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Look and slippers: Bottega Veneta, Hat: Borsalino at Mr.Porter.com, Bag: Aigner, Ring: Swarovski<\/p>\n Look and slippers: Bottega Veneta, Hat: Borsalino at Mr.Porter.com, Bag: Aigner, Ring: Swarovski<\/p>\n
The decline of man…and how to rebuild him<\/strong><\/p>\n Text von Kevin Braddock<\/strong><\/p>\n When the American artist Robert Longo made his \u201cMen In The Cities\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s easy to look at Longo\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n If Longo\u2019s images have endured \u2013 they are quoted in these pages by photographer Ben Lamberty\u2019s images of men submitting (rather stylishly) to gravity \u2013\u00a0then 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\u2019s Watchmen (hey, superheroes are human too\u2026), pop culture\u2019s recent and most penetrating depictions of men have tended to dispel the myth of masculinity\u2019s 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n Not that it\u2019s a terribly new narrative, or even one that began with Longo: as far back as 1958 George B. Leonard Jr. and William Attwood published \u201cThe Decline of The American Male\u201d, a book which took a humorous glance at the life of the then-modern man, and included such questions as \u201cWhy do Women Dominate Him?\u201d, \u201cWhy is He Afraid to be Different?\u201d and \u201cWhy Does He Work so Hard?\u201d More recently, the culture\u2019s decline-machine has been gunning its engines anew with thoughtful publications such as Hanna Rosin\u2019s \u201cThe End of Men\u201d, Guy Garcia\u2019s \u201cThe Decline Of Men\u201d, Peter McAllister\u2019s \u201cManthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be,\u201d and so on. In the UK, the sitcom \u201cMen Behaving Badly\u201d turned ineptness and moronism into TV comedy (though hardly for the first time) while in the US, \u201cJackass\u201d suggested a philosophical response to the problem of men\u2019s new purposelessness in the shape of performative self-harm.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201chegemonic masculinity\u201d; and advances in gay rights have further called for a more nuanced idea of what masculinity is, does, and means.\u00a0<\/p>\n Modern man\u2019s 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\u00a0 is\u2026 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 \u201cthe real man\u201d ever existed, apart from in cigarette advertising, films starring Sylvester Stallone and the nostalgic imaginations of men\u2019s magazine editors, the attempt to redefine masculinity in this pluralistic, confusing era thrives nowhere more strongly than in the discourses of media and marketing.\u00a0<\/p>\n A while ago they said that we\u2019re living in the era of the metrosexual (the effeminate, image-conscious peacock). Fifteen years or so previously, The New Man (the bachelor who\u2019s 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\u2019re living through a \u201cManaissance\u201d, where it\u2019s acceptable to enjoy a \u201cbromance\u201d, and one may typologise man as a SPURMO (single proud unmarried male over 30), \u201ctoxic bachelor\u201d, \u201cheteropolitan\u201d, \u201cretrosexual\u201d or \u201cfauxmo\u201d. In October this year, the news start-up QZ.com even went so far as to report that, \u201cThanks to the \u201cmancession\u201d, metrosexuals have become \u201cmanfluencers\u2122\u201d. 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 \u2013\u00a0this bewildered, occasionally self-pitying and seemingly emasculated animal?<\/p>\n 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 \u2013\u00a0in all of which the man of Robert Longo\u2019s imagination located himself. So too is it there in a required response to other social changes. There\u2019s age: does a man become a man younger today, or older \u2013 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\u2019s orientation: the recent suffixing of Q (for \u201cqueer and\/or questioning\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s He-Men.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Photography: Ben Lamberty at Klaus Stiegemeyer<\/strong> Styling: Tu Anh Ngo at Bigoudi<\/strong><\/p>\n Taken from Sleek 40 “Man & Boy”<\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201cMen In The Cities\u201d artworks in the early Eighties, they were read by some as a critique of the structures of power…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,1223,21,322,93,429,344,1200,1224],"class_list":["post-12499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-art","tag-ben-lamberty","tag-fashion","tag-kevin-braddock","tag-menswear","tag-robert-longo","tag-sleek-magazine","tag-sleek-magazine-40","tag-tu-anh-ngo"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n