Maskulinity

 😷

The Mask of Masculinity 

(Maskulinity)

Are you hiding behind the mask of masculinity? I am and have been all my teenage and adult life.When does a boy become a man? At age 13, 17, 19 or 21? I bought shaving cream and a razor from the chemist (pharmacy) at six months before I shaved my face for the first time. I remember the anticipation of becoming a man and this was one visual sign of it.  

I haven't looked back since then. The two faced adult man I have become is too scared to look back at the boy I used to be.

I had my first pint on my 17th birthday. A pint of Woodpecker Cider poured from the bottle in the local village pub. I had been comatose from alcohol poisoning just before this when I drank 5 tumblers of gin and orange juice while burning my school reports on the coal fire. I remember cutting the wood earlier in the day ready for the symbolism later on. I think at age 17 was when I became a man because it was at that age that I realised that school had been a sham. I read every scrawled report out loud with the name of the teacher then downed a slug of more or less neat alcohol and sent the report up the chimney.It was my recent competitive past going up in flames.My mother got a bucket out and I spewed my ring into that all night before passing out 

It was a school that had taught me about failure. I and the school reports had branded myself a failure after 6 years of compulsory education in a Dickensian hellhole in north Wales. Failing the eponymous O levels to embark on a fruitless job search that bore no resemblance to the career dreams that I had once entertained in the long and much needed school holidays. It was a school where rugby, cricket and athletics were the currency of competition and when myself and a pal agreed halfway around the running track that we wouldn't race but would cross the line at exactly the same time in an early gesture of 🖕to enforced competition. We were punished by being sent on a 6 mile cross country run immediately after strolling across the finishing line.

Failure was my right of passage. At age 21 I donned the mask of masculinity. I lost my virginity at that late age and got thrush from the encounter. I call it an encounter because it was drunken fumbling with a brash and brazen femme fatale in a row of flats above a clothes shop in Colwyn Bay who had spewed her ring on the floor below while looking for the toilet. I only mention this because a flatmate stepped in it the following morning and shouted up just as I was studying the red itchy marks on the end of my 'Johnson'. Spewing rings and Johnson should really be the title of this blog post.

I also voted in a General Election for the first time at the advanced age of 21 and the result of that was as satisfying as the drunken fumbled encounter. A stubby smudged cross on a voting slip from the end of my pencil. It was the age of Margaret Thatcher and full on Toryism so whatever you voted you were bound to be negated by the forces of unfettered 

individualism. Buy your own Council House why don't you?

Making your mark as a man was as difficult in those days as it is today. The biggest mask that man has to hide behind is in the competitive world of work. I wont detail my chequered work history but I did try and don that mask from the ages of 21-39. At 39 I took early retirement so this year I will have been retired from the mask of work for as long as I was wearing it. The mask of masculinity requires you to be hunter, gatherer and provider. I had too much cerebral interference to fall into those roles but I am unusual in that respect. I wonder what percentage of men find themselves in the role of father, husband, partner, provider and then never question those roles?

I believe that it is the weight of expectation from 'masculinity' and the fact that so many men have to pretend to be the idealised definition of masculinity that is killing so many of us so young.

In an age of comparison websites we live in the goldfish bowl of a comparison website comparing our own masculinity to that of others. Masculinity needs to be redefined by a critical mass of men. Redefined within the framework of kindness, empathy and compassion. Yes, the dreaded 'Woke'. Personality traits associated with femininity but ones that 'mansplainers' and 'toxic masculinity' need to claim. Two terms that have likely been coined by women. Has masculinity become so toxic in the eyes of women because men have lost insight into what makes 'humanity' and have got lost in toxic competition.

Masculinity has become toxic because men are wearing a mask that they don't understand why they are wearing it in the first place. The mask has become an appendage waved in the face of the unsuspecting through violence and sexual violence. Does toxic capitalism lead to toxic masculinity? The kindness, empathy and compassion that men have innately are jettisoned somewhere between the ages of 13 and 21. At 21 the limbic system switch is triggered and we become cave men again. Working all hours in a job that does not stimulate and satisfy then binge drinking and drug taking on the weekend to numb reality.

I am not convinced that any of us know what we are doing. So many of us are unconscious, driving around in the biggest cars that money can buy despite the warnings of protestors.

There will be men who having read this will be even more convinced that I am wrong and that masculinity needs to return to the 'stiff upper lip' and 'Don't cry'. Reframed by Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. I am convinced that those two more than any others are the ones that wear the masc of maskulinity.