What’s Happened to Men?

A strange thing has happened to men over the course of my lifetime.

Men used to be these forbidding patriarchs. There were all-knowing doctors and exalted high court judges and terrifying bishops and authoritarian politicians. There were fathers who represented the Rule of Law, as in “wait until your father comes home”. There were uncles who were permitted to be a little more playful, but the playful uncles had a licence to be thus when they were young, or still bachelors, or were classified as Bohemian types and thus not quite an established part of respectable society.

For the rest, men towered above us doing their manly duty. There were the guards, before whom any malefactor might tremble: even the threat that “we’ll call the guards” was enough to inhibit the worst juvenile tearaway. There were the priests who might be a bit more liberal than the Bishops (and there were always easy-going priests, certainly in Dublin, whose favoured phrase considering human frailty was “let us exercise the benefit of the doubt”), but still, they too were patriarchs in their broad and stiff Roman collars above their black clerical habits.

Out in the recreational world there were manly movie stars who always won the girl, like John Wayne with Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man (wherein the hero is actually exhorted by the village community of Cong to give the heroine a thrashing to establish his masculinity), or manly men who were prizefighters or football players or GAA enthusiasts. All around there were patriarchs and manly men whose authority held up society and whose writ was the last word in judgement and order.

Of course, as you began to understand more, you found out that not all men were the essence of masculine patriarchy. There was a much-warned-against category of male called the “ne’er do well”. Thankfully, they were rare. There was, in storybooks, a character labelled “the bounder”. The bounder would seduce the poor girl and disappear, leaving her reputation in shreds, and possibly worse.

There was also, apparently, a male called the Brute, although it was quickly added that such a blackguard never occurred in our  family. The Brute appeared in “rough” circumstances and totally lacked the refinements of respectability.  There was, as well,  the occasional appearance of a more feminine man, but that was all right because he was “artistic”, and gentle, and very fond of his mother.

Fast-forward the years and men now seem to be a completely different species. Far from being forbidding patriarchs, men today often seem nervous wrecks. They’re depressed. They’re suicidal. They’re nihilistic athiests. They’re “deadbeat dads”. They’re uncertain about their sexuality. They’re looking for their “inner feminine”. They’re in rehabilitation for their addiction problems.

They have “baggage” – that is, two ex-wives and three ex-children, not revealed until the third date. They have unusual sexual tastes, which they seek to alleviate through the internet. They like little boys. They like little girls. They’re having a nervous breakdown. They’re having a penis extension. They’re having Viagra. They’re having a sex-change operation. They’re having a mid-life crisis. They’re having therapy. John Wayne has been replaced by Woody Allen: and by the way it turns out that John Wayne’s real name was Marion and his cowboy cohort Randolph Scott was gay, just like granite-jawed Rock Hudson (whom Doris Day still says was the love of her life.)

The patriarchs turned out to have feet of clay and now bishops and priests preach that “all you need is love”, an ecclesiastical variation on a hippy mantra. Doctors are now known to make fatal mistakes and some are accused of blind incompetence:  politicians are often revealed as hollow men confected by spin-doctors; and high court judges are ridiculed for the odd pronouncements they seem to hand out from the bench.

The former “ne’er do wells” can now be said to be the “real men”: that is, the Alpha-Male criminals who are profitably successful at what they do, and are never without a harem of gangsters’ molls as wives, girlfriends and mothers to their innumerable children – for it has been shown that criminal men have higher fertility than non-criminal men, and every opportunity to prove it.

Is it me, or has the world turned upside down? Is it truth of perception? Shadow or substance? Or a little of everything all mixed up?  Be as it may, you sometimes long for the simplicity of old masculinity, when Bould Thady Quill was the male role-model and we sang ballads of glory extolling the ideal….

“At the Cork Exhibition there was a young lady
Whose fortunes exceeded a million or more:
But a bad constitution had ruined her complately
And medical traytment had failed o’er and o’er.
‘O, Mama, cried she, sure I know what can aise me
And cure this disayse that is threatenin’ to kill
Give over your doctors, your medical traytment
Sure I’d rather one squayze out of Bould Thady Quill!’”