Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny Page A

reality and every small service that made life bearable – the education support, the youth centres and the jobseekers’ allowance – is being cut in an austerity drive that has left the salaries of the super-rich untouched. But we are assured that there is nothing political about these riots. The problem is young men, particularly young black boys, and their lack of discipline. It’s not poverty and it’s not the police. It must be masculinity gone mad.
     Already on the radio, politicians and talking heads are speaking of a ‘crisis of masculinity’. Fear of testosterone poisoning is the final posture of a kind of class hatred that can’t face itself in the mirror, since managing and directing the energy of young men has always been about maintaining social order. It’s obvious to anyone desperate to ignore political reality that the young men tearing up the tarmac in Ealing and Tottenham and throwing makeshift Molotovs at police in Brixton and Hackney didn’t have strong male role models, weren’t beaten enough as children, weren’t real men, calm, orderly men, like the skinny-jean-wearing, Kasabian-listening sons of every political commentator freaking out on the news. Every time night falls and the inner-city kids come out to smash up another high street, the panicked media narrative disintegrates again, social media flashes and judders like the inside of an acid trip and nobody knows what’s going on.
    I am a journalist. I need to cover this story, find out what’s happening to the city that I love. But I’m trapped in the living room because my boyfriend won’t let me leave the house.
    I’m a journalist and I’m prepared to take silly risks to do my job, and right now he isn’t letting me. He says he has to keep me safe, even against my will.
    Violence happens when people are frightened that somebody’s about to take away their power. I have understood something new about men tonight, but it’s not what they’re saying on the news.
    In most search engines, ‘masculinity in’ autocompletes to ‘crisis’. The terms are so often connected that one can rarely talk about modern masculinity without acknowledging the sorry state it’s in, the once-powerful beast languishing on the slab waiting to be put out of its misery. We discuss the sorry state of men, real men, men’s men, dominant, powerful men, in lowered voices, lest we incite the vicious bitchwrath of the straw feminists.
    In the year 2000, as Susan Faludi reported in Stiffed , ‘As the nation wobbled toward the millennium, its pulse takers seemed to agree that a domestic apocalypse was underway: American manhood was under siege. Men on trial, the headlines cried, the trouble with boys, are men necessary? Maybe manhood can recover.’ 2 More than a decade later, the same headlines still circulate: boys in crisis, testosterone on the wane, girls overtaking boys, how will men cope?
    Masculinity, of course, is not in crisis – to a large degree, masculinity is crisis. Whether or not an oppressive system of social control is malfunctioning depends entirely on whether you expect it to be concerned with making a large number of people happy and fulfilled, which the postures of masculinity have never been designed to do. If modern masculinity is keeping men, particularly young men, in a state of anxious desperation, lonely and isolated, unable to express their true feelings or live the lives they really want, taking out their social and sexual frustration on women rather than understanding it as a systemic effect of elitism inequality, then masculinity is functioning perfectly well. It is, in fact, in tip-top shape. 
    Women, it seems, are allowed to talk only about their gender. Men are allowed to talk about absolutely anything except their gender. Discussing what it means to be a man is tacitly forbidden in most social circles. Masculinity functions rather like the film Fight Club , in that the first rule of Man Club is you do not talk about