A very modern despair?

I'm off on holiday for a couple of days to relax and to celebrate the wife's birthday.  Before going, however, I wanted to draw attention to an odd article in yesterday's Independent, exerpted below. The writer, on Michael Bywater, expresses and attitude which, via its disjunctions, comes as close to despair as I have ever read in anyone.

His theme is the desparate nature of modern masculinity, and I wonder if it is widespread. The comments suggest there may be (though they also reinforce the point that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, you'll get the internet).

I wonder if, as a Christian, I (along with others in the same boat) am leading a very sheltered life, where the old patterns of male and female relationships still hold true and where, therefore, my masculinity doesn't feel terribly threatened, and where many women feel entirely comfortable. Certainly I've looked at the TV adverts and noted grimly the predominance of the 'buffoon male', but in the churches men are not buffoons (though many of them need to get off their spiritual backsides and take some responsibility). Is there, however, something else going on 'out there'? I leave others to comment.

Here's a taster of Bywater's article:

Young men now seem to have reached a sort of affable affectionate ease with women that escaped earlier generations. They share beds happily and chastely. They are best friends. They talk about their feelings. But lust and libido and passion seem strangely absent. They're dreadfully held-in-check, and prey to the body dysmorphias that for so long in the Age of the Image have victimised women. They go to the gym endlessly; they buy magazines devoted to the abdominal muscles; they gel and tan and sack-back-and-crack, vogue and pose, fret and pump iron, eat cabbage leaves and nibble on dry biscuits... but unlike women, who hope that this horror will end with them being desired, the young men just hope, I suspect, to be forgiven. If they can make themselves nice enough, in a parody of manual-labour masculinity plus beauty-salon pubescence (body hair a no-no), it might not be so terrible that, at the end of it all, they are still men.

But how do you get to be a man now? Not by submitting to the embraces of an old dude round the back of the Temple of Hephaistos, for sure, nor by going off and tupping the nubile ancilla. You get to be a man (if you get to be one at all) by acquiring the "virtues" of fidelity, emotional articulacy, sexual discrimination and social co-operating. In other words, you get to be a man by imitating a woman, except with a six-pack. But no body hair.

You do this because, first, the social roles for the "manly" man have faded with our manufacturing economy. It doesn't require courage or physical strength to poke at a computer screen, which is what most work (and much flirtation) now consists of. Aggression and decisiveness count for nothing in a call centre (or at least, not decisiveness).

And you do this, secondly, because masculinity is evil and the phallus – once a symbol of fertility, fun and good fortune – has become a lethal, corrupt and infecting agent of violence. The phallus ravages children. The phallus injects HIV. The phallus, if uncalled for, destroys lives, and never mind how. It injects children who must be borne and nurtured by lone, unsupported women. And – Sophocles's vicious tyrant – it drags its possessors (or its slaves) about the place, heartlessly. Gray Joliffe's Wicked Willy cartoons about sum it up; except, unlike Joliffe's affable, happy little chap, the real thing is vicious and unheeding. A madman.

Any man, then, is a sort of zombie with a loaded revolver. Lock up your wives, your daughters, your sons. Lock up the dog. There may be a man about.

Read the rest of the article here.

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