Where have all the men gone?

This is an article I originally wrote for It's a Dude Thing last month. I'm reposting it here for those who follow my blog.

Being a bit of a geek, I’ve been a fan of anime for some time, especially the work of Studio Ghibli and it’s star director Hayao Miyazaki. What I usually enjoy about these films are the rich plots, adult characters and great animation. So, when I went along to see Princess Mononoke (literally “monster princess”) last week, I was giddy with anticipation for some great action and a story I could sink my teeth in to.

However, as the film progressed a definite theme set in. All the females were portrayed as intelligent, hardworking and strong. The men on the other hand were almost uniformly dull, lazy and cowardly. In fact, the only positive male character in the entire film was the protagonist, a boy who ultimately “conquers” by bringing the opposing forces of the narrative together in harmony.

All this (and it’s a long film) got me wondering – when did it become okay to portray men so negatively while promoting women (and feminine behaviour in men) as the solution? How did we arrive at a popular culture ideal of strong women and feminised men?

Now, you might be tempted to think that this is some kind of phenomenon restricted to Japanese animation (“it’s just Asian kids stuff anyway, right?”). But spare a thought for the endless American sitcoms featuring a clumsy husband/boyfriend paired with a the sassy, smart, go-getter wife/girlfriend. Here too, the only intelligent men seem to be either gay, geeky, gentle romeos or in some way anti-masculine archetypes.

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with a chick I was chatting up female school teacher acquaintance who expressed a view on how “hard it is to grow up into an ethical person, if you’re unlucky enough to be male,” before going on to espouse some stock standard feminist viewpoints on men.

However, she had a point. An undeclared war on masculinity seems to be under way. A culture war that’s being fought out on our TV screens and in our schools and workplaces which puts out a subtle but constant message that somehow boys are bad and girls are good, and if only boys were nicer and more like girls than the world’s problems could be solved. This is a giant and destructive lie.

In his book No More Mr Nice Guy, American psychologist and family therapist Robert Glover talks about the growing emergence of what he calls the “Nice Guy syndrome.” Men who have been raised, directly or indirectly, to believe that it is not safe or acceptable to be just who they are. Loaded with toxic shame, these men morph into approval seeking machines, ultimately leading lives which are unfulfilled and self-limiting.

Glover defines a new type of man which he calls the integrated male, who embraces his masculinity and the creative and sexual energy which comes with it. He is neither a nice guy, nor it’s opposite extreme – the jerk – but instead is a man who acknowledges and loves who he is while embracing his masculinity. The book is selling well.

So where have all the men gone? In our post-industrial, information-era world, where boys are raised by women, educated by women and bombarded with messages to be more like women, where fathers are away at work all day and young men have no positive masculine role models to emulate, what kind of generation of men are we creating? And what kind of fathers will they be in turn?

I’m not advocating a return to some idealised 1950s Leave It Beaver never-never land because the repression of that era was very real. But as I suggested with the title I chose for this article, there is a growing identity crisis in masculinity, at least in the English speaking world.

Men are fracturing along the lines of popular media, as boys who never grow up or men who embrace violence or sport or drugs as a substitute for real manhood, or who drive themselves to work at the exclusion of social or personal lives, or who become nice guys forever trying to please everyone and actually pleasing no-one, least of all themselves. We need a new generation of great, male role models.