The English in 'not real men' SHOCKER!

[cymrococh]

I agree/disagree with this:

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Colum...1773064,00.html

 

What has happened to English masculinity? Two examples. A carpenter was working in my house recently. He had an ample tool belt and all his fingers, so I took him for a man who knew what's what. Then I heard some whimpering from upstairs. It was the carpenter singing: "I'm every woman. It's all in me." (This, incidentally, will be the last time Capital Gold is heard in my home.) Then last week I read about a Suffolk man who has insured himself for £1m against the psychological trauma he will suffer if England lose the World Cup.

 

Once, Englishmen took Henry V's exhortations to martial self-sacrifice as inspiring. Now, instead of stiffening sinews and summoning up the blood, we sing Chaka Khan in falsetto and underwrite the possible upset of watching telly.

Meanwhile, in Australia, some real men were hauled from a mine after being trapped by a rockfall following an earthquake. Why, asked several women columnists, can't Englishmen be more like Aussie blokes? "They didn't want a psychiatrist," wrote Alice Thomson in the Telegraph. "They just shouted 'Yee-ha' and demanded steak and eggs and rum and Cokes." Hold on. Who, apart from my friends in the Buff Gay Rodeo Association, shouts "Yee-ha" today? And rum and Coke? Isn't that a girl's drink?

 

The miners reportedly kept up their spirits by listening to iPods. I'll bet they played a lot of Oleta Adams, Candi Statton and Mariah Carey. Have you ever heard trapped Australian miners singing through the tears: "Young hearts, run free/Never get hung up, hung up like my man and me"? No? You've never lived.

 

These supposedly masculine miners are juxtaposed with effete whiners such as Mark Oaten, disgraced former LibDem home affairs spokesman. He undwerwent therapy following a psychosexual malestrom that blew him towards Scylla and Charybdis, who are currently working as rent boys. Real men, see, don't need therapy.

 

This view echoes Tony Soprano's lament. "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type?" Tony asked (oh, freighted irony!) his shrink. For more on this, read The Ghost of Gary Cooper: Masculinity, Homosocial Bonding, and The Sopranos at http://tinyurl.com/odol8. There, Katherine Hyunmi Lee argues that Tony's female shrink and his wife subvert his identification with masculinist mafia codes in favour of civilised, feminine spaces - the home, the couch. How ironic then that some women writers sneer at men who enter therapy's allegedly feminised milieu. Perhaps their vitriol is the real problem, and their desire for strong, silent, repressed men something they could work through in therapy, rather than in print.

 

It is baffling being a man, especially now, particularly if you are ageing and English. Consider me. What kind of man am I? I don't know any more. Befuddled by contradictory research, I can no longer bask in my uninterestingly heterosexual fortysomething English complacency. Even in the past three weeks, three surveys have helped to shatter my self-image. Now, I know what it is like to be a woman - at least the kind of Mail-reading woman who is, as she must be, confused.

 

First, researchers suggested that over-40s have great sex, because experience brings proficiency. This cheered me up, until I reflected on another story. Theo Walcott, the 17-year-old who, so far as I can judge, has never played football, was selected this week to join England's World Cup strikeforce. Maybe, then, experience and proficiency are inversely related, thus undermining the researchers' findings.

 

Other researchers poured more cold water on my libido. Male fertility levels plummet after 40. So, because unfeeling French scientists posit that my biological clock is ticking down, the great sex I thought I was having turns out to have been rubbish. If I had a penny for every time I've heard a woman say "Ha!" since that report appeared, I would have enough for compensatory Viagra. Such plummetus calamitous is best exemplified by John Prescott who told reporters: "I took the largest department any deputy prime minister has ever had and have continued to have the largest department any deputy prime minister has ever had." John, sweetheart, love, it's not the size of your department that matters, it's what you do with it, which in your case is, thankfully, increasingly little.

 

Yet more researchers claimed that women can tell a man's testosterone level by looking at him and thereby determine whether or not he is worth loving up. This creeps me out. Stop staring at my picture byline! It's harassment!

 

To cap my masculine angst, on Monday morning I took a call. "Stuart!" yelled my editor who is, in a very real sense, a woman. "Write about what happens when men go bald! You know, sexually!"

 

I ran my fingers through thinning locks and calmly replied: "Do I know you?" That didn't work.

 

"Just write the piece!"

 

"I'm afraid I can't," I said. "Not only am I only bald-ing rather than bald - important point - but I'm having great sex. Not while I'm on the phone obviously (Unless you're into that. You're not? OK!). But, you know, generally. Ever since I was 40. Grrreat sex. And not with rent boys. Not that there's anything wrong with that gender-wise. Anyhoo. The train's entering a tunnel. That isn't a sexual euphemism. It's a tunnel. I'm breaking up!!!" Then I turned my phone off until she had commissioned someone else and it was safe to turn it back on.

 

At my men's group (go to www.silkendalliance.org), we considered why English masculinity is an international joke (see, eg, The Simpsons' episode 'Scuse Me While I Miss The Sky). We concluded that the joke says more about the inadequacies of those telling it. Then we broke for some really nice cheese and planned a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show.

 

What is masculinity? Is it measurable by testosterone levels or the size of one's John Thomas? Can only women can see it and, if so, could they point out where it is, please? Is it about being secure enough to sing Chaka Khan or order rum and Cokes? The answer to that last question, according to an authoritative new survey from Clerkenwell University (ie me), is a big yes.

[cochyn]

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[Coyler]

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