A charming man?

It surprises some people to find out just how interested I am in masculinity. After all, don’t feminists like me just care about ‘women’s stuff’ (which, I’m assuming, means debating whether strappy sandals are oppressive and talking about how to ‘empower’ myself by reading Cosmo)? And while I’m not one to shy away from the political importance of the personal aesthetics or the potential for political work in pop culture publications*, those things really aren’t as important as feminism’s potential to help us understand the very nature of gender.

Anyway. What does this have to do with new wave? Well, like I said, I find masculinity very interesting. How are ideas of masculinity shaped by current events? By the market? By popular culture? By long tradition/the longue duree narrative? Science? Art? The list goes on. The 1980s were a particularly volatile time on a lot of those fronts, particularly in terms of politics, economics and popular culture. It was the convergence of all of these which led to two related but distinct forms of ‘new’ masculinity. The first was the eponymous ‘New Man’ who arose not long after the ‘New Woman’ of the 1970s took the weight of the corporate world on her heavily-padded shoulders. He was a creature of mainstream marketing, a so-called ‘feminine’ man who would do housework, who was in touch with his feelings, and who, more importantly, cared about his appearance in a way that only women had been encouraged to do before. In other words: Cha-ching! What could be better in the midst of a bear market than discovering, like vast reserves of North Sea oil, a whole huge, untapped consumer base? Masculinity and male sexuality were commodified , placed for mainstream public consumption for the sake of commerce (which, interestingly enough, women’s sexuality has always been used for). Men were encouraged to embrace their true natures and buy, buy buy! You could say the metrosexual male is just the ‘New Man’ with a new wardrobe and some designer stubble and you wouldn’t be far from the truth.

Fluid masculinity, on the other hand, is more slippery, no pun intended. It’s a concept of masculinity that refuses to be defined clearly. It’s masculinity which won’t adhere to the strict old rules of what makes someone a man, but won’t be cast out as feminine other, either. I know I go on and on about Morrissey, but he’s really the best avatar I can think of. Is he gay? Is he straight? Is he just aesexual? In a society in which, as he so rightly says, ‘most people keep their brains between their legs’, his desire to conceal what he’s thinking, so to speak, leaves us in a lurch. A celibate is, in some ways, as worrying to traditional views of heteronormative society as a homosexual; after all they both actively shun the basic unit of society: the traditional nuclear family. However, someone who refuses to be defined by this (or any other) form of normative masculinity without allowing himself to be fully marked out as ‘wrong’ or ‘other’, creates far more potential for a destablizing force. This, of course, is just the example of Morrissey, but what he represents, that fluidity of definition that won’t adhere to any sort of rigid binary, is an idea that came to the fore in the 1980s (though, of course, pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality is by no means unique to that decade—it’s a part of rock n roll’s longue duree narrative, after all). And you can’t market to someone you can’t define.

Really, I would call both the ‘New Man’ and the ‘fluidly’ masculine man two sides of the same coin, products of the inherent instability of the gender binary. The former, of course, had more to do with revenue than revolution, but the motion and momentum was there and is there still. And hey, they both had great hair, and that’s got to count for something right?

*Except Cosmo. I really don’t like Cosmo.