Men, channel your inner caveman
Masculinity is in crisis. The problem, according to Tim Samuels, author of a new guide to modern manhood, is that there aren’t enough outlets for testosterone-fuelled stress and anger. Here he offers advice on how to be a 21st-century caveman
I’VE never punched anyone in the face. I’ve been sorely tempted several times, usually when I’m trying to change my broadband package, but my flight response has always kicked in before my fight one. Instead of violence, I’ve resorted to muttering, tutting and – if it’s really bad – a strongly worded email. This is because I’m not a Neanderthal. I’m a modern, civilised man. Bottling aggression is what we do.
According to Tim Samuels, the author of Who Stole My Spear?, a new guide to modern manhood, pent-up anger isn’t a good thing. In fact, it’s just one element of a broader crisis of masculinity. Sure, he says, we’re the undisputed dominant gender. But there’s a big difference between male power across society and the individual experiences of men. He has many statistics to back him up: men are four times more likely than women to take their own lives; internationally, the prison population is more than 90 percent male; men develop heart disease 10 years earlier than women. And there’s more bad news on the relationship front. Half of marriages are destined to fail, with pornography being cited in an increasing number of divorce cases.
“I’m not saying it’s the end of men as we know them,” Samuels says. “But I do think it’s a difficult time to be a man. The ones at the top are doing fine, the ones at the bottom definitely aren’t. And in the middle there are quite a lot of guys who are struggling to find purpose. They’re having a much more befuddling existence than men of previous generations ever had.”
The problem, Samuels believes, is simple. We still have the same physiology as our mammoth-hunting ancestors, but all outlets for manliness have been stripped away. Office life, home life and everything in between is ill suited to a creature designed to be out in the wilderness, hunting and gathering.
“We spend a third of our lives staring at screens,” he says.
“Some studies even show teenagers who have too much screen time go on to develop weaker bones. In short, our bodies are out of kilter with our lives,” Samuels says in his new book.
He wants a return to manliness. He wants us to release our inner caveman. Disappointingly, there’s a caveat. We must do it in a modern way. We can’t just go around punching people when our testosterone demands it. We’re not even allowed to smash up our computers and return to the cave. We must be 21st-century cavemen.
That said, I’m still about to punch Samuels in the face. We meet at a boutique hotel in London, not the traditional hunt- ing ground for masculinity. We’re here to do YogaBox, a new fitness class that combines yoga and boxing. Frankly, this doesn’t sound very manly either. Yoga is yoga and I’m fully expecting the boxing to be boutique-hotel soft. All the same, we put on the boxing clobber and warm up with a few gentle swipes.
Then Samuels hits me quite hard. I don’t think he means to. We’d been getting on well. But he throws a forceful jab and even though I’m wearing a face guard, I can still feel my brain rattling around inside it. He immediately apologises, but for balance I ask if I can hit him quite hard back. “Why not?” he says. So I punch him. And I enjoy it. Which is obviously appalling.
The proper class begins with yoga. Samuels likes yoga and meditation. He even includes it in his list of things men should do regularly to “be in the body”. Many of us spend too much time stressing about work issues. Yoga breaks the cycle of worry, he says. It stops the spiralling of negative thoughts. I’ve never been good enough at yoga to stop the spiralling, but it doesn’t matter now because the second part of the class has arrived, and it involves more punching.
Our instructor, Chris “The Bull” Baugh, is a professional boxer and he begins by shouting at us. It’s quite a shock after the nice, gentle yoga. “If you don’t get your hands up I might slap you!” he shouts. This is a man who broke his hand knocking out an opponent in a recent bout, and didn’t notice it was broken until afterwards. He is, you might say, tough. When we punch the pads on his hands it’s like hitting a brick wall. I don’t want him to slap me. Samuels, however, seems to be enjoying himself.
“There’s something cathartic about throwing punches,” he says when we’ve got our breath back. “It’s a good release of aggression. In the normal course of life stress can build up. It seeps out into your body over a long period of time and we’re not designed for that.
“When you’re releasing good aggression, you’re flicking a switch that stops the adrenaline building up.”
Baugh puts it more bluntly. “We’re primal people, but we don’t face primal threats any more. You can’t expect thousands of years of fighting, hunting and protecting to just disappear.”
THE boxing finishes, we return to yoga and I feel relaxed. This isn’t just because Baugh is no longer shouting at me. It’s because they’re both right. It feels good to let out a bit of stress. And it’s clearly better to do it in a fitness class rather than in a bout of road rage or sitting on a sofa shooting imaginary assailants via your video console.
‘If you don’t get your hands up I might slap you'
(From previous page) According to Samuels, problem one for modern men is that marvellous invention, the open-plan office. “It’s hermetically sealed, it’s away from nature, it’s divorced from an environment we’ve existed in for the past 12 000 years,” he says. “You’d be hard pushed to come up with a worse place for men – and, no doubt, some women – to spend so much time.”
I work in an open-plan office and I like it. The person I sit next to is a loud typist, it’s far too hot and it’s impossible to string a long sentence together when everyone around me is having a meltdown, but I enjoy the interaction.
“But it’s not interaction; its constant distraction,” says Samuels. “The fightflight hormones are triggered arbitrarily and for the wrong reasons. And it’s antisocial. You eat your lunch at your desk and you interface with technology, not people, all day.”
Then there’s the issue of rank. “Your status is laid bare for all to see, which is fine if you’re part of the boss class.
“But if you aren’t, this in-your-face hierarchy plays havoc with your serotonin levels.”
I point out that we’re an adaptable species. Surely we can adapt to offices. Surely it’s preferable to back-breaking manual labour?
“Yes, the benefit is that you’re unlikely to meet your end or sustain a life-changing injury in an open-plan office. But I’d argue that if you look at the mental-health crisis, we aren’t adapting at all. When the biggest killer of men up to middle age is themselves, something’s not right.”
The problems start much earlier. “If you wanted to make an argument for the feminisation of the world, the classroom is the place to start. We force boys to sit still all day, to be polite and sedate. And lo and behold, they struggle.”
Boys lag behind girls at reading in every industrialised country, he says. They’re six times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD). His solution for education? “It needs reform,” he says. “It needs parents to see that boys aren’t being taught in the way they were designed.”
I think many of us parents already know that our boys find it hard to sit still in class. I don’t think there’s much we can do about it, other than to get them off the sofa and outside.
His solution for offices? “Get rid of open-plan and introduce Manual Labour Mondays.” For one day (or “even just a morning”) he wants us to do something physically productive, to break a sweat on something unrelated to work. “Ideally, it will benefit the community, giving you a sense of purpose and another dimension to your life.”
To demonstrate how his Manual Labour Monday might work, we’ve come to a field in deepest, darkest Kent armed with axes and a two-man saw. Our goal is simple: we must turn a fallen oak into firewood. Immediately it becomes apparent that our tools are inadequate. The oak requires a very large chainsaw, but in order to hire a very large chainsaw, you have to go on a very long training course. Blimming health and safety, spoiling our man fun, stopping us from chopping a leg off.
For a good 40 minutes we saw away fruitlessly at the tree trunk. It’s frustrating. It doesn’t feel physically productive.
Who’d be a caveman? But Samuels is unfazed. “We’ve almost got halfway,” he says. “And getting out in the wilderness is a natural tonic, isn’t it? I used to get out a lot more, but as you get older and work and life takes over it’s like an ever-decreasing circle. There’s no time to get out.” Eventually, we give up on the stupid two-hand saw and turn instead to the axe. Our job is to chop small bits of tree into smaller bits of tree and instantly this feels more satisfying.
After a few unmanly miss-hits, we create a large pile of firewood. Well, not large, but definitely a pile. We’ve achieved something that doesn’t involve a spreadsheet, a screen or a blue-sky meeting.
“I would really enjoy the idea of spending Mondays doing something physically productive like this,” Samuels says. I agree, but it would never work, would it? If we all bunked off on a Monday, the economy would collapse by Friday. “Work contracts or expands to fit the time available,” he says. “I really don’t think productivity would fall off a cliff. If you’re physically fitter and feeling better about yourself, your productivity goes up. I’d bet you’d have hours to spare.”
Our physical labour over, we head off to the King’s Head in London. This isn’t a gastropub. It has the football on big screens and it serves proper beer, as proper pubs should. And we’re here not just because I need a drink after all the fighting and lumberjacking, but also because going to the pub is a pivotal part of Samuels’ man manifesto. Men, he says, need to spend time with other men socially. He’s single, but claims to have
nothing against the concept of marriage.
He celebrates the fact that many of us are finding more intimate, meaningful and more balanced relationships than ever. And even though the comparative size of man’s testes to other apes means we’re hard-wired to play the field, he aspires to blissful monogamy. So what’s the problem? “The problem is that with all that going on, men aren’t able to spend enough time with each other socially.”
Research suggests that men who see their friends twice a week are healthier and recover from illness quicker. Being with our pals is good for us. But Samuels says this vital ritual is under threat. “Until very recently, it was a natural part of daily life. Men working and socialising with other men – it came naturally. Today it’s seen as a luxury or an evasion of parenting duties.
“In many relationships it’s the woman who controls the diary. They’re very proactive at that. So weekends are blockbooked with dinner parties and there’s no time for a trip to the pub. Men need to pull their finger out. Pubs, sports grounds and so forth have been places where some of that pent-up aggression and testosterone could be regularly released in bursts.”
I’m not convinced an inked-in weekly trip to the pub would be an easy sell for many husbands or, for that matter, wives. I’ve been to the pub twice since my third child was born, three years ago. This isn’t because my wife controls the diary. (She does, but she’s a benevolent dictator.) It’s because a glass of wine at home is easier. Perhaps that proves his point. Still, two beers later and we’re in agreement that time away from home is valuable for men and women. In fact, aren’t most of the problems Samuels identifies applicable to both sexes? He says yes, probably a lot of this applies to all of us – but he wouldn’t dare speak for women. That way danger lies.
“What I’d say is that we don’t take masculinity as a concept seriously because it feels a bit outdated. It’s something that’s best left in the ’70s. But it’s a powerful force, and if you look at the surge in popularity of Donald Trump in America, or even the way [terrorist group] Isis recruits young men with its ultra-masculine propaganda, it’s clear that when it doesn’t have a good place to vent, it’s going to pop up somewhere and it’s going to be negative.”
And then his concentration wanders. Manchester City are kicking off in a crunch European tie. He’s stuck, technically, at work when he’s supposed to be on the other side of town with his friends, “releasing more good aggression”.
‘We force boys to sit still all day, to be polite and sedate. An lo and behold, they struggle'