The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry

Author:Grayson Perry [Perry, Grayson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141981734
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

If the popular vision of masculinity is in need of updating to suit a world of more nuanced gender roles, who better to instigate this than concerned groups of men. The men’s movement has been kicking along since the 1960s. It grew alongside second-wave feminism, the Black Power movement and student activism. It started as a men’s liberation movement that looked at how boys and men needed to adapt to a world of gender equality. It looked at the restrictions of the male role, very much in the same way as feminists looked at the female role. Early men’s movements campaigned alongside women, but very soon they split into opposing camps who were either pro-feminist or anti-feminist.

While pro-feminism was quietly absorbed into Western liberal thinking, the character of the men’s movement changed. As society moved towards equality, those men who were lumbered with outdated attitudes and interpersonal skills started to feel hard done by. These feelings started to coalesce into a different kind of men’s movement, one which was openly hostile to feminism. One of the early voices was Warren Farrell, who wrote a book in the 1980s called The Myth of Male Power. His thesis was that men are the disposable sex, sent off to fight, rescue others or work in dangerous situations. His book was seen as an astringent corrective to the feminist voices dominating debate around gender. Paul Elam, who cites Farrell as his mentor, runs A Voice for Men, the most popular website of the men’s rights movement. Paul seems to be an intelligent, sensitive thinker on masculinity, and much of the site seems thought-provoking and relatively moderate, but I can’t help feeling that behind a lot of the writing is a well-polished sense of grievance. Alongside articles on mansplaining, manspreading and circumcision are features entitled ‘The Dangers of Modern Feminism’, and one singling out a feminist activist that I felt invited trolling. The site has many thoughtful, perceptive things to say, some of it written by women. But I think that the justifiable anger at how traditional working-class men feel left on the scrapheap, or the impossible visions of masculinity that are sold to them, is too easily targeted at women and feminists instead of men in power. The men on this website seem to feel that the thing feminism is attacking – the sexist patriarchy – is the same as their core masculine identity. They seem to talk as if annihilating sexism is annihilating them. On the whole I feel that men are their own worst enemy. What started as a heartfelt call to re-examine and re-imagine a man’s place in the modern world has gradually become hijacked by younger, angrier and sometimes openly misogynistic men.

This is probably more down to the nature of the Internet than anything. The Web seems to have the effect of crystallizing diffuse discontent into paranoid, blamey rant fests. Reading posts on websites like Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), I start to think that maybe I’m a dupe of some feminist conspiracy and I have been indoctrinated by a misandrist liberal media.

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