It is vanishingly rare these days that you see in print the word masculinity without its cancerous prefix: 'toxic'. From the President to the Presidents' Club everywhere you look there are men cleaving to cliche as if their lives depended on it. And maybe, in a sense, they do. Neanderthal and knuckle dragging isn't much of an identity but if it's the only one you've ever known perhaps it seems better than none at all. When flair and imagination are the first qualities to be beaten out of a boy running the playground gauntlet is it any wonder that the world teems with man boys who just can't, for the life of them, see things any other way.
Contrary to what some may say empathy is not a uniquely female quality nor compassion confined to girls. But since forever (it sometimes seems) boys and men have won no reward for feeling another's pain. Put yourself in the shoes of the man behind the bayonet and you'll feel steel in your guts before you can say love you brother.
If we are lucky what we are witnessing in America and elsewhere is no good manhood in its death throes; a last ghastly efflorescence of everything we don't wish in our sons. Everything I don't wish for my son. Or perhaps it is we that are in mortal peril: about to burst into the air and sparkling sunlight will we be dragged back to the depths by the Kraken's squirming tentacles?
My fear is that the more we fixate on the bad man the more we fix the idea of man bad. There are magnificent men out there like the surgeon David Nott, heroically putting himself in harm's way time and time again to help the most harmed people in the world, thoughtful and funny men like Grayson Perry whose Descent of Man and Robert Webb's How Not to be a Boy brilliantly encapsulate how we've gone wrong and how we might go right, graceful and sexy men like Carlos Acosta, the peerless Cuban dancer and let's not overlook Sir David Attenborough, the world's favourite naturalist. It is incumbent upon all of us to celebrate and promote these passionate men not the empty vessels of moribund manhood.
I am certain that there is no difference between being a good man and being a good person but there is a joy in being a boy that needs nurturing so that the man can rejoice at the boy within not the boy fear exposure by the man without.
#MeToo has been a long time coming for women in its collective expression of solidarity and refusal to tolerate the tired tropes of the past. The time is ripe for men to have a #WeToo moment in celebration of all that is marvellous about manhood and a renunciation of the unearned privileges of patriarchy.
The man whole isn't just about fists and feet but heart and soul too.
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