Man Up

Surviving Modern Masculinity

Jack Urwin

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785780707
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

'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.

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

TEEN BOYS LOSING VIRGINITY EARLIER AND EARLIER, REPORT TEEN BOYS

The Onion, 29th April 2014

Okay, maybe your fancy ‘academic texts’ written by ‘experts’ in ‘gender studies’ don’t quote headlines from satirical news sites at the beginning of chapters, but you know what? Sometimes The Onion speaks more truth than all of the legitimate journals on Earth put together. Regardless of gender, adolescence can be a fucking miserable time; a cocktail of hormones, peer pressure and insecurity, all complemented by a virtually non-existent self-esteem. If there’s one piece of advice I’d want to give anyone in the midst of this period, it would be ‘don’t trust anyone who tells you these are the best years of your life’.

In the last chapter, I discussed at length how perceived sexuality affects the ways we, as men, present ourselves, and the widespread fear that acting at all ‘gay’ or ‘effeminate’ will lead to us being targeted by bullies. We are taught that our sexuality is a major defining characteristic of our personalities long before puberty sets in, and then after this it just gets even more complicated – after all, so much of what we are forced to endure at this age is a direct result of our reaching sexual maturity. But in reality, this biological occurrence is made most unbearable by sociological factors (like the pedestal on which sex is placed) without which it would be much easier to handle the physical and chemical changes our bodies go through.

As a society, our obsession with sex is so powerful that even those who are able to look at it objectively and see that this obsession is ridiculous are still plagued by the same worries about the issue as everyone else. I was lucky to have a non-judgmental, supportive group of friends in my teens, who would never think less of each other for what sexual action they were or weren’t getting; I didn’t believe for one second that getting laid would actually make me any better as a person or that it mattered what age I was when I first had sex; I was fully aware that when it did happen it probably wouldn’t be the mind-blowing, life-affirming act it’s hyped up to be. In the rational part of my brain, I knew that sex wasn’t everything, and even so, during that entire time, I wanted nothing more than to lose my virginity. (I’m conscious of the fact my mum is probably going to read this, hi Mum! Maybe skip the next couple of paragraphs, yeah?) I wasn’t really fussed about who I lost it to or whether we had any kind of emotional connection, it came down almost entirely to the desire to have been inside a woman, just once, in order to get that experience out of the way. It wasn’t even a matter of being able to brag about it, I simply craved the self-reassurance that would come with no longer being a virgin.

So it happened, and confirmed everything I already knew. Now I’m in my twenties and feel reasonably qualified to say: ‘Sex is fun, but it’s not necessarily going to be a life-changing experience or anywhere near important enough to spend time worrying about if you’ve yet to lose your virginity.’ It’s the truth, and most sexually active people would back me up on this, but reading it won’t make the slightest difference to a desperate boy in his teens. No amount of others’ wisdom or lived experience can change the fact that it’s really, really frustrating when everyone around you seems to be gunning for a world record in Most Sex Had and you’re stuck with just your imagination and one wrist that’s suspiciously more toned than the other. Of course, it’s not just males who struggle with sex (or the lack thereof), but while our desires and anxieties may be equally as strong, the cultures surrounding sexuality in young men and women, and the consequences, are quite different.

If you were to take two teenagers – one boy, one girl – with an otherwise identical background (socioeconomic status, school, academic performance, popularity etc), both of whom have slept with an above-average number of partners, which of the two would you guess had faced the most criticism or abuse for their sex life? If your answer was ‘the boy’, then – no offence or anything – my follow up question would be: where the fuck have you been all your life?

Male sexuality overwhelmingly tends to be celebrated, guys who shag lots of women are seen as being ‘studs’, and as something that other men aspire to be; women, on the other hand, are shamed for the same thing, called names such as ‘slut’ or ‘whore’, and taught that only pure, virgin women are desirable to men. This might have something to do with our historical ownership of women – by taking a man’s hand in marriage, a woman was essentially agreeing to become his property; and men presumably didn’t want what they perceived to be second-hand goods. To quote Laurie Penny: ‘The ideal woman is fuckable, but never actually fucks.’³⁵ Even from a linguistic standpoint our sexism is all too apparent: every derogatory term for a promiscuous person is gendered, and in the rare instances that these words are used to refer to men, we tend to tack on a prefix, ‘whore’ becomes ‘man-whore’, and so on. I am sure that no one in the history of the English language has ever called anyone a ‘woman-whore’ – the prefix is unnecessary, and in its original form, ‘whore’ refers only to women.

The interplay of virginity and masculinity is also particularly interesting. While historically (albeit sometimes inaccurately) a broken hymen indicated a woman’s lost virginity, there is no equivalent for men, and yet culturally male virginity seems to be somewhat more taboo, particularly among older people. Christ knows enough women have to deal with endless shaming for promiscuity, but there don’t seem to be the same tropes surrounding older female virgins as there are for men.^a

Everyone knows the character; the overweight, unemployed, 30-something guy who lives in his parents’ basement and plays video games – a good example is Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. The fact that he’s a virgin is a detail that, like all the others, is intended to present him as a loser. Off the top of my head I’m unable to think of a notable example in pop culture in which an older woman’s virginity is seen as something embarrassing or shameful in quite the same way. That’s not to say women don’t suffer from the same insecurities about this as men, but as I discussed in the earlier chapter The Ideal Man, the way each is presented in society and deemed ‘acceptable’ or otherwise is quite different. Certain actions or comments, which would rightly be considered sexist in the modern world if made by men about women, are laughed off when the subject is male. Take a look at the following snippet taken from an interview with Michael Fassbender in GQ³⁶:

Let’s consider a remarkable interview with him in The Sunday Times, a British newspaper known for a reasonably high tone and sturdy standards. Much of the article is about Fassbender’s anatomy, sex life, and sexual history, and in the published version he is depicted as someone willingly engaged in the back-and-forth. At one point he is quoted as blurting out, unexpectedly, “When in doubt, fuck.” It also includes a statement near the end from the interviewer, Camilla Long, that I believe is without precedent even in the giddy history of the celebrity profile:

I…feel quite certain that he would willingly show me his penis, given slightly different circumstances and a bucket of champagne.

“Wow,” says Fassbender when I recite this to him. “No, I haven’t read that one. Just as well, really.” But he does remember the interview. “The first thing she said to me was, ‘So, what does it feel like to have a big cock?’ That was her opening question.”

The way we talk about male sexuality is entirely different to the way we discuss female sexuality, to the extent that people who really should know better are guilty of this bizarre elevation of sexual prowess as long as it’s about a man.

Historically, virginity has been prized in women. As I mentioned above, the unbroken hymen was symbolic of purity, proof that a woman hadn’t been ‘tainted’ by another man before marriage and all a bit indicative of male possessiveness. We’ve mostly got past the idea that sex before marriage is immoral or impure, but it’s still a common fantasy of plenty of men to take a woman’s virginity (maybe because she won’t know how bad he is at sex). Virgin men, however, don’t tend to be subject to this same fetishisation, and instead can be seen as inexperienced and thus undesirable. I would hazard a guess that only a minority of men willingly admit to a woman that she’s their first partner, at least not until the deed is done, fearing that the revelation will be a deal breaker. Men are frequently taught by their peers, their parents and much of society to believe that dominance – particularly over women – is a key quality of masculinity, and they worry that by admitting their virginity to a more experienced partner, she’ll view them as weak or submissive. In fact, this may go some way to explaining why male virginity in general is viewed the way it is.

Being dominant and assertive plays into many aspects of society’s ideas of male success, from high-paying careers to beautiful wives. When men have passed their twenties without losing their virginity, they’re portrayed as ‘sad’ or ‘losers’: words that are surprisingly gendered, and that are rarely used in the same context to describe adult women.

Masculinity and a fairly rigid definition of ‘success’ are synonymous, and the concept of a personified human ‘failure’ on an all-encompassing financial and personal scale is applied almost exclusively to men. As I mentioned right at the beginning of the book, modern perceptions of masculinity have been shaped in a big way by the jobs we do, the money we earn and, above all, how much power we command. Attitudes to romantic relationships or fatherhood have not – until very recently – been factored into the value that society ascribes to men, while women have traditionally been judged on these alone. Does she make a good wife? Is she raising her kids properly? Male success is all about power, and if a man is seen as powerful then rarely do we question his merits as a father or partner.

There’s a word I’ve touched upon a few times already, but which I feel is appropriate here: emasculation. In modern usage, emasculation tends to refer to a loss of masculinity as a socialised concept, but it can also mean, quite literally, the removal of the male genitalia. The evolution of the way the word has been defined over time suggests we’re burdened by a much more complex idea of what it means to be a man than we used to be, but its origins betray what we fear most at our core. A man without genitals can function as a human in a way that a man without a heart can not, but he is unable to have sex – and so, by this definition, he is not a man. Perhaps this is why we view male virginity as a bad thing – without having had sexual intercourse, a man is not a man.

There are many reasons we want to have sex, but there’s no denying that for straight men in particular, a good sex life (regular, satisfying, ideally with a variety of partners) is seen as an important part of masculinity. As I touched upon earlier, loud heterosexuality is fundamental to the definition of masculinity to which many subscribe, so it’s not surprising that we celebrate physical sexuality like this: a man having sex with a woman is literally the most heterosexual thing he can do (although I’m sure there’s room here for a dated remark about Elton John having had a wife). Physical sexuality is linked to masculinity so powerfully that it may prove one of the hardest attitudes to change, held even by those who should know better. Male virginity and penis size are common punchlines, and I’ve been disappointed on several occasions to see these sorts of jokes made by otherwise intelligent, forward-thinking feminists, often in response to online harassment.

Like the Australian road safety campaign (chapter four)^b I can understand the reasoning behind this – if you link misogyny to things men are ashamed about, it might make them think twice before tweeting abuse – but regardless of whether it’s effective, it perpetuates the harmful idea that a man’s worth is found in the size of his genitals or in his sex life. Imagine a well-meaning man who hasn’t had sex for whatever reason, being forced to hear from someone he respects that another man’s shitty personality is a result of him being a virgin. On a similar note, there are plenty of horrible men who have slept with countless women, and/or have massive dicks, and plenty of wonderful men with more modest packages, and when you make comments like these, you risk alienating the good guys and further provoking the bad ones. This is what we’re up against: men are being taught by people from across the spectrum that they are defined by their physical sexuality, and that being a virgin is something to be ashamed of. Girls may want sex, but boys are encouraged to believe they need it. And this is very dangerous indeed.

For as long as sex education in schools has existed, sex education in schools has been bad. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, from any place, of any age, who thought their Sex Ed. classes – or class, singular, as is often the case – were time well spent. Grainy videos with animated erections being soundtracked, hilariously, by slide-whistles; naked fathers and sons walking towards the camera so you could see the difference between prepubescent and adult genitals (except the father was sporting an almost enviable hair coverage which all but obscured his scrotum); someone pointing to a table of contraceptives with little indication as to how any of them worked. If you were lucky you’d get to roll a condom onto a perfectly straight, plastic phallus, your teacher laughing nervously as the boys cheered the enthusiastic efforts of one of the girls. There was rarely any discussion of sex outside of a biological context, or any mention of why you probably shouldn’t get pregnant yet, and we shall soon be approaching a third generation of kids failed by the same ancient VHS, doomed to repeat the mistakes of their parents and grandparents.

The content of these lessons is now more redundant than ever. Most kids are well-versed in the physical side of sex thanks to phones and the internet, with tabloid headlines proclaiming every few weeks the ‘shocking number’ of children who view porn regularly. Everyone’s worried about what exposure to this material at so young an age is doing to our youth, but few are bothering to ask why a situation has arisen in which youths routinely seek out sexually explicit content, nor do they ask how we should address it. As far as I’m concerned, if someone is voluntarily seeking out porn and enjoying it, they’ve obviously reached an age of sexual awareness and it’s not the end of the world. For some kids, this may be spawned by an initial curiosity, a result of insufficient sex education; for others, their reasons for watching porn will be exactly the same as those of any adult. Porn in and of itself is not necessarily unhealthy. However, problems can begin to appear when it’s being consumed by young people as their first real experience of sex, and their minds can be unable to distinguish porn from the real thing.

This, in turn, means that when they start becoming sexually active, their behaviour may reflect what they’ve seen in porn and this can be harmful for themselves and their partners on an emotional level, they can leave partners feeling degraded or used, but it can also have physical effects, as porn rarely shows the discussion or consent vital in real life and in some cases could be considered to be normalising risky practices. Acts such as anal sex are ubiquitous in porn, and while plenty of real life couples can enjoy this, it requires total enthusiasm from both parties and a lot of preparation – a young man trying to emulate the unlubricated anal sex he’s seen time and time again can do serious damage to his partner’s body.

Emily Reynolds, a journalist who’s written on mental health and feminism told me: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been with a man who doesn’t watch porn, but within that group the vast majority have been able to separate the fantasy of porn from their real life interactions with, and attitudes to, women. In my experience most men are fully aware of the fact porn is a complete artifice – a lot of young men have sexual tastes that may have been implicitly influenced by porn, but in a manner that doesn’t necessarily affect the way they treat women in general (although there is a lot to unpick around why people may like certain things and how pornography has consciously or subconsciously influenced that). I had one boyfriend, though, who was absolutely obsessed with porn.’

She once asked him to give up watching porn – not out of any kind of moral objection but as a test. ‘He absolutely lost it. It was like I’d asked him to give up food for a week or something – he just couldn’t not watch it.’ Reynolds believes her ex-boyfriend’s obsession with porn was part of a bigger issue ‘in that he didn’t respect women and he wanted to control them.

‘Unable to do that in real life, he really took solace in watching porn because it was ten perfect minutes of ultimate control. As a viewer he was controlling them because he was the client, the customer; in his mind, and in that moment, he was the singular voyeur and audience for whatever particular act the woman was performing. And, unlike me, they always said yes – the whole point of (most) porn is that women are constantly assenting, they’re either wordlessly accepting or loudly encouraging the scene. That was something that I could never do because, obviously, I’m a real life human woman with different desires and bad moods and my own autonomy. I couldn’t always say yes and he resented that.’

Though I am no fan of Martin Daubney, the former editor of lads’ mag Loaded, I do agree with his stance on teaching young men the responsible way to consume porn. As he wrote in the Guardian³⁷:

My take on porn is like my take on alcohol: prohibition will always fail, but it’s similarly risky to hand kids the keys to the drinks cabinet. Instead, we need to encourage responsible and critical consumption – and those conversations need to happen in schools and at home.

With porn, I urge teenagers to question what they see, rather than accepting it as true. Not all men have penises like draught excluders. You don’t have to shave yourself bald: not everybody likes it like that. If you see something in porn and you want to try it in the real world – always ask first. And if the person says no, then no always means no.

When I was seven, my dad pointed out battered women we’d occasionally see on the streets of Nottingham, where I grew up, and say: “We don’t do it like that, son. Real men don’t do it like that.” Now I try to take perhaps the most uncomfortable stimulus of our time into British schools and turn it into a positive springboard for a 21st-century conversation about sex and consent. The kids, and especially the lads, listen to me, as my perhaps dubious CV gives me credibility. They know I won’t judge them and, vitally, I’m not there the next day to make them feel uncomfortable.

This is when the real conversations start – with teachers, their parents, and, hopefully, the most importantly people of all: their future sexual partners.

I don’t think young people watching porn is inherently bad, but there are definitely issues to be addressed – such as the aforementioned blurring of fantasy and reality, consent, respect for one’s partner and general bedroom etiquette – and this is where sex education could make such an important difference. It is undeniable that today...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• 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
• Back Cover