Additional Reading and Discussions

15 This is the second part of the same article. Study the language of the text for further exercises and discussions.

Perhaps the real reason lies in a growing recognition that the old narratives of man as master always were as much about impossible dreams as desirable realities, ideals that either could never be attained or turned out to extract too high a price. Men today may see as clearly as women that Traditional Man was an ideological cutout with a multitude of less heroic flip sides. Behind the oaken patriarch often lurked the wife-beater; behind the charming dangler after women, the sexually obsessive lady-killer; behind the warrior, the tortured soul whose memories of cruelty wouldn't let him be. Traditional Man could not survive being revealed as simply human, with all the human weaknesses.

No wonder New Lad prospered in the wake of his downfall. At his best, the New Lad made mock of Traditional Man, destroying his pretensions, exposing his pomposities to the public gaze. At his worst, though, he simply put on irony as a fig leaf behind which it is bloke business as usual, the boring, killjoy business of taking responsibility for the well-being of others and putting their needs first.

What became of New Man? Of all the worn-out archetypes, he is the one who is now most roundly despised. And if New Man was meant to be the antidote to the failings of Traditional Man, how come he is never depicted as somebody people of either sex respect, admire or desire? Yes, yes, I know: the cynicism of women on this score frequently arises from hard experience. Those who find their lives messed up by men who don't speak to them, don't listen to them, don't seem to care about the children and never see domestic dirt may need a great deal of convincing that men can be any different. Yet it's worth considering a revealing paradox. On the one hand, it has long passed into common knowledge that New Man was not just a fraud but impossibility. The very idea of man possessing so-called "feminine" qualities and having any instinctive appeal to women (or, for that matter, to be accepted by other men) is often vigorously resisted. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that men and women are trying to work out more democratic ways of coexisting in their domestic, social and working worlds.

It is as if, in truth, we really do know who Ideal Man might be, but the cult of true manhood, of a pure masculinity free from "feminine" contamination, is so sacred in our culture that we just cannot quite bring ourselves to embrace him openly.

… Just because someone is skilful with an oven doesn't mean the guy is not a guy. This kind of uncommon but alluring modern male figures inspire curiosity, mixed feelings and all tell us a good deal about the way masculinity works. They indicate that masculinity is an exacting and unending job of "gender work". Men labour to perfect the ways of presenting their male social self from their boyhoods. They often police themselves and each other remorselessly, to conform to whatever version of the masculinity script is in operation. (Don't be a faggot! Don't be a wimp! Don't be a big girl's blouse!)

Men, on the whole, continue to enjoy privileges at the expense of women simply by virtue of being born male. But the maintenance of those privileges takes a price from men as well. It is the price of failure and the fear of failure to conform to whatever formulation of approved masculinity operates in the social circles to which a man belongs, however unattainable, however undesirable, however bloody daft and self-destructive it may be.The ideals of manhood have always been immovability and a straitjacket, solidarity and pleasure. Those of "femininity" have always been for women, in a comparable, though different, way. The difference for men is that even those who wish to shed the straightjacket know that doing so will guarantee them no applause.

Now what? The inability of advertising industry to define a new Ideal Man seems to illustrate the ambivalence surrounding men and what they are for. All the existing models appear discredited and dated. Yet there is no obvious new contender to fill the vacant space. This is often said to constitute a crisis. But if so, it is ultimately a crisis only inside our own heads. Maybe the best way to respond to the elusiveness of Ideal Man is to recognise, from all his earlier incarnations, that he has only ever been a myth, a myth born of the fallacy that men are men, and they are the opposite of women. This is not to defame manhood's customs and practices right across the board, for they include qualities that are valuable and precious: courage and determination, humour and self-deprecation, independence, fortitude and nerve. But these are also qualities women, too, possess and have battled, with some success, to have duly recognised (such recognition is more readily given if women are perceived as keeping their "femininity" intact).

Parallel progress, though, has been much slower with regard to men. That is partly because men themselves have often seen that they may lose more than they gain from any realignment in the gender order. The sassy old maxim has it that the trick for a woman to hang on to her man is to be a nurse in the nursery, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. If we believed that men could clinch the same combination, then both sexes might find themselves a little further down the road to liberation. Now, there's a concept worth selling. Anyone want to buy?

16 Explain the meanings and give examples of usage of the following words from the text above. Use the chart below.

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