What’s gone wrong with men?

Being male today entails rage, pain, fear – and a grubby pair of jeans. It’s time for change, says Grayson Perry

Iam riding my mountain bike through the forest up a long, steep track. Halfway up I see a young boy, maybe nine or 10 years old. He is struggling; this track is a tough challenge for anyone not used to mountain biking, let alone a kid on a new bicycle. He can’t work the gears, and wobbles and grinds to a halt. Tears run down his face. “Dad, Dad!” he yells, sobbing. He is crying for help, but he is also in a boiling rage.

I offer to help him, but he is so angry, so ashamed, that he doesn’t acknowledge me. As I pedal past up the hill, I see the father in the distance. He is standing silently next to his mountain bike, arms folded across his chest, staring at his son 200 metres down the hill. He also looks angry.

I have seen that father’s face on a thousand football touchlines, outside a thousand school gates. It’s a face that says, “Toughen up, don’t whine, be a man!” It’s the face of someone who hands down the rage and pain of what it is to be a man. I feel incensed on the boy’s behalf. I can’t help myself: I say to the father, “I hope your son can afford a good psychotherapist when he grows up.” The father doesn’t respond. We need to examine masculinity, not just to prevent small boys from crying with fury at their impassive fathers on a mountain-bike ride, but to change the whole world for the better. Crimes are committed, wars are started, women are being held back, and economies are disastrously distorted by men, because of their outdated version of masculinity.

We need to get a philosophical fingernail under the edge of the firmly stuck-down masculinity sticker, so we can get hold of it and rip it off. Beneath the sticker, men are naked and vulnerable – human even. It is a newsroom cliché that masculinity is always somehow “in crisis”, under threat from pollutants such as shifting gender roles. But to me many aspects of masculinity seem such a blight on society that to say it is “in crisis” is like saying racism was “in crisis” in civil rights-era America.

Masculinity needs to change. Some may question this, but those who do are often white middle-class men with nice jobs and nice families: the current state of masculinity is biased in their favour. What about all the teenagers who think the only manly way out of poverty and dysfunction is to become a criminal? What about all the lonely men who can’t get a partner, have trouble making friends and end up killing themselves? What about all the angry men who inflict their masculine baggage on the rest of us?

Growing up, I did not have good male role models. My father left when I was just four years old, and I didn’t really have any meaningful contact with him until I was 15, by which time I was pretty well hard-wired with my own version of masculinity and its attendant sexuality, something that I still have 40 years later. My stepfather, with whom I lived for most of my childhood, was a volatile and violent man of whom I was terrified.

My mother used me, her eldest son, as a sounding board to vent all her rage against men. By the age of 15, I had taken on board a heap of anti-male propaganda. Even today I often catch myself observing and commenting on men as if I were not one of them.

I can’t remember the first time I realised I was male, I doubt many men can, but that is at the nub of masculinity; it is there at the very basement level of our identity. The first question most people ask when they hear of a birth is, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Once we know the sex of a baby, we often coo over it in gendered ways: “Isn’t she beautiful?”; “Look at him kick, he’s going to be a footballer.” Before they can spell their own names, children are well versed in the potent clichés of gender; girls play fairy dolls, make up and gossip and a boy’s world is full of spaceships and action.

As a child, I remember being so uncomfortable with the unconscious signals of gender that I couldn’t handle my aunt’s flowers and rural scenes emerging through the milk as I ate my cereal. I would always opt for blueand-white striped Cornishware: I “instinctively” sensed the gendering in her crockery. Stripes are about as decorative as a lot of men are willing to go.

But I am a transvestite; I am turned on by dressing up in clothes that are heavily associated with being female. I sometimes like to pretend I am a woman. In forming an erotic attraction to women’s clothes, I think a part of what my unconscious was trying to tell me was that I did, indeed, have a choice. Male clothes were not a pelt that grew on to my back, they were a costume, and if something in me was rejecting the role then it certainly did not like the costume. When I try to explain the reasons that I think may have led to me becoming a transvestite, people sometimes respond with the question, “Isn’t putting on a dress a rather simplistic way of trying to renounce maleness or adopt femininity? Surely you, Grayson, Reith lecturer, Turner prize and Bafta winner, are more subtle and sophisticated than that?” My reply is that, as in all of us, the basic psychological wiring of my sexuality was laid down in childhood, so is it really so surprising that I should use the seemingly childish tactic of cross-dressing?

The only boys’ clothes I wore in childhood that I can recall sharply are uniforms. My secondary-school uniform consisted of black blazer and trousers. First and second years had to wear a blazer with red braid around the lapels. The glowing red braid was a double humiliation, firstly as a sign of being an innocent new pupil, a target for the older boys, and secondly because it was a bit fey, braid round the lapels having overtones of a camp, end-of-thepier entertainer. Some first years would rub ink and dirt into the braid to give it the patina of a more experienced second year. At 14, I studied every nuance of the style of slightly older boys. Collars in or out, ties fat or thin, baggy trousers short or covering the wedge shoes? I recall watching and aping the older lads’ swaggering strut, what Tom Wolfe called the “pimp roll”.

I held a constant internal dialogue about how to pass as a man. As a tranny, “passing” as a woman is something I have worked very hard on, achieved and rejected. We all work unconsciously or otherwise at