Who’s to blame for toxic masculinity, asks a beleaguered millennial male

YOU ARE NOT THE MAN YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE:

INTO THE CHAOS OF MODERN MASCULINITY Martin Robinson

Bloomsbury, £20

REVIEW BY IAIN MACWHIRTER

IF I’m part of the patriarchy why’s my life so sh**?” That would be a more accurate subtitle for Martin Robinson’s investigation of modern masculinity – that trait which nowadays generally comes with the prefix, “toxic”. He is a white male millennial who grew up in the era of equalities legislation, yet is acutely conscious of men’s image problem in the era of #MeToo and third-wave feminism.

Calling him a dominant male seems a bad joke. His life has been marked by alcoholism, breakdowns, unemployment, and a profound sense of personal and sexual inferiority.

He doggedly agrees with feminist theories about “the patriarchy” and throughout this penitent book insists on his own complicity in it.

Yet he can’t help looking around at his own “generation rent”, who can’t afford houses, have rubbish jobs and are being out-performed at every level of education by women.

Men are in deep trouble psychologically. “Suicide is the biggest killer in the UK of men under 45,” he writes, “an orange flame in the night sky illuminating a heaving ocean of self-harm, addiction, eating disorders, violence and anti-social behaviour.”

Men die much younger than women for social rather than biological reasons.

“Ninety-five per cent of prisoners are male,” he continues, “along with 86% of homeless people and 73% of deaths from drug misuse.” Robinson obediently agrees with social media feminists that this is men’s own fault – the result of “toxic masculinity”. However, if you replaced “men” with “BAME”, as in Black Lives Matters, those same statistics would be regarded as manifestations of structural inequality and discrimination.

But Robinson can’t go there because he would be attacked for being sexist, racist and generally a dork. So instead, he goes looking for the causes of men behaving badly. It’s a journey. He speaks to bodybuilders, boxers, ex-soldiers and lots of very manly men and discovers that most of them are pretty cool and often surprisingly sensitive. He goes to men’s groups like “Andy’s Man’s Club” in Hull and hears tearful men struggling with their demons.

He listens at length to the artist Grayson Perry who, because he dresses like a girl, is allowed to talk positively about men and even say that National Service was a good thing. He talks to evolutionary psychologists such as Robin Dunbar, who tell him that men have developed over the millennia to be competitive providers, and that much male risk-taking is sexual display – to communicate to potential mates that they have good genes and are powerful protectors. Articulate prisoners tell him that they joined gangs because they were searching for the male role models they lacked at home.

Robinson decides that “brave men are needed”, at least when tackling terrorists on London Bridge; that there is social virtue in masculine stoicism, especially in wartime, though it is less needed these days. He decides that his own need to be a provider for his children is not such a bad thing.

In other words, it’s not men themselves who are to blame for toxicity, he says, but society, “the system”. He doesn’t explore the implications of this for patriarchy theory, in a book that is largely anecdotal. Instead, we get the usual message: men just need to step up, express their feelings, stop treating women badly. Men need to cease “acting out”: pretending that they are what he repeatedly calls the “Default Male”, the socially-prescribed male role model that is “homophobic, sexist, aggressive and casually racist”.

Except it’s never entirely clear that this Default Male still exists, at least as a socially-prescribed role model. I don’t