Descent of Man
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Grayson Perry’s first art prize was a large papier-mâché head he awarded to himself as part of a performance art project at college in 1980. Since then he has won many other awards, including the Turner Prize in 2003. He is now one of Britain’s most celebrated artists and has had major solo exhibitions all over the world. His 2013 BBC Reith Lectures were the most popular lectures since the series began. He won a BAFTA for his Channel 4 documentary on the creation of six new tapestries entitled “The Vanity of Small Differences, All in the Best Possible Taste”, for which he was also awarded Best Presenter at the Grierson British Documentary Awards.
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
Copyright © 2017 Grayson Perry
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
I AM RIDING MY MOUNTAIN BIKE THROUGH THE forest up a long, steep track. Halfway up I see a young boy, maybe nine or ten years old. He is struggling; this track is a tough challenge for anyone not used to mountain biking, let alone a kid on a new bicycle. He can’t work the gears, and wobbles and grinds to a halt. Tears run down his face. “Dad, Dad!” he yells, sobbing. He is crying for help, but he is also in a boiling rage. I offer to help him, but he is so angry, so ashamed, that he doesn’t acknowledge me. As I pedal past up the hill, I see the father in the distance. He is standing si- lently next to his mountain bike, arms folded across his chest, staring at his son two hundred meters down the hill. He also looks angry. I have seen that father’s face on a thousand soc- cer sidelines, outside a thousand school gates. It’s a face that says, “Toughen up, don’t whine, be a man!” It’s the face of someone who hands down the rage and pain of what it is to be a man. I feel incensed on the boy’s behalf. I can’t help myself: I say to the father, “I hope your son can afford a good psycho- therapist when he grows up.” The father doesn’t respond.
I hope that in picking up this book you have already acknowledged that masculinity needs to be questioned, that
gender inequality is a huge issue for all of us and that the
world would be a better place without it. What I hope this small book might do is bring awareness of masculinity to more people-awareness being a step toward change, be cause many forms of masculinity can be very destructive. If this is the first book you have bought about gender, I am joy ful. We need to examine masculinity, not just to prevent small boys from crying with rage at their impassive fathers on a mountain-bike ride, but to change the whole world for the better.
Examining masculinity can seem like a luxury problem, a pastime for a wealthy, well-educated, peaceful society, but I would argue the opposite: the poorer, the more undeveloped, the more uneducated a society is, the more masculinity needs realigning with the modern world, because masculinity is probably holding back that society. All over the globe, crimes are committed, wars are started, women are being held back and economies are disastrously distorted by men, because of their outdated version of masculinity.
We need to get a philosophical fingernail under the edge of the firmly stuck-down masculinity sticker so we can get hold of it and rip it off. Beneath the sticker, men are naked and vulnerable-human even.
It is a newsroom cliche that masculinity is always some how "in crisis," under threat from pollutants such as shifting gender roles, but to me many aspects of masculinity seem such a blight on society that to say it is "in crisis" is like saying racism was "in crisis" in civil-rights-era America. Masculinity needs to change. Some may question this, but they are often white middle-class men with nice jobs and nice families: the current state of masculinity works for them. What about all the teenagers who think the only manly way out of poverty
and dysfunction is to become a criminal? What about all the lonely men who can't get a partner, have trouble making friends and end up killing themselves? What about all the angry men who inflict their masculine baggage onto the rest of us? All of us males need to look at ourselves with a clear eye and ask what sort of men would make the world a better place, for everyone.
When we think about masculinity and men, the issues
can quickly become scarily global and serious. A discussion about hipster fashions or who does the washing-up can rap idly spiral into a debate about rape, war, terrorism, religious oppression and predatory capitalism. I sometimes watch the evening news on television and think all the world's problems can be boiled down to one thing: the behavior of people with a Y chromosome. Men seem to be the ones with the power, the money, the guns and the criminal records. The conse quences of rogue masculinity are, I think, one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue, facing the world today. Some forms of masculinity-particularly if starkly brutal or covertly domineering-are toxic to an equal, free and tolerant society.
Understandably, women have led the discussion about gender. They are the ones who have been most oppressed by its constraints, after all. On the subject of gender, the feelings of many men can be summed up as "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"; the status quo seems to work for them. But I am asking, "Does it? Really?" What if half the victims of masculinity are men? Masculinity might be a straitjacket that is keeping men from "being themselves," whatever that might mean. In their drive for domination, men may have neglected to prioritize vital aspects of being wholly human, particularly issues around mental health. In their drive to be successfully masculine, men
may be preventing their greater self from being successfully happy. I want to unpack what the American feminist Peggy Mcintosh calls the "invisible weightless knapsack" of male priv ilege, full of "special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks," to see if it is as much a burden to some men as a boon.
I feel I need to say here that in no way am I setting myself against men in general, not least because I am one. Nor am I against all masculinity: I can be as masculine as the next guy. This book is about what I think masculinity is, and question ing it. One of the problems when talking about masculinity is the confusion between sex (male) and gender (man). The physical, definite, pretty much unchanging fact of the male body can make us think that all the behaviors, feelings and culture associated with that body (masculinity) are also im mutably writ in flesh. For many males, being masculine, act ing in a manly way, is as unquestionably a biological part of them as their penis and testicles and deep voice. But mascu linity is mainly a set of habits, traditions and beliefs histori cally associated with being a man. Our bodies take tens of millennia to evolve even slightly, but behaviors seen as mas culine can be as transient as a teenage fad, a coal mine or a forgotten deity. We need to shift away from seeing masculin ity as a closed set of behaviors and from seeing change as threatening, unnatural and feminizing. I see masculinity as being how men behave at present. I think it needs to change to include behaviors that are at present regarded by many as feminine, behaviors that are sensible, life-enhancing and planet-saving.
I can't remember the first time I realized I was male, I
doubt many men can, but that is at the nub of masculinity; it
is there at the very basement level of our identity. Before we learn to speak or understand language, we are being indoctri nated in gender. The first question most people ask when they hear of a birth is "Is it a boy or a girl?" Once we know the sex of a baby, we often coo over it in gendered ways: "Isn't she beautiful?"; "Look at him kick, he's going to be a soccer player."
So masculinity is a deeply woven component of the male
psyche. But I am a transvestite; I am turned on by dressing up in clothes that are heavily associated with being female. This is perhaps some unconscious renunciation of being a man, or at least a fantasy flight toward femininity. I sometimes like to pretend I am a woman, so from a young age I have felt that masculinity is optional for someone with a penis. Because I am a transvestite, people often assume that this gives me a special insight into the opposite gender. But this is rubbish. How can I, brought up as a man, know anything about the experience of being a woman? It would be insulting to women if I thought I did. If anything, it gives me a sharper insight into what it is to be a man, since from the age of twelve I have been intensely questioning my own masculinity. I have had to step slightly outside myself, a doubter at the gates of the crumbling superdome of masculinity. This does not mean that I have stepped into femininity, but it is no surprise that I am thoroughly fascinated by masculinity, the lumbering beast within me that I have tried to suppress and negotiate with my entire life. I have been forced by my sexuality to be come aware of what it is to be a "man."
As a twelve-year-old rummaging in my mother's ward robe, I felt dangerously weird and alone. I didn't even know that such a thing as transvestism existed or that other men felt
the same. This feeling prompted the thought that masculin ity is an act played out blindly by many men who have had no reason or impulse to question what it is they are doing. One thing I discovered in investigating the nature of identity for my TV series and London exhibition Who Are You? was that identity is an ongoing performance, not a static state. The philosopher Julian Baggini wrote that "Tis a verb masquer ading as a noun."
I can't remember a time when I embraced being a man fully, unquestioningly. I am a white man, a rather tarnished badge to wear these days, weighted with guilt and shame at the behavior of one's fellows. Manliness for my young self was problematic. Somewhere there was always a nagging suspi cion that masculinity was inherently wrong and needed to be controlled. My mother used me, her eldest son, as a sounding board to vent all her rage against men. By the age of fifteen, I had taken on board a heap of anti-male propaganda. Even today I often catch myself observing and commenting on men as if I were not one of them. Most men are nice, reason able fellows. But most violent people, rapists, criminals, kill ers, tax avoiders, corrupt politicians, planet despoilers, sex abusers and dinner-party bores do tend to be, well ... men.
I did not have good role models. My father left when I was just four years old, and I didn't really have any meaningful contact with him until I was fifteen, by which time I was pretty well hardwired with my own version of masculinity and its attendant sexuality, something that I still have forty years later. My stepfather, with whom I lived for the majority of my childhood, was a volatile and violent man of whom I was terrified. So men were unreliable, brutish, distant and uninterested in me. I have suffered at the hands of individual
men and with the constraints of gender itself. I am a male person, and I have learned to have some compassion for my self and hope to have compassion for males in general. I write this book with goodwill and in the hope that men will learn to flourish in a changing world.
This is not about writing men off: one thing that writing this book has made me realize is that, despite my gender dys phoria, I can be a very traditionally masculine man. There is a corny saying in therapy circles, "If you spot it, you've got it;' which means that if you notice behavior in others, it's probably because you behave in the same way. I have been masculinity-spotting for quite a while now, and note I display quite acutely some of the traits we associate with men. I am very competitive and territorial, particularly toward other men. I often ask other men about this and they usually deny bristling at rivals or having any other such man moments, which leaves me feeling like I am a macho monster for admitting to wanting to get one over on other guys in petty ways. Maybe my circumstances, being a transvestite and an artist, mean that I am less invested in society's ideals of masculinity than many men and that therefore I am willing to pick them out and question them, even in myself. I feel I have nothing to lose but some anti social habits.
When I was growing up, my unconscious dealt with the issue of masculinity in a very particular way: it handed the role over to my teddy bear. Maybe at some level I sensed that being fully the man I could be was dangerous in a house with my...
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