When you say the word masculinity, what do you actually mean?
–That's kind of the question.
–When you say masculinity I think testicles.
–I love being a man, I love other men.
Being a man's good. I don't know any different so ...
–This is the third episode in our series on modern masculinity.
If you haven't watched the first two episodes there are links
on the screen now so that you can do so.
This episode is a little bit different but the idea is still the same.
It's about getting different voices contributing to the conversation
about modern masculinity.
So I emailed a bunch of different men,
relatively well-known guys and I asked them if they would
come and talk to me and these were the guys who responded.
It's quite a broad mix.
They're all different ages and from different backgrounds
and I asked them the same questions
from whether aggression in men is natural or taught by society
to what their relationships with their dads are like.
So I hope you enjoy the episode.
–Woi ...
–Err ... I don't know. Sorry let me think about it a second.
–That's OK.
–My dad used to growl at me man, I remember, as a kid.
I'd be like this tall, yeah, and he'd come down to my level
and go "grrrr". I'd shit myself.
I would shit myself and run upstairs.
–Hmmm.
You know what they say:
'When you get older you start to look more like your dad'?
So every day I look in the mirror, even with all this make-up
and all these dreads, I still see my dad.
[laughs] Like I see my dad.
–Even if I never met my dad in my life and you met both of us
you'd be like, 'Rah this is mad.
He's just like him. He's just like him.'
He was famous in the ends, had the deepest swagger,
the ring from there to there the Kangol hat with the fur.
The Kangol hat, that's what I used to wear.
–My dad was an ice-cream salesman. We grew up with Italians
and he didn't drink and was a very jolly little man.
[sings] Che bella cosa.
All the time that sort of stuff. That's my dad.
And that sometimes brings tears if I hear Italian opera because
I remember my dad and happy times like that.
He really loved music.
–I grew up in a very, very male set-up.
My father was the headmaster of a boys' public school.
The ethos around him was all about men and boys.
–So my mother died when I was quite young. I was two
and my sister was four, I think.
He had lost the love of his life and he had two kids
and so I looked at him growing up and I guess I saw this man
who was struggling, I think.
Seeing the weaknesses in my father
help me look at when I have similar weaknesses
in myself and ask myself:
'How do I approach those struggles in a different way'?
Not that I don't think he tried to in a way that was good
or valid for him, but my relationship with my dad
is founded primarily on the idea that he tried to create a good life
for us in very difficult circumstances for himself
and so my relationship with my dad provides me
with so many questions that I don't have the answer to
but I will spend my whole life thinking about.
–My mum and dad separated when I was three
but they were always there for me and my brother.
My dad lives round the corner from me so I never felt as if
I was abandoned or I didn't have a dad. He was always there.
My mum, when she was younger, never went down that
bad boy route, she was very straightforward.
Whereas my dad was a little bit like this
so I got both worlds.
I think he was just mixing with the wrong crowd growing up
so then when he saw me doing that he pulled me up on it
because he knew what that could entail.
–My dad used to go, 'arseholes' a lot.
'You silly arse' could be very very affectionate
or it could be literally, 'silly arse'. Wrong.
I don't know how much he's affected me.
Were you close with him growing up? –Ish.
My family, we were all close but not too touchy-feely, I suppose.
Some people find that funny, there's something wrong with us.
–I guess I probably grew up, you know,
resenting a few things about my dad
and hiding a few things from my dad.
And so now that I can be open about those things
– it's still a work in progress, it's definitely not all the way there –
but you know, things like him knowing I'm a gay man.
And it's interesting what that does for you.
At least getting over the line with your parents
or getting past a certain bit of secrecy because
having secrets from your parents can be such a juvenile thing,
especially when you grow up and you want to just move on
with your life and live your truth
so when you let go of that, it's actually quite freeing.
–I didn't have a close relationship with him.
He was, you know, a very ... he was an authority
and I think he developed in me a bit of an anti-establishment
view of life.
I don't think I wanted to identify myself as different to him,
I just didn't think he had anything to tell me
about who I wanted to be.
–So I think that it's obvious that for many of us
our first idea about what masculinity is all about comes from our
relationship to our dad, but we did a call-out
and we got all of these responses and many of them asked us
to address the question of role models, especially for men.
So I asked all of our contributors who their role models were growing up.
–Yeah I have role models, but you know what it is, yeah?
I've never ever looked at a role model
and said that's the life I want to live.
–I've always wanted to be be Beckham, just from a kid.
He's like a baller, good-looking fella, he's got his mrs who's a 10/10,
he's got a family, he's got a nice house
he's got cars, whatever.
So from the outside looking in, he looks like the guy, you know what I mean?
–I remember one teacher in in the choir school.
I think he offered me a softer view of what we could all be.
A more sensitive view.
There was still a lot of sexual abuse in male boarding schools,
and you were always wary.
With this particular guy, you never felt any threat of that.
–The strong male role models in my life were my grandfathers.
They both expressed a different idea of what it meant to be a man
and neither of those things were formed on the idea of aggression.
They both emigrated to this country in quite a tumultuous time,
but they found spaces for themselves.
Yeah they felt like good men to me and I just always try to hold them in my head.
–I think possibly my first manager, somewhat.
His cousin who was called Johnny Walker, he was so
mouthy-south-London-fucking-hell and he made me laugh a lot.
And my manager Colin Johnson had this Cockney bravado thing.
And a guy called Jack Linton was very, very funny.
Probably stuff like that, which again, isn't particularly good
but it served me well, rather than people realising
there's a wimp hiding in here somewhat,
or a coward a lot of people would say.
You aren't encouraged to be forgiving or any of that stuff.
You're just, 'What kind of a fucking man are you?
Get in there with rugby, hack him down boy.'
So when we're talking about role models for kids
we have to be careful that in 40 years' time
you're not telling them, 'No that's wrong now,
we don't believe that anymore, we don't do that'.
–The only real representation of being a man in south London,
as a black man, is extremely hypermasculine.
There's no room for vulnerability.
You have to be strong, you have to be hard.
There was no one to show me it was OK if I didn't want to fight,
if I didn't want to be angry.
–Throughout my career, I've covered loads of different stories
but I find myself repeatedly drawn back to try and understand
the big questions around terrorism or knife crime for example.
I always ask myself why it is that in these extreme cases of violence
that it's very often men involved.
I asked our contributors if they think that aggression in men
is something that is natural or if they think it's something that is taught by society.
–I don't think it's natural. It's not natural.
–But we are pushed to do something.
Ever since I was in primary school, it was something about
not being manly enough, not being tough enough,
not being all that macho stuff.
–If someone hurts you and then everything was fine,
they could hurt you again.
So when they hurt you, you approach the situation,
you show them I'm not someone that you can hurt.
It's to do with this thing about holding it up, you know what I mean?
Someone could have dissed you, someone could have nicked something
from your house and then you found out who it was
and now it's up to you to put it on them.
It's a way of protecting.
When I was really young, I walked to school
and I'd seen this kid and I must have smiled like that.
A day or so later, it seemed like, I saw him again. I smiled again and
he came and hit me round the head so hard with his plimsole.
He must have gone to his dad and said something on the lines of
that somebody had smiled and laughed at him.
So his dad, which a lot of guys tend to do with their kids,
says: 'Go up and hit him as hard as you can.'
It was two kids both shitting themselves
being in that position but his dad had made him
get me the following day.
They come at you with such a fucking aggressive angle,
I found that so intimidating, that I learnt to try and be that
and it wasn't until I was about 30 that people used to say
they were frightened of me.
You tit, how could you be frightened of him?
But it showed that it worked.
–I do think a certain amount of aggression is inherent in men.
I don't think that's something that is necessarily an excuse or can't be pushed against
but we also live in a society that validates that aggression.
You see that slightly heart-breaking thing of people's personalities shifting
more towards 'this is what I think the world wants of me'.
That capacity for compassion, for empathy,
that sort of gets knocked out of them a little bit.
–Men experience something in life, which moves them that way.
Now what that something is can be anything
from neglect, to abuse, to bullying, to inducing some sense of
inferiority, which they feel they need to get back at.
–There's boys in my year who are dead,
there's boys in my year who are married,
there's boys in my year who are in prison.
So I could have done any of them.
I could have done any of them.
I just luckily went down a route that I never even knew was possible.
I was in the right place, right time.
–I'd just like to say a really big thank you to all of these guys
for coming and speaking to me about their personal experiences.
We will be returning to their stories later on in the series.
In the next episode, I'm going to go to south London
to speak to some of the men there
about being a young man in 2019.
I feel like it's really, really important because very often
we speak on behalf of 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds.
We’ve got all these concerns around them
but they’re very often not given the platform
to speak for themselves.
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