'Bollocks to the New Man' proclaimed the front cover of London's City Limits magazine, welcoming the emergence of the New Lad - 'thoughtful and sensitive, but unashamed of masculine pursuits like boozing and getting laid'.
Battle lines were quickly drawn up between New Man and New Lads. New Lads aren't afraid of their dicks, New Men are' (City Limits), 'he [The New Lad] may be pretty flaky but he's a damn sight more fun than the New Man' (Arena).
For those of us who still haven't worked out what a New Man is, worse is to come. It turns out he is us. 'In one trench are the men of Achilles Heel who march to the tune of feminism' and who still 'cling parasitically to the women's cause for any meaning' (The Times).
The media version of the changes in masculinity has a dialectic that would make the RCP green with envy. First comes the Old Lad, neanderthal jaw, groping arms, '1oud, proud and utterly unreconstitutable' (Arena). Or is he? Because fast on his heels is the New Man, the negation of everything the Old Lad stood for. The man who, according to City Limits, apologises for his masculinity, hides his Playboy under the bed, and goes to Ikea on Saturday afternoons with his girlfriend.
Thesis . . antithesis.. take the Old Lad and the New Man, merge them, and, assuming you don't want to create the 'Old Man', you arrive at the New Lad' ...synthesis. A man who 'aspires to New Man status when he's with women, but reverts to Old Lad type when he's out with the boys' (Arena); who combines 'open minds with street-wise attitudes' (City Limits).
The New Lad is another media fantasy just as the New Man was. An attempt to categorise and label men - straight and gays, wimps and warriors, New Men and Old Men. But changes in attitudes do occur' and, however inadequate the label, the growth of the 'New Lad' reflects an underlying social current. As 'Sid the Sexist' sexism becomes less and less acceptable, a belief in sexual equality is slowly becoming an integral part of the social consciousness of young men.
The New Lad is not perfect but he is a welcome development from the Old Lad. Even if the only difference with the New Lad is emphasis - they're not quite as boorish/tribal' drunken or loud as their prehistoric predecessors' (Arena) it's a move in the right direction.
But whilst New Lads happily insult New Men like a son might do his father, it's worth the new kids remembering who paved the way for them. Had there not been any feminists or anti-sexist men, people brave enough to confront and change prevailing orthodoxies, there wouldn't be any New Lads crying in World Cup semi-finals. Gazza may not have read The Second Sex, but his career may owe more to deBeauvior and other feminists than he realises.
Question: what two things best help sell newspapers? Answer: sex and violence. Question: what two things best define masculinity? Answer (some would say): sex and violence. Both themes come together, in the most sickeningly gruesome way in the sexually sadistic serial murderer. This year has seen sustained media attention to the question of serial murder.
Anthony Hopkins' rivetting portrayal of 'Hannibal the Cannibal' has helped make the film The Silence of the Lambs one of the box-office smashes of 1991. Thomas Harris' book of the same name, upon which the film is based, is currently No.1 in the paperback best-sellers, closely followed by his earlier Red Dragon, the book in which Hannibal first appears. Bret Easton Ellis' book about the yuppie serial killer, American Psycho, has caused a storm of controversy in the United States.
Is all this attention simply a recycling of perennially newsworthy themes in the time-worn interests of sales and profits? Or, a sign of the 'new times 'in which nothing can shake us and, literally, anything goes? Or is this, more hopefully, the fitful beginnings of a hard look at male sexuality and male violence?
The FBI's Behavioural Science Unit in Virginia has been constructing elaborate profiles of offenders based on everything known about serial killers. The implicit assumption behind this offender profiling approach is: in what ways are these men different. Feminists, on the other hand, have tended to emphasise the similarities between 'normal' men and the sexually sadistic 'monster'. For them, any differences are those of degree, not of kind.
Here is not the place to arbitrate between these views; but we do recognise that questions of male sexuality and male violence are at the very heart of any project concerning itself with changing men. That is why, in the next issue, we shall be devoting a special section to men and crime in which, among other things, the questions of serial murder and working with sexual offenders will be addressed.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
