navigating the constant stream of information are skills that would have challenged even the most He of history’s He-Men.
Point being, this plural age surely demands a more pluralistic acceptance of what masculinity is, rather than fossilising it in models from the past, or prescribing new lifestyle typologies with lists of must-have, must-bes and must-dos. The rebuilding of masculinity begins with an acceptance that the new man, if we need one, is the man in whom masculinity is a nuanced, multilateral concept, a face with a thousand expressions. Naturally, the beard is optional.
Photography: Ben Lamberty at Klaus Stiegemeyer Styling: Tu Anh Ngo at Bigoudi
Taken from Sleek 40 “Man & Boy”