Apparently, I’m not a real man. The profile of masculinity that exists today, on television and the internet, doesn’t fit me whatsoever. I don’t drink. I don’t watch football. Most egregiously of all, I believe women are my equals. Like millions of men, I’m alienated by the male gender stereotypes that continue to exist. Popular culture tells me that, as a man, I can either be a farting, tattooed sex pest or a defeated, helpless kidult, who needs his wife to cook and clean for him lest he burn down the house. Take a look at TrueLad.com, or the commercials for cleaning products. These are the types of men that pervade today’s media. Our brains are ostensibly only interested in three things: sport, drinking and fucking. If we try to do anything else, we’ll need a woman to help us.
Men worry about feminism, as if a culture of women’s rights is about to stamp out male identity. But really, it’s men who are their own worst enemies. In response to feminism, there’s been a surge in ultra-male television and writing. TrueLad is one example, so is Man v. Food, those Fosters ads on YouTube and the hugely venomous Return of Kings. This kind of media is – ostensibly – designed to reclaim a lost kind of maleness. It tells young men that it’s acceptable to adhere to their basest instincts, to eat, drink and laze around, and expect subservience from women. But rather than empower or reinvigorate the male gender, this lad culture is retarding it. An entire generation of men is learning, by osmosis, that tolerance, restraint and self-improvement are all virtues that are unmanly, and that ascribing to higher behaviour than “laddishness” is to rebel against their genetics. It’s leaving men looking outmoded, childish, irrelevant. If masculine emotional attitudes had matured at all since the Stone Age, then much of that progress has now gone up in smoke thanks to the male media’s puerile response to new feminism. It’s as if men are throwing out their cars and going back to the bicycle. The version of maleness that lad culture seeks to reclaim is resoundingly at odds with today’s world.
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