The crisis of masculinity is class-based

Delivering his heartfelt plea on behalf of all young men, everywhere, all at once, virtuous St Southgate warned of internet subcultures replacing real-life communities, and of toxic influencers serving as surrogate fathers. In a digital age, rife with family breakdown, young men bereft of role models are feeling “isolated”, “grappling with their masculinity”, and are “reluctant to express their emotions”. They withdraw into internet porn, video games, and reddit forums. It is in these dark corners, lit only by the light of solitary screens, that lurk those “callous influencers” — who don garish pairs of fatherly shoes, whilst flogging snake-oil, and seldom have young men’s “best interests at heart”. 

Southgate’s air of respectability, and his mawkishly near-tear compassion, ostensibly removes himself from his own crosshairs here. But, for the less gullible, by diagnosing the danger of online charlatans, whilst unironically presenting himself as a saviour of young men, the following question comes to mind: “does Gareth Southgate really have young men’s best interests at heart?”

I don’t doubt for a second that Mr Southgate is well-intentioned. He seems a decent bloke, even if wants you to cry a lot. More to the point, his emphasis on loneliness, fatherlessness, the absence of rooted communities, and the appeal of vice without direction in life, are problems faced by a lot of men — and a lot of women, too. But the problem is this: Southgate’s analysis is too vague to be meaningful, his prescription too therapeutic to be helpful, and his targets are so symptomatic that he ignores root causes. As Nina Power said, the “rot goes much deeper”.

On the point of vagueness, who are these “young men” that he speaks of? And what does it mean to be “grappling” with one’s masculinity? These are two separate but related concerns that will be dealt with together. “Grappling with masculinity” is a term a lot like “crisis of masculinity” — or the even more culture-war explicit, “demonisation of masculinity”.

Most charitably, these are umbrella terms: implicit within each is a range of pathological phenomena — like the fatherless-purposelessness that Southgate touches on. Yet at their worst, terms like “young men” and “crisis of masculinity” are euphemisms. They obfuscate the fact that perverse social conditions — encapsulated under the rubric of a crisis — are felt most acutely by cohorts of men in lower socioeconomic communities and particular life circumstances. And class, though rarely mentioned, is the salient through which we should view issues like purposelessness, lack of community, and insecure pathways to belonging and identity among men.

The findings of the recent “Lost Boys” report from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) makes this clear. It’s a short report, 60 pages or so, with a unified focus but broad scope — with sections on the rise of chatbot companions, and the damaging effects of porn. The researchers, however, spend a lot of time focused on the negative effects of shipping our male-dominated industries abroad.

Manufacturing, agriculture and construction, contributed over 40 per cent of UK output in 1970. Now they amount to 16 per cent of UK GDP.  Whilst overall unemployment rates remain low (even in places like Sunderland, Rotherham and Hartlepool), economic inactivity is high, and there is an absence of secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs that used to be available to non-university educated men. When the mills and mines moved out, it wasn’t Blair’s “transferable skills” that replaced them — it was drugs, crime, welfare dependency, and family breakdown. The only things that were transferred were the jobs.

Half of all children by the age of 14 will not live with both of their parents. Boys today are more likely to have a phone than father, as Southgate rightly noted. Yet university-educated professionals are the group least likely to experience divorce, have children outside of marriage, and live in single-parent households. At three in five, boys of black Caribbean descent are the ethnic group most likely to live with one parent (typically a single mother). But the areas with the highest proportion of single parenthood in the UK are overwhelmingly White British. Our former industrial heartlands are the epicenter of broken homes, little money and less sense of what people do with their lives; where the epidemic of fatherlessness is increasingly the most acute; and where the closest thing to a male role model might indeed be frowning back at boys through smartphones.

Young men are falling behind in education and employment relative to women across the board — even young female graduates are now out earning their male counterparts: a very recent development. There are, indeed, many problems facing the young downwardly mobile middle-class. Many are priced out of home ownership, disillusioned with low-status desk work, and longing for the social life of their university days. (There’s a reason Houellebecq calls the graduate transition into the world of work a “stupefying” experience of “loneliness”.)

Both the graduate in London, and the disengaged schoolboy in the North East, face prospects of low-status, meaningless work and social isolation. But there are gradations to these problems. Not having the desk job that you thought your degree was a passport to is a different and less constrictive problem than, say, illiteracy, failing your GCSEs, and being out of work and education as a teenager and young adult. You’re more likely to experience these problems if you are white and working-class man in this country. And you’re more likely to kill yourself.

Areas which have been hit the hardest by deindustrialisation, declining living standards and family breakdown are those where deaths of despair are the highest in England and Wales. In fact, research published by the University of Manchester last year — the first UK study to look at geographical patterning and socio-economic predictors of deaths of despair — found that being male, living in the North, unemployment, White British ethnicity, living alone, and economic inactivity, were the biggest risk factors associated with deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug misuse in this country.

What is being touted as a crisis of masculinity is often rooted in socio-economic and geographical divides

There is a pincer of despondency in deindustrialised areas which is crushing men at the top and bottom of the age range. It is where young men are most likely to come from a broken home, fail at school, and be out of work and education; and where, by the time they get to middle-age, they’re most likely to feel that life might not be worth it anymore. Which gets to the rub of the issue.

There are lots of phenomena affecting young men that transcend class divides — loneliness, earning less than their female counterparts, and parents rich or poor can all be dysfunctional. But the basic point is this: what is being touted as a crisis of masculinity is often rooted in socio-economic and geographical divides. 

I don’t blame Southgate for not addressing this. He is merely a well-dressed vessel for unoriginal chatter. But when the high-sounding do-gooders cast their net of empathy too wide, they fail to address any problems at all. And often they make them worse — not least because of the opportunity cost of dissipating public attention, and even policy suggestions, so broadly. This is the problem of being vague.

Next is the problem of being therapeutic. Rather than addressing the cultural and economic malaise felt hardest by working classes, Southgate not only mischaracterises the problem but suggests ineffective, and likely dangerous, courses of action. Southgate — who as England manager encouraged his players to express their emotions — is again in unison with public conversation here. He lines up toxic influencers, and emotional repression, as the usual suspects in the crisis of masculinity; he talks repeatedly of the need for men to open up about how they feel.

Yet it is not obvious that this is what men should be doing: our culture is uniquely open about mental health already. Never have we spoken so much about mental health (let alone diagnosed mental health disorders, and prescribed anti-psychotic drugs), yet this has had absolutely no effect on male suicides — the primary targets of campaigns to open up. Even with the profusion of such initiatives, men continue to account for three-quarters of suicide deaths: a trend that has remained consistent since the 1990s.

It is, of course, a lot easier for a failed football manager to preach vulnerability and warn about Andrew Tate than for him to rebuild an economy with enough meaningful jobs for people without degrees, thereby restoring a sense of purpose and dignity to communities decimated by globalisation. Nevertheless, Southgate — and others like him — remains so fixated on emotional repression, toxic influencers, and the need to talk as the male panacea, that he contributes towards a broader culture where the material conditions which drive despondency are seldom sat down on the leather couch and interrogated themselves.

For too long we’ve mistaken symptoms for causes — we’ve looked at toxic masculinity instead of broken communities. Southgate gestures at real problems but offers vague diagnoses and empty solutions. In so doing, he perpetuates a disconnect between drivers of male despondency and our public conversations about it. For anybody stopping to think for more than a second, however, the crisis of masculinity is a crisis with class contours. If we keep misdiagnosing the problem, we will continue to fail those who are most in need.