Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Feminism Emasculates British Men -Who Lose Interest in Sex, Go for Preening

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The ANNOTICO Report

 

Tears Before Bedtime for Preening Men

 

Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
By Andrew O'Hagan

May 6, 2008

 

Male vanity has a lot to answer for. It can claim credit for every great conflict in history and most of the intractable problems of today. Yet these facts shouldn't prevent us men from feeling deeply sorry for ourselves at every opportunity.

It appears, in Britain at least, that the masculine ego has never had it so bad, and male blubbing can now be considered something of a national pastime, with men forgoing the football field and the public bar in droves to be more completely in company with their inner turmoil. The value of manly men has been forgotten. Dismissed, even.

·  When evidence is called for on these matters, one can immediately point to two new, great sources of male hysteria: recent figures suggest that the libido of the average British man is in freefall while, at the same time, the male cosmetics industry is enjoying a boom.

It is not that men can't have sex but just that in alarming numbers they simply don't want to - they don't need Viagra, they need a pill that might enhance their self-worth and enlarge their sense of personal value. Thus the rise in male grooming.

For years, women have understood how to improve their looks as a way of making themselves feel better about themselves. Men have now learnt that lesson - so much so that in the past decade the sales of male grooming products have leapt by 30 per cent to over #800 million a year.

The traditional picture of the British man is being remade. Until recently (after a slow start mired in shyness and English reticence) he was considered a laddish, lusty entity - keen on Page Three girls, saucy postcards and blue jokes.

If the French had a bigger name for romance and the Italians more of a reputation for sexual dedication, British men were viewed as being more interested in sex as a key to happiness.

But not any more. Not if you look at the figures. One survey in a men's magazine reported that, after a few pints, 53 per cent of British men would sooner eat a kebab than have sex.

It would be too easy to put this down to the "am I bothered?" culture of New Labour Britain. There is a certain ennui, or malaise, or some other exotic-sounding dullness in the male spirit, but it becomes all the more interesting when viewed next to this exponential rise in grooming.

Like all great leaps in personal poofery, the habits of bronzing and plucking and exfoliating and moisturising were instituted by the British working classes. In some ways, it was ever thus.

My father's generation boasted of just scraping their heads with a comb, scrubbing their necks with carbolic soap and dousing themselves in Old Spice, but in fact they were bold with the Brylcreem and made excessive demands on the ironing board.

The new narcissism is a response to something altered in the air of British life. Men's roles have changed - and so have expectations about what they must do and how they must appear if they want to be considered healthy and successful. Having a decent sex life is more of an add-on, but looking good for your age is an essential.

There can be no doubt that men, more than ever, are subject to the kind of harassment that has defined women's views of themselves for decades. Thin, happy, beautiful, coping women have been gazing from covers since the dawn of popular magazines, but only recently have men had to judge themselves - and see themselves judged - against the pectorally pert, manicured, bronzed Adonises now beaming out so depressingly from the nation's newsstands.

And surely that's what this is all about - depression. British men are, at one and the same time, more overworked but somehow less defined by their work.

Their households are no longer exclusively set up to gratify their egos, which is good news for women and better news for children but bad news for men who still believe they must be kings of their castles to feel happy.

It may be hard to pity men in circumstances such as these, for feminism (whatever else it did or didn't achieve) managed to make the more persistent demands of domestic male vanity seem ridiculous.

But for many men the happy process of feminisation is indistinguishable from emasculation, and the confusion has turned them inwards, and made them turn their backs when the lights go out.

I recently spent some time talking to young British and American soldiers who had served in Iraq. Very few of them were strangers to the lure of the sunbed or the benefits of teeth whitening. Most of them seemed to some extent married to their hair gel. Quite a number of them were divorced. They spoke of the difficulties of doing their jobs and then going home: they loved their children and expected to do more with them than their fathers had done with them, yet many of those squaddies obviously felt assailed by their partners' expectations and sense of freedom.

I thought about it afterwards. The men weren't all depressed, but they were demoralised. They found it hard to establish a domestic life that could serve their loved ones while not diminishing a need men have - all men, at some level - for personal heroism.

I wasn't wholly surprised when John Prescott told the world about his bulimia: sure, he didn't look like a bulimic, but he had several qualifications that made it seem plausible - he was stressed out, working class, worried about his role.

I don't think the young soldiers were extreme examples, but fairly typical young British men. They exhibited a powerful confusion: they worked out and strove to be all they could be but they saw this as something they did for themselves rather than for others.

To some extent, they had a kind of self-consciousness about their manhood that might have seemed foreign to their fathers. And I don't think they invented it. Society and the media invented it. The men weren't all in crisis, but something had changed.

I imagined they would soon pack up their grooming products and return to Newcastle, Glasgow, Essex and Swansea, ready for nights that ended with kebabs.

 

 

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