• 1 John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001), (...)
• 2 Dad’s Army, BBC, 8 series and 12 “specials”, 1968-1977. Script writers: Jimmy Perry and David Croft (...)
• 3 Some Mothers Do Ave Em, BBC, 22 episodes, 1973-1975, 1978. Scriptwriters: Raymond Allen and Michael (...)
• 4 Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? BBC, 26 episodes in 2 series, 1973,1974. Scriptwriters: Dick (...)
• 5 Fawlty Towers, BBC, 12 episodes in 2 series, 1975, 1979. Scriptwriters: John Cleese and Connie Boot (...)
• 6 Only Fools and Horses, BBC. 52 episodes in 8 series and 14 “specials”, 1981-1996. Writer and editor (...)
• 7 Men Behaving Badly, Hartwoods Films. 1992-1994 on ITV, 1995 on BBC1. In 1995 the show won the “Most (...)
• 8 Micawber. ITV. 4 episodes. December 2001. Creator: John Sullivan. Executive Producer: David Reynold (...)

1In contemporary British culture, there seems to be a demand for representations of weak men. As John Beynon observes in Masculinities and Culture, published in 2001 “Popular films and television shows, videos, advertisements and magazines are full of images and narratives of weak men unable to cope with the demands made on them. […] These representations of men are very different from the former male paradigms of husband and breadwinner”.1 This representation is particularly associated with humour. The ‘hopeless man’ has been an essential characteristic of British television comedy since Dad’s Army,2 developed subsequently in Some Mothers Do Have em,3 Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads,4 Fawlty Towers5 and Only Fools and Horses6 and the award-winning Men Behaving Badly.7 In all these cases it is the essential incompetence of the masculine protagonist that produces the comedy. In the most recent of these, Men Behaving Badly, the two protagonists Gary and Tony, although presented sympathetically, are not only incompetent and absurd, but also selfish, inconsiderate, cowardly, vainglorious, emotionally undeveloped and unprincipled. The inclusion of feminine partners, as in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Fawlty Towers, the third series of Only Fools and Horses and Men Behaving Badly serves to highlight the peculiarly masculine nature of the incompetence. The male protagonist is afraid of his partner’s judgement; he seeks to hide evidence of his weakness or incompetence, by dissimulation, bluster and lying, until finally all his absurd efforts are laid bare. The feminine partner, on the other hand, is continually disappointed or exasperated by her ‘man’ but forgives him in the end, as she would a child, because she loves him. This attitude is epitomised by a comment in the six part series Micawber8, based on the character from Charles Dickens; at the end of the third episode, Mrs Micawber, having saved her pompous and vain husband from a ‘situation’, says to him indulgently: “Like all men you are foolish and weak”. The Mrs Micawber of Charles Dickens was unfailingly courteous towards her husband and did not express such thoughts. We may take her harsh view of men to be more a reflection of contemporary attitudes not those of Dickens.

• 9 John Arlidge, “Men Fight Back over Sexist TV Adverts”, The Observer, January 16, 2002, 4. These adv (...)
• 10 Sue Summers, “Has TV had a Makeover?”, The Observer Review, March 2, 2003, 12.
• 11 Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch (1993) and High Fidelity (1995).
• 12 Tony Parsons, author of many novels such as One For My Baby (2001), Man and Wife (2003) and The Fam (...)
• 13 Brandon Robshaw, “How to be Good. Has Ladlit Reached its Closing Time?” The Independent Magazine, A (...)
• 14 Gary Taylor, “You Vile, Hopeless, Incompetent Brits”, The Guardian, December 12, 2003, G2, 10.

2More recently, it has been suggested that this negative perception of men has become a dominant theme in the media. An article about advertising in The Observer in 2002 claimed that “men are fed up being depicted […] as incompetent, brow-beaten slobs, who cannot express themselves, hold down a job, clean the house or keep a girlfriend”.9 The television critic Chris Dunkley complains that men on television “are seen as inept nerds, useless except for providing women with canned beer and not even the occasional orgasm, which is quite beyond them”.10 This perception is not restricted to television. A book review in the Independent Magazine complains about the recurrent theme of “hopeless men” in the contemporary genre of novel called lad literature or ladlit, inaugurated by Nick Hornby11 and Tony Parsons12 and the reviewer Brandon Robshaw, notes that “the female lead mainly functions as a personified super-ego, frowning on the lads’ wayward behaviour”.13 Although a female equivalent of the lad, the ‘ladette’, has been documented, it receives little representation in drama and women are more generally represented as victims of laddish excess or inadequacy. An American writer, Gary Taylor, having spent a week in London theatres in 2003 and describing the experience in The Guardian, concludes that in Britain “the women never have orgasms, the men are all assholes”.14

• 15 Unlike sociologists, Neo-Darwinians consider that human behavioural characteristics are fundamental (...)
• 16 The Observer. “So it’s a woman’s world”, The Observer, 15 August, 2004, 3.
• 17 The study was carried out in 2009 with 238 children at two primary schools in Kent. According to th (...)

3Popular science writing seems to endorse this view of men. In The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Cambridge Autism Research Centre, argues that if autism is considered as a sliding scale of emotional response on which everyone tends to cluster round a mid-point, men tend to be above the mid-point, generally displaying more signs of autistic behaviour than women. Neo-Darwinian thinking,15 perhaps best exemplified in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor of zoology, sees the male sex throughout the animal kingdom as a sexual parasite, seeking to minimize its share of the work of reproduction, although Dawkins himself does not directly relate his conclusions to humanity. The geneticist Steve Jones’s Y: The Descent of Man (2002) about which the Australian feminist writer Germaine Greer, known for her outspoken views, comments on the back cover, “Steve Jones is much harder on men than I am”. There is evidence that this representation of men has affected the way people think about gender. Following the recent statistical successes by girls and women at school and University, newspapers have often chosen to focus on masculine failure, with headlines such as: “So, it’s a woman’s world. The future looks to be female as women continue to perform better than men at school, in university and in the workplace.”16 A sociological study by a team from the University of Kent shows that school children as young as four, boys as well as girls, believe that girls are more successful and more focused than boys.17

• 18 R. Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 31.
• 19 Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 131.
• 20 Brittan, Masculinity and Power, 5.

4In theoretical terms, this representation of men might well seem anomalous. In sociological analysis, gender has most usually been seen as an ideology that is to the advantage of men and to the detriment of women. For example, the American sociologist R. Connell wrote that the “collective interest of heterosexual men” is “broadly to maintain the existing system”.18Arthur Brittan calls this ideology “masculinism”, argues that social discourse is masculine19 and that, however varied, masculinities are to do with the exercise of power.20 Hegemonic masculine power or “masculinism” is often supposed to operate invisibly and pervasively, as Pierre Bourdieu argues in La Domination masculine:

• 22 Françoise Héritier, Masculin/féminin: la pensée de la différence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 19-22, (...)
• 23 The three pillars as conceived by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (...)

5By appropriating language itself, masculinity can define its own characteristics and become synonymous with strength, prestige and power. In Masculin/Féminin: La pensée de la différence, the French anthropologist Françoise Héritier traces the polarisation of gender characteristics through African and Far Eastern ethnic cultures and languages, concluding that the masculine principle is systematically associated with warmth, action and completeness, whereas the feminine is left with cold, passiveness and incompleteness.22 She goes so far as to suggest that this linguistic polarisation in favour of men may be considered as a fourth pillar to be added to the three identified by Claude Lévi-Strauss as common denominators of all human society.23 The greater value conferred on masculinity serves to underpin and justify the structural inequality between the sexes.

• 24 Oh why did God

6The English language, though not included in her study, would tend to support her thesis. Although Doctor Johnson’s first English dictionary, published in 1786, does not even mention masculinity, the adjective “masculine” includes the definition “virile, not soft, not effeminate”, while “manliness” includes “dignity” and “manly” includes the synonyms “brave, stout, undaunted, undismayed”. “Feminine”, on the other hand, after “soft, tender, delicate”, is defined as “effeminate, emasculated, wanting”. The notion of “wanting” or “lacking” is illustrated by a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost in which the feminine sex is described as “this fair defect of nature”.24 Although recent editions of the concise Oxford dictionary (revised 11^th edition, 2008) avoids these synonyms, a glance at Roget’s Thesaurus (6^th edition, 2002) shows that they are still in currency.

• 25 The mytho-poetic movement, founded by Robert Bly, is a men’s movement inspired by the thinking of t (...)
• 26 Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading: Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1990), 2.
• 27 Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly (New York and London: Bantam, 1991), 14.
• 28 P. Nathanson and K. Young, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in popular Culture (...)

7If social discourse is masculine, if men have universally appropriated language and definitions to their advantage, then how do we explain the representation of the weak man? Chris Dunkley, the television critic quoted above by the Observer, thinks that feminism, or else an increasing feminization of society, is at the root of this negative masculine image. This view has a certain non-academic support. In France, writers and journalists like Eric Zemmour and Alain Soral, have written polemical books about the feminization of society to the detriment of men. Robert Bly, the American poet and writer, founder of the “mytho-poetic” men’s movement25, writes in the introduction to his best-selling book about men Iron John: A Book About Men that he began to notice increasing numbers of “soft” and “unhappy” men in the 1970s, often accompanied by radiantly strong women,26 with the obvious implication that men are being dominated by their women. A common theme in mytho-poetic and neo-Jungian writing, and the central image in Bly’s Iron John, is that the key to a man’s masculinity has been taken by a woman in his life, whether mother, wife or girlfriend. As another neo-Jungian writer Sam Keene, author of Fire in the Belly, asserts in a chapter entitled “It’s a woman’s world”, and a section entitled “Man’s Unconscious Bondage to WOMAN”, “we never acknowledge the primal power WOMAN wields over us. The average man spends a lifetime denying, defending against, trying to control, and reacting to the power of WOMAN” (his capitals).27 A book published in 2002 by two Canadian academics from the field of Religious Studies, entitled Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, attributes popular contempt for men specifically to the influence of the feminist movement.28

• 29 Tolson, The Limits of Masculinity (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), 69.
• 30 Brittan, Masculinity and Power, 28.
• 31 Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 66.
• 32 Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling (Buckingham: OUP (...)
• 33 Steve Jones, Y: The Descent of Men (London: Abacus, 2002), 23.
• 34 Eric Zemmour, Le Premier sexe (Paris: Denoël, 2006), 72.
• 35 Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1979), 65.

8The problem with this argument is that in every case cited above, in which the male is represented as weak, whether a television comedy, West End play, novel or other book, the author is a man (and in the case of the television comedies, the producers are also men). It would also seem that amongst writers on the subject of gender, it is above all men who emphasize masculine weakness, fragility or vulnerability; Andrew Tolson talks of “the fragile masculine identity”,29 Arthur Brittan of “the extreme vulnerability of the masculine identity”,30 Pierre Bourdieu of “the immense vulnerability” of “the impossible ideal of virility” (my translation), John Beynon of “conventional masculinity” being “more often than not a false skin hiding deep insecurities”,31 Mairtin Mac an Ghaill of heterosexual masculinity as “a highly fractured and fragile construction”.32 Steve Jones, the geneticist, talking of the biological foundations of maleness, says that “masculinity emerges as a fragile and uncertain thing which is often forced to reinvent itself.”33 Even Eric Zemmour, an apologist for unreconstructed and atavistic masculinity, asks: “What is more fragile and mysterious than masculine desire?”34 The militant feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, writing in the 1970s, complains with apparent exasperation that “men dare to claim not only that they are fragile but that the power of women over them is immense and real”.35

• 36 As David Hepworth, former editorial director of Emap Metro, explained to me in an interview in 2006 (...)
• 37 Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Brita (...)
• 38 Mort, Cultures of Consumption, 20.
• 39 The first issue sold 59,400 copies and Loaded broke the 100,000 sales barrier with its ninth issue. (...)
• 40 ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations), http://www.abc.org.uk.

9Perhaps more significantly, the men’s magazine market that took shape in Britain in the 1990s36 seems to show that the representation of the weak man is not only produced by men but also appeals specifically to a masculine audience. As Frank Mort has shown in Cultures of Consumption, there was, over the course of the 1980s, a sustained attempt by magazine publishers and advertisers to find a formula for a successful, generalist men’s magazine which would serve as a marketing platform to a unified masculine market.37 As Mort shows, most of the magazines, even those with big promotion budgets like Cosmo Man or The Hit, closed after a few issues or else, like The Face or Arena, settled into a relatively small niche market of men’s fashion. Many publishers believed that men did not wish to identify with their gender.38 Cruelly for Mort, his study just missed the spectacular success in 1994 of two magazines that finally seemed to have found a successful formula: Loaded from the publishing house IPC, and FHM from EMAP Metro. Loaded, the first, passed 100,000 copies sold on its ninth issue.39 The real, longer-term success, however, belonged to its rival, FHM, whose monthly sales went from approximately 60,000 in 1994 when EMAP took the title over, to over 750,000 in 1998,40 inspiring a number of imitators and creating a vast new publishing market. The editorial of the first issue of Loaded in May 1994, captures the tone of both magazines:

• 42 Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Brookfield and Alde (...)
• 43 Tim Southwell, Getting Away with It: The Inside Story of Loaded (London: Ebury, 1998), 61.
• 44 Carolyn Jackson, Lads and Ladettes in School: Gender and a Fear of Failure (Maidenhead: Open Univer (...)

10At face value, both Loaded and FHM were constructed in a spirit of popular, masculine, working-class hedonism, reminiscent of that of Paul Willis’s “lads” in Learning to Labour42, and in contradistinction to middle-class, politically correct values of self-control and moderation, although the target of both magazines included middle-class and successful professional young men. As Tim Southwell, one of the founding editors of Loaded, wrote later in his history of the magazine: “Loaded had clocked onto the fact that there was another kind of Britain than the Beefeater, fucking around in Florence, that kind of high-brow Britain”.43 Both magazines quickly became known as ‘lad mags’ and became emblematic of a new atavistic and ‘laddish’ masculine culture, appealing to all social classes, based on male camaraderie, drinking and the pursuit of pleasure. Carolyn Jackson, in her book on masculine failure at school, Lads and Ladettes in School: Gender and a Fear of Failure, claims that laddism is a “hegemonic masculinity”.44

• 45 Peter Jackson, Nick Stevenson and Kate Brooks, Making Sense of Men’s Magazines (Cambridge: Polity, (...)
• 46 Tim Adams, The Observer Review, May 25, 2005, 1-2.
• 47 Nicholas Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad dans les magazines spécialisés pour hommes: l’état de la m (...)
• 48 FHM, October 2000, 98.
• 49 FHM, November 2000, 154.

11Most studies of lad mags, such as Making Sense of Men’s Magazines,45 have tended to emphasize the riotous and hedonistic side of laddism. However, in Loaded and FHM, as well as their weekly successors Nuts and Zoo the representation of the weak man plays an important part. According to an Observer Review report in 2005, marvelling at the rise and continued success of these magazines “their message was: ‘Don’t take us seriously. We’re blokes and we’re useless’.”46 Prior to the launch of FHM in France in 2001, focus groups of French men seem to have spotted and rejected this message, which suggests that it appeals to a specifically English or English-speaking culture. Amongst the key recommendations of the launch report presented to the management board of EMAP France, we find the following: “L’autodérision est à consommer avec modération"47 (“self-mockery is to be taken in small doses”). This is firstly apparent in the magazine’s representation of the male body. Unlike Men’s Health, which claims to be the best-selling men’s magazine in Germany (and which generally shows a worked-out, semi-naked male body on the front cover), FHM has no interest in male beauty. The front cover is reserved for a beautiful female body, and any men pictured inside the magazine tend to be homely at best, often with a noticeable beer gut, in the image of the magazine’s star reporter in the 1990s, Grub Smith. It is the same with masculine character. There are various columns and spaces – “True Stories”, “Vital Signs”, “FHM Confession” – to which readers are invited to write in recounting their most shameful or demeaning moments. These may concern social or sexual humiliation, such as one man whose plan to spice up his sex life by dressing up as a baby for his girlfriend, ended so badly that he not only lost his girlfriend but he also had to leave the village where they lived.48 More often, however, the confessions deal with more banal and yet more revealing events. For example, a confession sent to “FHM’s incessant Laundromat of honesty” in November 200049, is about a man who wanted to get rid of two goldfish as he was going to move to a new flat. It turns out that he had originally bought the goldfish to show his girlfriend that he had a ‘nurturing’ side to his character. Wishing to hide the deed from her, he tries to stage a fatal accident, but finds that he is too squeamish to kill an animal ‘properly’ (as his father had taught him). Eventually, afraid that his girlfriend will discover the truth, he flushes the fish down the toilet. He turns out to be guilty of dishonesty, cowardice, hypocrisy, unfeeling cruelty, incompetence and spinelessness, but the magazine offers no judgement. The girlfriend in both stories appears, to borrow the phrase of the Independent book critic Brandon Robshaw quoted above, as “a personified superego”.

• 50 For example, in a question and answer with Stuart Pierce and Steve Cram 5 questions out of 10 are c (...)
• 51 For example in the “Sin Bin” question and answer column;
• 52 To the singer Corey:
• 53 For example in an interview with Al Murray the comedian in December 2000, we find the following que (...)
• 54 FHM, December 2000, “Quote Unquote: Jose Washbourn”, 70.
• 55 FHM: Do you want a hug?
• 56 FHM, July 2002, 42.
• 57 FHM, December 2000, 74.

12In interviews with celebrities and stars there is a similar interest in uncovering unpalatable truths and the ‘real man’ behind the mask, which is totally unlike the soapily avuncular tone that FHM adopts with the beautiful actresses or female pop stars who model for the magazine. When it interviews sports stars, it would like to know about deliberate violence and cheating50 or secret homosexual longings in the baths after the match.51 When talking to celebrities, it wants to know whether they take advantage of “dangerously young” female fans.52 More generally, the magazine likes to ask about attitudes to masturbation and farting.53 It can be deliberately provocative in order to unsettle the interviewee, often playing ironically with the tropes of traditional masculinity; for example in an interview with the singer Jose Washbourn, the interviewer starts by asking: “Have you always had that incredibly bouffant hair style – as in big, curly and more than a bit girlie?”54 If an interviewee becomes angry with their needling style, the interviewer might ask, as he did to Corey, the lead singer of the American band Slipknot: “Do you want a hug?”55 There is a long-standing column called “The Bloke Test” in which two stars are pitted together, answering the same questions and marked according to FHM’s value system “to decide who is least like a big girl”.56 A man who is not like a “big girl”, however, is apparently one who can confess to anything without shame, who is without pretension, who is at ease with his weakness. A classic example of this is the closing exchange of an interview with the singer of American punk band Blink 182, Mark Hoppus in December 2000. FHM says: “Clearly you are a man of little shame. Fancy a career in porn if the band goes belly up?” Hoppus replies calmly that his penis is too small and he lacks sexual endurance. In FHM’s world, it is the perfect reply.57

• 58 The expression “new laddism” is used, especially by sociologists, to distinguish the phenomenon tha (...)
• 59 Adams, ‘‘Why is this the biggest…,’’ 1-2.

13In other words, the representation of the weak man, within Britain at least, would seem to be generated by men for consumption by men. If we assume that there is an interactive relationship between supply and demand, then it would seem that British men want to consume (and perhaps even identify with) these images of weak masculinity, which are so far removed from the patriarchal ideal. What is more, the magazines belong, as we have seen, to a wider cultural phenomenon called “laddism” or “new laddism”.58 According to The Observer, laddism is “the defining male attitude of the decade” .59 This would put the image of the weak man at the heart of a very widespread complex of contemporary heterosexual British masculinities.

• 60 Rowena Chapman, “The Great Pretender”, in Unwrapping Masculinity, eds Rowena Chapman and Jonathan R (...)

14From this brief overview of the magazine it might appear that there is at the heart of British masculinities in the 1990s and 2000s a popular critique and a deconstruction of masculine mythology, created by men for men. In other words, the representation of the ‘hopeless bloke’ in popular culture, which is experienced on an immediate level as funny, could reflect a deeper desire amongst men to unmask, to reveal the truth and to ‘debunk’ the myths of masculinity. However, this hypothesis leads to the question posed in the opening paragraph: why would men want to challenge a masculine ideology and representation which has traditionally been to their advantage? Is it, as Rowena Chapman might suggest,60 another protean mutation of the dominant masculine discourse, endlessly adapting to new circumstances and social environments in order to hold on to power, assimilating new critiques into its own structure, taking the weapons of its enemies and making them its own? The problem here is that if this is a cunning plan, it is perhaps too cunning for the ordinary men who buy the magazine. And it is not clear how a discourse of masculine weakness and irresponsibility can lead to social power and control.

• 61 As both the first editor of FHM, Mike Soutar, and his immediate superior, EMAP editorial director D (...)

15Or could this be a genuine male liberation movement, utterly unlike the one inspired by second wave feminism in the 1970s, but similarly motivated by a desire to shed the mask, to stop the performance, to discover a real, authentic self? The problem here is that “laddism”, or “new laddism”, is almost pure performance; on one level public displays of masculine drunkenness and excess, but also literally a popular performance of masculinity on television shows such as Men Behaving Badly, and finally, of course, a commercial discourse dreamt up by the advertising agencies and publishers.61 As the term “new laddism” suggests, the behaviour it represents is an imitation, a copy, inspired by the working class lads that the cultural theorist Paul Willis describes in Learning to Labour. However genuine the desire for authenticity, we end up with yet another performance.

• 62 The transcripts are published in appendices C and D of Nicholas Growse, op. cit. 10 are complete, t (...)
• 63 Office of National Statistics (ONS), 2001 Census, http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census/

16I would like to examine another possibility suggested to me during the course of my own research into lad culture. I used my study of FHM to construct a survey of the magazine’s target group – which I defined as British men who had left school, aged between 17 and 35, and were not married or with children. My intention was to examine to what extent the interests and concerns of FHM, which I had identified through a contents analysis of twelve issues over a three-year period, corresponded to those of its supposed readership. There was no formal questionnaire, but a series of subjects – manhood, couple relationships, violence, friendship, family, work, marriage, happiness – on which I sought to elicit the interviewee’s attitudes. The interviewees were under the impression that I was simply recording their life-history. Instead of asking leading questions I tried to follow the interviewee’s own discourse by picking up or ‘echoing’ interrogatively his own words. I recruited my first interviewees through informal contacts from different geographical environments and socio-economic backgrounds and then used the ‘snowball’ technique of gaining access to the initial contact’s entourage. For reasons of convenience I concentrated my interviews in the South East of England, going no further north than Birmingham and no further west than Bath. In the end I managed to complete 60 interviews lasting between 90 minutes and 3 hours.62 Perhaps unsurprisingly, compared to the 2001 Census,63 the sample was representative in terms of family background, ethnicity, home environment (big city, town or village) and educational background.

• 64 I began each interview with the rather strange but fruitful question: “Do you consider yourself to (...)

17During the course of these interviews, I was struck by two particular common threads that emerged in the discourse of the interviewees. The first concerns the notion of manhood.64 While 9 had no notion of what manhood might mean or else rejected the concept as outdated, a majority of the rest thought that being a man meant responsibility. 22 spontaneously used the word, while 9 others talked about being financially responsible for a family as a necessary criterion for manhood. Implicit in the idea of responsibility seems to be a notion of getting a good job, buying a house and entering into a steady relationship, as emerges in this exchange with Brian, a 28-year Londoner who claimed to have been amongst the first to buy Loaded, a first adopter of laddism so to speak, and who was currently working as a musician in a band:

• 66 The Harvard professor of Sociology Talcott Parsons developed the functionalist principles of Role T (...)
• 67 Mirra Komarovsky, a former student of Talcott Parsons, developed Sex Role Theory in two articles pu (...)
• 68 Mirra Komarovsky, “Functional Analysis of Sex Roles”, American Sociological Review, August 1950, 51 (...)
• 69 Gloria Steinem, “The Masculine Mystique”, in Men and Masculinity, eds Pleck and Sawyer (Englewood C (...)
• 70 Max Weber, L’Éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme (Paris, Plon, 1967 (1964)) 101.

18Brian’s definition of being a man is very reminiscent of the “masculine role”, identified in the 1940s and 1950s by American functionalists such as Talcott Parsons66 and Mirra Komarovsky.67 In this view, given that we have no natural instincts of reproduction, society inculcates certain behaviour patterns to regulate the work that reproduction entails – the “feminine role” of the homemaker and the “masculine role” of the “provider”.68 Second wave feminists deconstructed sex roles to show that they were a structural element in gender inequality. For example, the American feminist writer Gloria Steinem, in an essay entitled “The Masculine Mystique”, argues that the masculine role implies “masculine superiority” while the “feminine role” implies second-class status.69 We can go further and see the hand of Calvinist patriarchal theology which places men in the bounded context of work and family, as Max Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.70 In the contemporary masculine role as in the Puritan model, certain key concepts are inextricably linked: manhood, masculine status and success, work, responsibility, domesticity, self-discipline, continence. Brian’s laddism, far from being a hegemonic masculinity, would appear to be a form of countercultural resistance to the “masculine role”.

• 73 Sigmund Freud, Le Malaise dans la culture, trans. (Paris: Quadriges/Presses Universitaires de Franc (...)
• 74 Karl Marx, ‘L’Idéologie allemande’, in Marx: études philosophiques (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977)

21Apart from the seven already mentioned, who said they enjoyed their jobs, and two who did not question the need to work hard in life (both from traditional working-class country families), the rest of the sample, 85%, can be situated between these two positions. This perhaps is hardly surprising. Sigmund Freud argues that the pleasure principle in the human psyche leads to a “natural aversion to work”73 and Karl Marx argues that work under capitalism is “alienating”.74 However, this leads to a disconcerting syllogism; if being a man means exercising responsibility through work and if work is alienating, then being a man is alienating. In this light, it is significant that 23 of my sample of 60 did not qualify themselves as men, usually because they did not consider themselves responsible, usually because they were going out drinking and clubbing too much and had not ‘settled down’. Avoiding the status of manhood creates a space in which pleasure and self-indulgence is allowed. At the same time, it was clear that work is not only a functional imperative, but is also connected to self-esteem. Ben, the ex-programmer, questioned materialist values but was at pains to emphasize that he was not “lazy” or a “scrounger”.

• 85 Just look into her eyes when she tells you that she loves you. Now picture the same face, with 20lb (...)

33What is most striking in these comments is the lack of emotional commitment or even response to sexual relationships, which emerged in various manners. 3 had an aggressively macho ‘love em and leave em’ approach to sexual relations, which seems also to be the recommended attitude of FHM85. 6 others talked, somewhat legalistically, about having a girlfriend who was not actually a ‘proper’ girlfriend, with whom they slept more or less when it suited them but without any formal responsibility or obligation (although each of them recognised when questioned that this arrangement did not suit their ‘unofficial’ partner). 8 talked of their “fear of commitment” which was generally felt to be a “bloke thing”. 5 believed in love but for some reason had not experienced it. 4 had declared love but not actually felt it. 12 were worried about their lack of emotion and felt there might be something wrong with them (and a few were clearly taking advantage of the anonymous interview to talk about the “problem”).

• 86 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (London: The Women’s Press, 1991).
• 87 Nancy MacDonald, The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York (B (...)
• 88 Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, “Girls and Subcultures”, in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelde (...)

34My point is here that if social discourse is a masculine discourse, and if men enjoy a structural advantage, why would we find within this admittedly small but representative sample of British men such reticence towards society and its expectations? If being a man brought benefits in terms of enjoyment, self-expression and prestige, why do the great majority of interviewees not seem to feel them? Why is there so often a feeling of dispirited resignation when talking of life within social structures and a wild elation, however transitory, at any departure from those structures? There might be indications that social discourse and structures in Britain are not or are no longer especially ‘masculine’. For example, the popular and academic discourse which presents masculine emotion as ‘autistic’ might be seen as a fundamental shift of social discourse; in the past, emotional reserve or reticence was considered to be a sign of masculine strength and the expression of powerful emotions was associated with ‘female’ hysteria. Could this be taken as a sign that the masculine linguistic hegemony, which feminist writers such as Françoise Héritier and Mary Daly86 considered so universal, has been lost? We can also point to the emergence of counter-cultural movements in Britain since the 1960s, such as Mods, Skinheads and Punks. As Fiona MacDonald points out in The Graffiti Subculture,87 these movements have traditionally been interpreted in the light of Marxist analysis as forms of social protest, which ignores the fact that they are also predominantly masculine movements. In “Girls and Subculture”, the British sociologists Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber argue that women do not create their own subcultures.88 If this is the case, could this be an indication that it is above all men who are unhappy with social structures? And, once again, could this be an indication that social discourse is not necessarily ‘masculine’ or constructed in the interest of men?

• 93 For example, Gloria Steinem, in an essay entitled “The Myth of Masculine Mystique”, argues that the (...)

40What emerges from these interviews is a strong impression that the masculine role, based on work and family responsibilities, which second wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem considered an essential component of masculine domination93, is not an enticing prospect for men but is nevertheless considered to be unavoidable. It seems that, as a result, various delaying tactics, often characterised as ‘laddish’, are deployed, whether consciously or unconsciously, involving a subversion of patriarchal representations and values, a refusal to engage in work, to engage emotionally in sexual relationships, a refusal of the status of manhood, a refusal to engage in society or accept responsibilities. In this light we can better understand the desire to debunk or unmask ideal masculine values, which is so evident in FHM. More generally, it can be argued that politically incorrect humour is used subversively to undermine dominant social values.

• 96 Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 260.
• 97 Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 260.

42Heavy alcohol consumption breaks down conditioned constraints. In both cases it is implied that there are no women present, apart from the “bored barmaid” and masculine behaviour is anti-social, involving sexism and fighting. Another key element is the male group. For the interviewees of my sample, membership of a masculine band of friends had great importance. It was my impression, admittedly subjective, that the 18 who were part of such a group were the happiest of my sample and those that had no masculine friends were the unhappiest. In the words of one of my interviewees, the group of male friends was “magical and reassuring”.96 Typically, they had become friends at school, where they formed a powerful clique and neglected work in favour of “having a laugh”. After school they still meet regularly, usually at weekends to go out drinking together. The participation of girlfriends, although tolerated, is disapproved of (and can lead to bad feeling within the group), as in their presence the men cannot “be themselves”. All communication within the group tends to take the form of “merciless piss-taking”97, debunking any personal pretensions revealed by a member of the group, making politically incorrect and frequently sexist jokes and sometimes forcefully debating political issues which may range from Britain’s place in Europe to the local controversy of a road being built through a protected wetland. They do not share their feelings or discuss personal problems. It seemed to me that part of the success of FHM and Loaded is that they imitated the dynamic of such a masculine group. However, the masculine bonded group, too, seems to be also a temporary solution, as 33-year old Jim suggests:

• 99 Tolson, The Limits of Masculinity, 26.
• 100 Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1957), (...)
• 101 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York and (...)

44This analysis of the interviews challenges the traditional feminist assumptions that patriarchy and patriarchal masculinities are necessarily maintained by men in the interest of men. The dominant discourse may be about men and about masculine success, without being a masculine discourse. On the contrary, it may even be argued that masculinities are actively shaped by women according to a feminine ideology of the home. This is not necessarily a new observation in Britain. For Andrew Tolson, the pioneer of masculinity studies in Britain, the mother is “the principle representative of the middle class family.”99 According to Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London, in the Bethnal Green area of East London in the 1950s “the mother is the head and centre of the extended family.”100 Nor is this phenomenon restricted to Britain. The feminist writer, Barbara Ehrenreich in The Hearts of Men, argues that American men since the 50s frequently experience the process of settling down as a surrender of volition to a feminine world.101

• 102 Frank Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana, 1973), 8.
• 103 I have paraphrased here from a French translation of the English text.
• 104 F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (...)

45We can trace this analysis further back in time. As the literary critic Frank Kermode points out, D.H. Lawrence believed that women were the real “social agents” and that the miners of his generation had been “got under and made good” by their wives.102 In a speech delivered in 1955, later published as an essay under the title “The Condition of Women in Primitive Societies and in Our Own”, the British anthropologist E.E. Evans Pritchard expresses his belief that English men have lost a great part of the authority that they used to enjoy as head of the family and have adopted a passive and defensive attitude within the home.103 The theme can be traced further back in time. F.M.L. (Michael) Thompson, the British social historian of the 19^th century, suggests that “the father wielded the strap but most of the rules emanated from mother”104 and that feminine control of marriage arrangements led to feminine definitions of acceptable masculinity:

• 106 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, London and New York: (...)
• 107 Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 200.
• 108 Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 206.
• 109 Laura Gowing, “Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London”, in (...)
• 110 Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (London: UCL Press, 1998), 107.

46John Tosh, studying 19^th century masculinities, argues that for many middle-class Victorian men, “domesticity […] meant submitting to a feminized ambience”.106 Tosh argues that this masculine perception led to the creation of homosocial spaces that allowed men to escape the influence of women, not just masculine clubs and rooms reserved for men in domestic architecture (the gun-room, the smoking room etc.), but also, more generally, colonial adventure,107 in which analysis the former British empire must be considered the ultimate masculine space. Generally he notes the rise of homo-sociality and so-called “Uranian” friendships between men.108 The theme can be traced back further. Historians of the Early Modern period, such as Laura Gowing, Patricia Crawford and Jacqueline Eales have explored how women of this period used patriarchal institutions such as the Calvinist sects, the Church generally and the Ecclesiastical courts to militate against masculine drunkenness, infidelity, physical abuse and laziness and generally to ensure that men lived up to their patriarchal pretensions. Laura Gowing suggests that women acquired at this time “a verbal and legal authority that was at once powerful and fragile”109 and Jacqueline Eales speaks of the feminine role as “moral arbiter of acceptable social behaviour”.110 The historian Anthony Fletcher, speaking of the onset of patriarchal Calvinist masculinity in the early 17^th century, emphasises its drawbacks for men:

• 111 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995) (...)

47This manhood in itself was more questionable, it is suggested, than we have realised: more problematic to achieve, more problematic to retain and exercise according to the rules that society laid down. For the core of early modern patriarchy was household order and much was expected of men in that regard.111

• 112 Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 96.

48This would perhaps suggest that Calvinist patriarchy, while ostensibly reinforcing masculine domination, in fact came at a price, by expecting men to live up to their patriarchal pretensions and therefore, so to speak, to earn their status. It may be added that, according to Jacqueline Eales, it was agreed amongst Calvinist theologians and theoreticians that women should obey their husbands “unless their commands conflicted with those of God”.112 If this is the case, women would have had considerable influence as arbitrators of masculinity.

• 113 Andea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne eds, Dislocating Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994).
• 114 Chenjerai Shire, “Men Don’t Go to the Moon”, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne eds, op. cit., 153.
• 115 Lin Foxhall, “Pandora Unbound”, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne eds, op. cit., 133-46.
• 116 Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Paradoxes of Masculinity”, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne eds., op. cit., 198.

49This analysis encourages us to think of patriarchy not as a solid and monolithic structure imposed by men, but as a precarious, shifting interaction between gender ideologies that have emerged around the work and responsibilities involved in reproduction. Although men have most usually obtained the advantage in any contest over the division of labour in child-care (as women are literally left holding the baby) and sought to naturalise the advantage through masculinist ideologies, this would not preclude the emergence of feminine ideologies and practices that seek to minimise the feminine disadvantage and masculine abuse of power. We can imagine that direct confrontation would not produce the best results and therefore envisage the evolution of subversive strategies which seek to influence masculine conditioning or even define masculinities according to perceived feminine interests. In this scenario, the prestige women accorded to a man would be conditional on his behaviour. Such feminine participation in the construction of masculinities is not unusual or limited to the English-speaking world. In the collection of ethnographical gender studies entitled Dislocating Masculinity,113 a number of contributors note this practice. For example, Chenjerai Shire, speaking of the Shona in his native Zimbabwe, says that “women constructed masculinities right through the lives of men, from birth to adulthood.”114 Lin Foxhall challenges Michel Foucault’s analysis of masculine domination in Periclean Athens and suggests that women, by marrying young, spanned the generations of men and provided cultural continuity, which constrained masculine freedom of action.115 In “The Paradoxes of Masculinity”, Deniz Kandiyoti perceives among young Turkish men a reaction against patriarchal masculine identities which are inculcated or encouraged by the women of their families.116

• 117 Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Decline of Patriarchy”, in Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson e (...)

50We can therefore imagine that through this subversive or recuperative process the advantages accruing to men in patriarchy may be whittled away until they are not experienced as advantages at all but as constraints. This masculine perception would not necessarily take place on a conscious level, but would perhaps most likely emerge in self-contradictory discourse, as we have seen in the interviews of my own sample, and would be filtered through issues of self-esteem, perceptions of right and wrong, calculations of self-interest and the sublimation of desires. If hegemonic masculine discourse has really been subverted by a feminine ideology, we can also imagine the emergence of equally unconscious masculine counter-strategies or counter-practices, emerging through fashion and humour, which seek to undermine hegemonic patriarchal ideals and set up alternative ‘authentic’ models of masculinity which allow for greater freedom. This scenario might shed light generally on the meaning of post-war countercultural movements in Britain but particularly on the emergence of new laddism in the 1990s, with its emphasis on masculine pleasure-seeking, its impatience with social constraints, its ridicule of masculine pretensions, its self-lacerating representation of the weak man and more generally its use of subversive humour. Ironically, this interpretation would ostensibly have lads and feminists fighting for the same cause. However, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests in “The Decline of Patriarchy”,117 the dismantling of patriarchy might lead to new and worse forms of masculine abuse. It would be provocative and sensationalist to suggest that patriarchy is a feminine construction, but it might be considered, from a feminine point of view, as an ideological means, faute de mieux and in the absence of reproductive instincts, of containing masculine abuse and obtaining masculine contribution, however unequal, to the work that reproduction entails.