A stolen car is driven straight through the plate glass doors of an electrical goods store. Men in balaclava hoods jump out, quickly load the car with TV's, Hi-Fi's, etc. and reverse out and away. The goods are unloaded, then the car is burned. Elsewhere another stolen car, wheels screeching, is undertaking high-speed handbrake turns in front of an applauding crowd. At a third location, yet another stolen car is being driven round for the hell of it. A police patrol car spots it and gives chase. The stolen car crashes. Two men die. Nights of 'burnin' and 'a-lootin' follow. Scenes from Newcastle night life, circa 1991.
| What all commentators routinely ignored was the fact that the participants were, to a man, young men. |
How are we to understand these events? Wickedness? Unemployment? Deprivation? Boredom? Alienation? Ill-discipline? Oppressive policing? All were mentioned, of course. But what all commentators routinely ignored was the fact that the participants were, to a man, young men. If ram-raiding, hot-rodding, joy-riding and rioting are unimaginable in the absence of men, the same is true of practically any crime (however defined) you care to think of. Excluding soliciting (for the purposes of prostitution) which is, by legislative definition, confined to women, and shoplifting, where the official crime figures record a more even balance between the sexes (though men still outnumber women) all other crimes, be they crimes of property or crimes of violence, crimes of the powerless or crimes of the powerful, crimes committed against the state or crimes committed by the state, are dominated by men. The question is: how does this knowledge, usually ignored because so taken-for-granted, help us to think about the problem of crime? The answer lies in the way much crime neatly dovetails with the values motivating most men's behaviour, namely, those usually associated with masculinity - strength, independence, self-confidence, aggression, competitiveness, etc.
Ironically, but typically, feminists concerned with crimes of violence by men against women noticed this first. Unlike those holding to more conventional explanations, which saw violent behaviour as deviant or abnormal, feminists regarded it as part of a continuum of (male) violence uniting individual men, social institutions and society as a whole. In other words, they focused on what individual violent men, other men, the institutions that socialised them, the society that bore them, shared, namely, masculine values. Thus rape, for example, was seen not as an aberration but merely as a more coercive example of the predatory, phallic-dominated, 'sex-as-conquest' that stands muster for 'normal' male sexuality. We can look at joy-riding, hot-rodding, etc. in a similar light; for, in some ways, they are the perfect incarnation of a whole range of masculine rituals: taking risks, testing confidence, challenging others, achieving status. They also illustrate, in case we should forget it in the excitement, irresponsibility (a core masculine value?) in their careless courting of death and destruction. And all this from the inside of 2Oth century man's most potent virility symbol - the motor car. We clearly miss much if we fail to notice here 'masculinity-in-action': the fun, thrills and excitement of young men testing themselves, against themselves, against each other, and against other men.
However, masculinity is a difficult notion to work with. First, because some masculine values are so broad that they can conceivably encompass any sort of behaviour. 
Take the idea of transcendence, the notion of masculinity involving a desire to throw off the shackles of mortality, to achieve immortality through some glorious or notorious act. This masculine quest for 'transcendence' is part of the heroic, 'death or glory' appeal, to young men, of terrorism, as Robin Morgan argues in The Demon Lover (Methuen, 1989); it is also the 'common denominator' for understanding why sexual murderers are overwhelmingly men, and what motivates their sadistic 'lust to kill', as Cameron and Fraser argue in their book of the same name (Polity, 1989). But most men's 'quest for transcendence', thankfully, takes less obviously harmful forms than terrorism or serial murder - the attempts by writers and runners, for example, to achieve the ultimate (if somewhat pointless) accolade of a place in the history books.
Secondly, masculinity, strictly speaking, should be masculinities. There are, for example, clearly class-based examples of masculinity. Paul Willis's classic look at disaffected 'lads' in Learning to Labour (Saxon House, 1977) found that they rejected the femininity of 'pen-pushing' in favour of a class-based notion of masculinity centred on physical skills, physical strength, physical toughness. But nobody should imagine that the middle class boys taking up their middle class careers are not also coveting masculine values in their way. The working class 'lad' may dream of being the heavyweight boxing champion of the world and the middle class 'ear-ole' of winning the Nobel prize for physics; but both dreams embody the masculine ideal of competitive success leading to public glory. Moreover, there are no prizes for guessing which of these class-based versions of masculinity is the major beneficiary in the generational hand-over of the reigns of patriarchal power.
The question of race also complicates the issue. The fact that the next heavyweight champion of the world, like the last and the one before that ad nauseum, will almost certainly be black (if he survives the lottery of the ghetto and escapes the prison house) has nothing to do with chromosomes and 'natural' aptitude - but it has everything to do with the way racial and class disadvantages combine not only to reduce opportunities but also to heighten the salience of certain forms of manliness.
Finally, there is the issue of the appeal of any version of masculinity to boys becoming men. My view is that we learn to cling to a particular version of masculinity, not because the values just happen to be there, waiting to be unproblematically internalised, but because, and only because, they have an emotional resonance. Because of the complexities of our emotional lives, this makes the process of acquiring masculine values rather more fraught than sometimes assumed. Peter Sutcliffe is a good, if extreme, example of the difficulties I am pointing to. Acquiring the tough, masculine values all around him was no easy matter of internalisation, for they had to compete with his already strong identification with the feminine values represented by his beloved mother. The only way he found to develop his masculine side was by first splitting off his feminine side, projecting it violently onto the hapless women who happened to cross his path, and, by destroying them, destroying it. This is the essence of Joan Smith's account of Sutcliffe in her excellent Misogynies (Faber, 1989) book. It is also a good example of how feminism's engagement with psychoanalysis - a result of trying to understand the arduousness of girls' paths to womanhood (the tyrannies of the 'beauty myth'; the compulsions of the diet sheet; jumping the cracks betwixt madonna and whore, etc.) - is producing an altogether richer, more complex and adequate notion of how identities are acquired, negotiated, and fitfully sustained.
| I defy any (car driving) man reading this to deny he has never got a 'buzz' out of high-speed driving |
So, the concept of masculinity remains underdeveloped. Even so, how might the above help explain, better than the commentators have managed so far, the question of joy-riding, hot-rodding etc. In the first place, when thought of in relation to masculinity, its normality, not its abnormality, is striking. I defy any (car driving) man reading this to deny he has never got a 'buzz' out of high-speed driving, undertaking tricky driving manoeuvres involving a high degree of hand-eye co-ordination, overtaking, etc. Joy-riders and hot-rodders have simply made these usually incidental features of driving central, the whole point. It is also worth noting - a fact drawn to my attention by a woman, incidentally - how the terms 'joy-riding', 'hot-rodding' and 'ram-raiding' virtually describe the essence of a masculinized version of sexuality. As for ram-raiding, doesn't the bare-faced cheek, the brazenness, the daring, the sheer gall of it, evoke a (sneaky) admiration, alongside the public face of disapproval?
We might look at this from the other side: the abhorrence of the female criminal. Because crime is a quintessentially masculine activity, girls or women who commit crimes are doubly deviant: lawbreakers and gender-benders. 'Good girls don't'. A boy who has never walked on the wild side, by contrast, is suspect. On the other hand, if you linger too long it helps to have a good lawyer. The hypocrisy of the male establishment on this score is galling. But this is where the notion of class-based masculinities is central. In the first place, joy-riders pinch the cars of men from the car-owning classes. But in addition to this quite direct clash of class interests, joy-riders and their ilk are contemporary representatives of a wild or rough masculinity which, if only symbolically, threatens the social order underpinned by the dominant, respectable masculinity of middle-class men.
Think about it. Think about the streets and their gender relations. Not the quiet, well-to-do suburbs, but those of the working class inner city. During the day they are hives of activity with much coming and going by both sexes; women are highly visible, shopping and serving shoppers, taking children to and from school, etc. But the night-time streets tell a different story. Women are no longer so visible. Now these have become the province of men, particularly young men, groups of working class youths, what the media and right-wing politicians call 'gangs'. This has something to do with the burdens of women's 'double-shift' which renders their leisure far more restricted than men's. But it has probably more to do with the structure of power that both defines the night-time streets as effectively off-limits to 'good girls' - certainly as a place to hang around - and makes them, at best, places where women must be on their guard, at worst, fearful and intimidating places, best avoided. This constant threat of male harassment, intimidation or violence is not only directed towards women, but towards all who don't conform to the dominant, heterosexual norm - which means that open displays of homosexuality by men on the streets are not safe. And no doubt middle class men, caught without their cars, are unlikely to relish walking through the middle of a young, male, working class group. (This paragraph borrows heavily from Bob Connell's excellent Gender and Power.)
There is a history to all this. The creation of an urban proletariat during the industrial revolution also involved the creation of distinctive patterns of working class life and culture within which the street - as a site for buying and selling, social intercourse and the pursuit of certain leisure activities - has been central. Structural changes during the 19th century combined to reduce the size of the casual labour market and to 'clean up' the streets in pursuit of a new 'respectable' urban civility. The result was, effectively, to gradually leave the streets to the younger, 'rougher' more casually employed males - and the police: the guardians of the new respectability (see Cohen's "Policing the Working Class City").
In the contemporary period the massive un- and under-employment of young, poorly educated, unqualified working class males has increased the size of the casual labour market once more, and with it the number of young men for whom the street is a primary location - for casual 'work', non-work and play. And as working class youngsters, like Paul Willis' '1ads', physical skills, physical strength and physical toughness are at a premium. In this context, hot-rodding, joy-riding and ram-raiding are modern age manifestations within a long tradition of 'rough' or 'wild' masculinities against which the police, representing the state's version of the respectable, patriarchal order, are pitted. It certainly seems no accident that police taunting is part and parcel of the fun, just as, in riot situations, the police are often both the originating spark and object of much of the aggression. Black youth, though much less in evidence in Newcastle, would seem to represent for police, in the contemporary period, a particularly wild masculinity.
Finally there is the question of identification. Clearly not all young, working class men, out of work and living in the inner-city, are involved in these delinquent escapades. But it is not hard to see how, in the context of the life on offer, such escapades possess the kind of emotional charge that is hard to match in other ways. Those for whom the activities of hot-rodding, etc. are particularly important would show, I suspect, a significant identification with a conventional notion of an aggressive, tough masculinity.
These remarks have been highly sketchy. But they do, hopefully, begin to show how the concept of masculinity, underdeveloped though it is, can begin the sort of critically empathetic illumination of troubling, public issues that alone hold out any promise of a realistic approach. The Tory government's response was as predictably punitive as it was mindless. But they would, as guardians of 'patriarchal propriety', say that, wouldn't they? Question is: can criminologists do any better? The signs are not good, if contemporary criminology is anything to go by. It will certainly require the sort of imaginative engagement with difficult notions that has not been much in evidence lately. Now that really is a 'transcendent' challenge; is criminology 'man' enough to face it?
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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