Grayson Perry’s timely,
entertaining book explores how rigid masculine roles can destroy men’s lives
Grayson Perry... he is not
immune to macho roles – ‘if you spot it, you’ve got it’. Photograph: Tim P
Whitby/Getty Images
It is a strangely
embarrassing time to be a man. You only have to watch the news, or log on to
Twitter, or just open your eyes, and you will see a man doing something
atrocious. Very often the man we see is Donald Trump, but Trump is just the
most visible example of the toxic masculinity on offer. It is there, in some
form or other, all over our virtual and actual reality.
Of course, men have always
done terrible things. You could pinpoint any moment in history and men would
have been doing something despicable. Pol Pot and Hitler and Stalin were men,
for instance. So was Jack the Ripper. So is, indisputably, Donald Trump.
And, away from the big
names, as Grayson Perry puts it in his new book on masculinity, “most violent
people, rapists, criminals, killers, tax avoiders, corrupt politicians, planet
despoilers, sex abusers and dinner-party bores, do tend to be, well… men”. This
has always been the case, in every patriarchal society in history. But the
difference nowadays is that we are beginning to understand that part of the
problem with men is not their gender but rather the gender role dictated to
them.
He points to a more tender model of manhood,
embodied by Barack Obama and David Beckham
For decades now, female
writers and theorists have been dismantling their biological gender from the
perceived feminine roles that can restrict or harm their lives. It is only
recently that we have started to do this with men too, to see a man as distinct
from the concept and construct of masculinity. Maybe one of the reasons for
this is that we have a tendency to regard men as the normal human state of
things. Society is shaped by men, literally, in the sense that town planners
and architects have traditionally been male (an issue that Perry touches on,
looking at how public toilets and even air conditioning are geared towards male
comfort levels) and so we aren’t trained to notice them. Us. Men just are.
Perry claims this is also
one of the reasons why men dress how they do. The grey business suit, for
instance. “A primary function of their sober attire is not just to look smart,”
he notes, “but to be invisible… the business suit is the uniform of those who
do the looking, the appraising. It rebuffs comment by its sheer ubiquity.”
Life as performance is not
a new idea. As the melancholic Jaques famously tells us in Act II of As You
Like It: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”
Merely players, maybe, but performing different roles. Perry himself is
arguably the perfect person to write about masculinity, as he is not only a man
– “a white man, a rather tarnished badge to wear these days, weighted with
guilt and shame at the behaviour of one’s fellows” – but also a man who, along
with those early Shakespearean actors, likes to wear women’s clothes from time
to time.
One of the strongest areas
of the book is here, on the topic of clothing. He reminds us of the codes we
often follow, without thinking too deeply about them; how men often dress
functionally for work, while women’s attire is expected to be more frivolous
and decorative, one big “extraneous addition” tacked on to the male status quo.
But Perry admits that wearing women’s clothes doesn’t give him special immunity
from the masculine role. The reason he can see the perils of masculinity,
despite being a self-confessed sissy, is because he is familiar with those
roles, has known many of them himself – “if you spot it, you’ve got it”. In two
lovely biographical anecdotes (of which there are many), he writes about how he
used to be horrified as a child whenever he had to eat his cereal out of a bowl
with a floral pattern and he would slowly see the flowers appear as the milk
went down; and of the thrill he got from watching violent movies on television
and then talking about them the next day with his school friends…………
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/23/descent-of-man-masculinity-grayson-perry-review-a-mans-man-is-yesterdays-hero-gender-role
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario