What’s on the average 16- and 17-year-old’s mind? Tom Lamont talked to young men across the UK about masculinity, #MeToo, role models and coming of age now
“You mean Yorkie bars and steel factories, that sort of thing?” Joel is 16 and lives in Wirral. I’ve asked him to define masculinity as he sees it, just as I’ve been asking a similar thing of 16- and 17-year-olds like him all over the country. What is going on in their heads right now, these boys on the cusp? What do they believe, and what do they doubt, about the mantel of adulthood they’ll soon inherit? What do they think makes a man a man, at a time when there are big questions being asked about gender identity and gender privilege?
Joel says: “My grandad was a coal miner for 20 years. So in his mind, masculinity is a very stereotypical man’s-man thing: the guy coming home from work for his meat and two veg, a muscular, massive man. It depends who you ask, but I think, more and more, that idea’s dropped away.” What’s come up in place of the old certainties, Joel thinks, is a wildfire of confusion. “Because when you’re little and that, you think of being masculine as being big, butch, strong. You think of a man as someone who wants to help the people around him and, to an extent, protect.” Then you realise, Joel continues, “there’s a thin line between protecting and being overbearing. That line is often crossed. You hear a phrase like ‘toxic masculinity’ get thrown about. And it all gets... complicated.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ELcV3q
via
0 Comments