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

Man Club.
    Barbara Ehrenreich, in her excellent cultural study The Hearts of Men , dates the loss of this pact of the patriarchal family deal back to the Beat generation of writers and radicals, ‘the short-lived apotheosis of the male rebellion’ 3 in which ‘two strands of male protest – one directed against the white-collar work world and the other against the suburbanised family life that work was supposed to support – come together in the first all-out critique of American consumer culture.’ 4 The Beats, in common with Hugh Hefner and the burgeoning cultural ideal of the Playboy bachelor that would eventually lead to such cult creations as James Bond, relied on ‘rejection of the pact that the family wage system rested on’, 5 whereby men were obliged to seek paid employment to support women’s unpaid work, and the labour of both would be sealed in a system of sexual bargaining. If you’re thinking that this sounds like a shit gig, you’re not alone – and when many modern commentators speak of the loss of the ‘traditional male breadwinner’ role, they are speaking of a social arrangement that came to horrify both men and women in the mid-century when they realised there might be other options. Men’s flight from traditional commitment, however, was never met by a concomitant idea of liberating women from domesticity. The notion that women, too, might be ambivalent about homemaking never came up. Suddenly, tying men down to the traditional home became women’s full-time job.
    ‘Traditional masculinity’, like ‘traditional femininity’, is about control. It is a way of managing behaviour. There are two big secrets about ‘traditional masculine power’ that mainstream culture does not want us to discuss, and it is imperative that we discuss them honestly – men and women, boys and girls and everyone else pinned in painfully by the social straitjacket of ‘traditional masculinity’. The first big secret is this: most men have never really been powerful. Throughout human history, the vast majority of men have had almost no structural power, except over women and children. In fact, power over women and children – technical and physical dominance within the sphere of one’s own home – has been the sop offered to men who had almost no power outside of it. 
    One of the saddest things about modern society is that it has made us understand masculinity as something toxic and violent, associated with domination, control and savagery, being hungry for power and money and acquisitive, abusive sex. Part of the project of feminism is to free men as well as women from repressive stereotypes. Only some young men, of course. Few tears are being shed or water cannons mustered for the crises in masculinity that may or may not be occurring on private yachts and in the dormitories of elite boarding schools.
    The second big secret about the Golden Age of Masculinity, of course, is that it never really existed. There have always been men who were too poor, too queer, too sensitive, too disabled, too compassionate or simply too clever to fit in with whatever flavour of violent heterosexuality their society relied upon to keep its wars fought, its factories staffed and its women in check. Something does seem to be changing now, however: the myth just doesn’t work for enough people any more.
    The truth is that one of the main reasons young women are doing a little better in this recession than young men is that they are more exploitable, and more willing to let employers take advantage, because that’s what good girls do. Men are burdened with too much ego for the kind of jobs that are going. ‘One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most humble among them is made to feel superior.’ 6 Thus, a poor man working a job he hated could once expect to feel, at the very least, superior to his wife and children, to be master of his home even if he was treated like a slave outside