We need men talking to men.
But there are no male figures talking to 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds saying:
'Look, life is going to be brutal, malevolence is waiting for you,
evil is waiting for you, hard times are waiting for you.'
And prepare them then, and tell them the antidote to that is to find meaning now
so when those times come, you have an iron rod to hold on to.
That will get you through that storm.
I'm Iman Amrani, and I'm a journalist at the Guardian
and this is the second episode in our series on modern masculinity.
In the first episode, I went to a Jordan Peterson event
in Birmingham to ask people
why was it that they were coming to see him speak.
When I was there, I met this really interesting guy called Neil
who owns a bunch of barber shops in the north of England.
I went to Leeds to continue my conversation with him
and we have listened to what you said about the last video:
the music is going to be a lot less intrusive.
Neil, Neil?
Hey there, are you alright?
Yeah, you're good?
I am good. How are you?
Yeah. good, thank you.
I've got a team of two.
Hi man, how are you doing?
Neil's barber shop is called King Koby, named after his son.
All the staff that worked there are super interesting, very friendly
and I wanted to get their perspectives on modern masculinity.
The size of your arse?
It's big, isn't it?
I swear I haven't got arse that big.
I don't even squat.
I am not going to be able to stop looking at it now.
I have chats with people whose hair I've cut that I wouldn't have with my mates.
I can open up a lot more to people who I don't know that well.
More than I can with my mates that's the beauty of a barber shop.
Why do you thing that is?
The person whose hair you cut, you don't know as well as your mates
and you don't really feel that judged
whereas your mates, they know a little bit more about you,
and know who you are.
One of the recurring themes in our call-out to readers,
was men telling us that often they find it difficult
to find spaces where they can communicate and express themselves openly and honestly.
Seems like barber shops might be one of those spaces.
The most rewarding part of my job is when you find that you can tap into something
that someone has never spoken about before.
Like guys who are going through breakups or they're abusing drugs or something like that
and they know they're doing something wrong, but they don't know how to fix it.
Loads of guys who come in don't know how to deal
with heartbreak or even how to sort of level up
and be a better partner for their misses or fellas.
You were going to say, be a better man, weren't you?
Stop yourself.
It's meaning that sustains people, it's meaning and responsibility.
That means when you do lose your job, don't get me wrong, it's catastrophic, it's awful
but it's meaning and purpose that gets you through that and keeps pushing you in it.
The less you attach your life to external things,
the more you've got to go internal
and the internal things are what give you meaning, definitely.
The connection to your children, to your partner, to the greater good is what gives you meaning.
What do you feel like your meaning is? Do you know what you think your meaning is?
I think … I am definitely on a learning curve,
had a sort of bad relationships with women
because of the way I thought I should act in a relationship.
And how was that?
Being disloyal was a big one,
You felt like you should be disloyal?
No … I feel like, no one would ever call me out for being disloyal.
I feel like if you could go out with a group of friends
that were all pulling a fast one on their birds
they'd be like, 'I managed to do this last week'
and no one was going, 'oh, you're really wrong.'
Wanting to brag about it because it feeds the ego,
and that's what we are all doing as young men,
we're just feeding the ego.
And so, I actually stopped and cut away all the bullshit,
like trying to pull girls and spending money on clothes and whatnot
and just came in and found like a good group of people
that really genuinely cared about me
that would be honest with you and say, 'what you're doing is wrong'
like, 'this is the path you should be walking.'
It wasn't in a religious aspect, it was, let's treat everyone how you want to be treated.
And I don't think that behaviour is encouraged enough, really.
When was the last time, genuinely you met someone that you impressed by, went
that's someone who knows who they are, that's someone who got their shit together.
That's someone who's the same person whether they're in front of their parents,
or their friends
and they know how to say no to certain things.
You don't meet those guys because individualism isn't encouraged, supported or taught,
and what we really, really need, is we need to teach men to take responsibility
for themselves first
and then they can play an active and important role in the collective.
So this idea of identity and individualism for men is really interesting
especially when you think about the economics of growing up.
It's harder than ever to fit in that traditional mould
of leaving home at 18,
getting a mortgage, getting married and starting a family.
And lots of people aren't even sure if that's what they want anymore.
I have people in my chair who would probably associate,
probably be defined as lads.
I am talking to them for half an hour in the chair
and they're not lads,
they're just a little bit lost, they don't really know themselves,
they want to fit in, they want to be normal.
What would you describe as being a lad?
A lad is overcompensating, that's all a lad is.
So, bravado …
Yeah.
Overcompensating.
And the moment I hear that or see that from some point,
it's just like … it's just seeing past that.
Now I know that equals that. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
I meet a lot of men who as soon as they are around any other men,
they start speaking completely differently and like, watching you today,
you've just being the same person, in the barber shop,
you've exactly been the same, no matter who's been on your seat, and everything.
And it kind of gives the impression of a sense of like, I guess, peace with yourself.
Yeah, 100%, and I think the exact opposite would be,
be like this with this group, and this with this group,
and see, lost sense of self.
While not everyone in the barber shop was as much of a fan of Peterson as Neil was,
there were recurring themes that kept making me think about Peterson's book.
It feels like Petterson has claimed ownership of this idea of responsibility
which seems like an universal one but he packages it in a way
that makes it very accessible for men who are looking for solutions.
Men need men to teach them how to be men.
So the crisis of masculinity, if we are accepting that there is one,
and that's debatable but I believe there is one,
regardless of whether you link that back to the rise of feminism,
or to the lack of competition in schools, whatever you want to link that back to,
it's not deep enough.
We don't teach our young children, our young people rather, at all
to look for meaning in their life or even what meaning is,
that is a conversation to being had and to adopt responsibility.
I think that are somethings that are just uniquely masculine.
Women, generally speaking, want a man who's got his shit together,
they want a man who takes responsibility for himself,
they want a man who can say no when it's appropriate to say no.
They want a man that can be gentle, when it's appropriate to be gentle.
They want a man that can be strong and aggressive even, when it's appropriate
to strong and aggressive.
And there are so many traits that are uniquely, not uniquely, women have these traits too,
but men need that we just not teaching, our young men at all, in any way.
What I find really interesting is that all these things that you've listed,
I feel like women have been saying that for a while,
and Peterson came along and said,
'Make your bed in the morning.'
And I've had so many guys, they see me reading the book on the tube or whatever,
they come over and they said, Jordan Peterson, make your bed in the morning,
it really changed my life,
and I'm like, didn't your mum tell you to do that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I am like, what is it about Jordan Peterson saying that,
that is so different and actually gets more of an effect
than that being said for time by teachers, your mum …
Your mum telling you to tidy your room is in case the neighbours come up for tea
and she wants to show the house off,
Jordan Peterson telling you to tidy your room,
he goes and adds context to that.
If you can't govern your immediate surroundings,
don't expect to be able to govern anything else in your life.
It's naivety.
We have so many men that do not have the most basic elements of their life in order,
including me for a long time.
And now we live in a culture, that we want to go from step one to step six
and miss out steps one to five.
You know?
So, your mum telling you to tidy your room or teaching doing it,
doesn't have the same emphasis as a man saying,
no, you do this, because it leads to everything else you're looking for in your life.
What kind of decisions have you made differently in the past 10 years?
Which you think have helped you to have this sense of security that you seem you have.
Yeah.
I don't know if it's any like, specific decisions
that made my life at a crossroads go in one direction or the other,
but it was just a decision that never, ever, ever, ever, ever again,
will I use any part of my past or any part of anything that's occurred to me,
as an excuse for not being the man that I know full well I should be.
And I think having a commitment to the truth as well is one of the biggest things
that's changed in my life since then.
You have mentioned the truth a lot, I can even see the tattoo over your eyebrow.
When I am talking about the truth, and I don't mean, don't tell lies,
that's a level one basic thing that you teach your children.
When I am talking about truth, I'm talking about really getting to the bottom
of who you are as a person and who we are.
Find what's true about you.
And often times you'll find, as I found,
the more that I look into myself, what was true about me was overwhelmingly hideous.
I met a girl, called Helen, who ended up being a real catalyst in my life.
We were together for two years, and then that ended.
How was she a catalyst in your life?
She was the first person that told me I was full of shit,
which I needed.
I had this belief system here that I genuinely believed in,
the way which you should live and integrity, and courage and all of those things,
and then on the other side of that, I had the way that I actually behaved,
which didn't represent that belief system in any way.
And I'd managed to circumvent that by being relatively popular,
having lots of friends, being articulate,
and those things hid a multitude of sins.
So I've done all these things to completely hide the fact that deep down,
I was completely lost and I had no fucking clue who I was or what I was doing,
had this belief system and this way of living that I desperately wanted to achieve,
but my own weakness wasn't allowing me to achieve it.
And at the end of my relationship with Helen, she said,
'You're not the man you think you are. You could be, but you're not.'
'You're full of shit.'
'You need to go away and change it.'
It proper, it really hurt and I was really resistant to it for like a day or two
and then I started transcending myself and went inside and said, she's right, she's absolutely right.
She's absolutely right.
She was the catalyst for me beginning this sort of
last 10-year journey that I've been on.
I've just been trying to sort myself out and get my act together and find meaning
and find responsibility, find a way to actually start living the things I claim.
Interesting though, it was a woman.
Yeah, yeah, very interesting.
Did you cheat on her?
Yeah.
Yeah, I did.
I mean, I haven't seen Helen for 15 years but even now,
I've nothing but respect for her.
Because if it wasn't for her and that conversation in her apartment in 2006, whenever it was,
I would probably be in a very different place to where I'm now.
I really appreciated the conversations I had with Neil and the other guys in the barber shop,
I felt like they were honest, candid and very respectful
and I think that's a big part of what I'm trying to get out with this series.
Dialogue is so important, be that between man in barber shops,
or between a man and a woman across the table,
it's only through speaking to each other and really listening
that we are going to come up with solutions to the big questions about things like
modern masculinity in 2019.
One of the recurring themes that you've asked us to look at,
is that of role models for men and we will be addressing that later on in the series.
But our next episode will focus on a few familiar faces.
There's always a stigma around men can't be vulnerable and men can't have emotions
or men can't cry.
When I see my friends, especially when they are approaching women
and they turn on this certain amount of bravado,
it's like, that isn't you.
When we are talking about role models with kids,
we have to be careful that in 40 years time
you are not telling them, 'nah, that's wrong now.'
Like, comment and subscribe
to stay up to date with everything we are doing in the series of modern masculinity.
When I think of masculine, I think of power
but if you mean man, because I am powerful as a man in my way …