On masculinity: My father's generation were better at being men

The Guardian ^ | May 17, 2013 | Ian Jack

[2ndDivisionVet]

According to Diane Abbott, Britain is facing a crisis of masculinity. In a speech made on Thursday under the auspices of the thinktank Demos, the shadow health minister warned of a generation of angry, inarticulate young men who had no idea of their role in society. Raised on a diet of pornography and consumerism, they were "caught between the stiff-upper-lip approach of previous generations" and the "pornified ideals" of a youth culture that featured Viagra as a party drug and promoted sexism and homophobia.More prone to depression and less well educated than young women, and perhaps jobless despite a degree, they often found themselves trapped in the parental home as long-term adolescents who increasingly resented family life. In Abbott's phrase, they were hyper-masculine – that is, aggressive and misogynistic – without any understanding of the many-sided nature of a man's life and no talent for self-expression.

The speech was contested even before it was delivered. The columnist and novelist Tony Parsons wrote that men have never been better – never as articulate about their emotions, or more involved with their children and partners. To remedy any remaining flaws, he wanted boxing lessons in every school and a return to the "manly virtues" that would oblige good men to protect women and children by punching bullies "in the cakehole". Here was a man joining in the debate, as so many women writers have recently invited us to, and finding part of the solution in how men behaved in the East End c1948, or at least as how Ealing studios imagined they did. A world in which a man lands a blow on an adulterer and says: "That'll larn ya"; a world without "nonces" or killers photographing their dead 12-year-old victims; a world where grooming still means "Don't overdo the Brylcreem, sonny....

[Vanders9]

I blame Lyndon Johnson and The Beetles. He sparked the birth of the “Great American Chicken” and they sparked the rise of the “boy bands” that sound like girl bands.

Nah, the Monkees were the first boy band. Admittedly they were formed to cash in on the success of the Beatles, but the beatles themselves were no boy band.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Born 1960 and served in the cold war, as it were.

[Vanders9]

Exactly so.