This week I shall see the adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, ‘A Little Life’ at the theatre, under the direction of Ivo van Hove. FT critic, Sarah Hemmings, wrote an excellent review last week. She also reviewed ‘For Black Boys who have considered suicide when the hue gets heavy’, after its West End transfer. I was lucky enough to see it at the Royal Court, and I think it is one of the finest things I have seen in forty years of theatre-going. What both plays have in common is a perspective on, and often, an analysis of masculinity. This is a subject appearing more frequently in the print media currently.

I confess to nowadays expecting the word masculinity to always be immediately preceded by the word toxic, and I wondered why I was thinking like that and why the idea of discussing masculinity made me wince inwardly. To someone who is a father of a son and hopes to be a grandfather, these things are important. Why do we revere warriors, and why do we need to test masculinity with initiation ceremonies or intimidating hazings?

I think it may be that I perceive that exalting masculinity is aligned with social forces that aim to undermine gender equity. As a father of two fiercely independent women, I might be associating masculinity with a regressive approach to feminists and feminism. It certainly had me thinking.

‘For Black Boys…’ addresses a kind of toxic ‘hyper-masculinity’ for six black men who are meeting in group therapy. They act, and talk out, everything from being racially profiled by police, to absorbing the trauma of an abusive father. Sex is fundamental – a need to meet an idea of performance, to finding room for a black interpretation of masculinity in a queer man. Fashion, sex, food and father-figures get examined in relation with blackness and with masculinity.

‘A Little Life’ is a dark tour through masculinity as abusive, including against the self, but also of its positive power of collaboration, support, brotherhood (usually best represented in war movies and especially good in ‘1917’ and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’), and of the importance of the father figure. In the novel/play, the absence of a protective father as a model is critical, and the lack of it is emphasised by the appearance of the lead figure, played in the play by James Norton, being adopted by a man who represents all that is best about being masculine.

Unfortunately, his love is too unfamiliar to the abused adopted son, and of course, gets rejected, repeatedly. The rejection might also be a rejection of gentleness and love as concepts, because masculinity is often associated with aggression. Mance quotes feminist writer, bell hooks, who claimed that, “Patriarchy demands (that) they kill off the emotional parts of themselves”. Even Freud thought of masculine in terms of being active and feminine in terms of being passive.

Examining masculinity feels a bit zeitgeist at the moment, something emphasised for me by a long, and good, essay in the Weekend FT, from journalist Henry Mance, which appeared a few weeks after a piece by Susie Orbach in the Guardian; albeit it is now over ten years since writer Hanna Rosin published “The End of Men”. In his essay, Mance is focused on the difficulties for young males negotiating the online world. Both Orbach and Mance namecheck Andrew Tate in their opening paragraphs. Does Tate represent masculinity? He celebrates war, aggression (especially against women) and competition. If he does not represent me, am I somehow sub-masculine? He maintains that wives are the ‘property’ of husbands and that mental weakness, specifically depression, isn’t ‘real’.

Mance compares what boys of today, in the online world, absorb when thinking about the sort of men they want to become, with his own youth. He is younger than me so his reference points on ‘lad mags’ such as ‘Loaded’ and ‘FHM’ were not influencers to me. Sexism and homophobia were still rife, in print and especially in what passed for humour. Mance cites Frank Skinner’s routines – routines Skinner now says he regrets. For my generation, whatever was felt about skin colours, there was a general acceptance of a certain manliness about the black man. A rather unpleasant ‘slavery chic’, that paid a kind of tribute to the mute pride and insolence of a figure like Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte.

That was interrupted by the homophobic slur cast upon one of the greatest athletes of all time, Carl Lewis. Athleticism, alongside pugilism, was manly and masculine, but Daley Thomson, possibly this country’s greatest ever all-round athlete, and a man of mixed race heritage, unveiled a T-shirt at the LA Olympics, which said “Is the world’s second greatest athlete gay?” Thompson claimed the ‘second greatest’ could be several candidates, but the media and the public assumed he meant Lewis. It was a confusing time. How would I respond today?

Mance asserts that young males and youths today claim that they trust ‘influencers’ such as figures like Tate, more than newspapers or other social media. I cannot help but feel that the Gove-ish demeaning of ‘experts’ is echoed here. It begs the question of whether an intellectual, or a poet, can be perceived as masculine. Our poet laureate, in his brilliant podcast broadcast from his shed, strikes me as profoundly masculine, with his reverence for the wildness of nature, but I doubt that is a view widely shared. Would a modern-day intellectual, and a pacifist to boot, like Bertrand Russell, be revered today, or widely mocked?

Orbach wrote that “a return to a “boys will be boys” ethos hasn’t offered masculinity the pleasures of knowing oneself more fully or expanding what masculinities can be. The “crisis” of masculinity was reformulated into a new machismo”. She thought about how machismo is often aligned with putting “us women in our place”, but made it clear that “that ship has sailed”. Her wish is to promote more conversation, more thinking, something that “opens the door to speaking of vulnerability and nurture”.

I welcome that, but I want to get back to understanding why I felt uncomfortable thinking about masculinity. In short, do I want to be thought of as exhibiting a strong sense of masculinity? I know I did as a teenager, the sort of impressionable minds that Mance was considering. My worlds of television, cinema and sports exalted the masculine. Sometimes subtly, (the hero gets the girl) sometimes less so; sporting contests were about contrasts between two sportsmen, one of whom was portrayed as more masculine.

I think of Coe and Ovett, of the treatment of the Australian cricket captain, Kim Hughes, of Borg and Connors and also, the difficulty the British media seemed to have in treating outstanding sportsmen like John Curry, Robin Cousins and Christopher Dean as on a par with footballers, rugby stars and cricketers. Football-mad boys, like me, were encouraged to admire men like George Best, Stan Bowles, Frank Worthington, notwithstanding the difficulties these men often had off the pitch.

And now? I wondered if exuding masculinity was attractive, or is it now something associated with boorishness, thugishness, with an imbalance of brawn over brain? One of my daughters thought that when she thought of masculinity, she thought of physique, of a man who had a muscular body. Perhaps it is more aesthetic, than simply an aggressive psyche.

What masculinity means is not a new subject. I was fascinated to learn that my future son-in-law had written a dissertation about masculinity, a few years ago, specifically the representation of it by each different actor playing James Bond. The same character and yet different perceptions of being masculine. There may be something in this. My sense of the masculine was partly formed by two actors in old films, because of the way they represented their characters. They are Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men” and Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. I thought that being able to swim against the tide of opinion, to stand up for right over wrong, to accept the contempt of people around you, was truly manly.

My interest in psychoanalytic theory is usually concentrated in Freud, and his “Three Essays on Sexuality’ offer plenty on the subject of masculinity, but it is his some-time collaborator and then rival, Jung, who is especially astute about gendering, I think:-

“No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him. The fact is, rather, that very masculine men have – carefully guarded and hidden – a very soft emotional life, often incorrectly described as ‘feminine’. A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman, at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be ‘mannish’. The repression of feminine traits and inclinations clearly causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious.”

What is interesting is how aggression, perceived as masculine, is often a projection against the part of the other that we do not like about ourselves. This is the root of homophobia and also of an idealisation (Mr Tate) of the masculine attitude. The more I have considered the concept of masculinity, the more confused I am about how I would define it, and how masculine I would want to be seen to be. I would reject an Andrew Tate masculine view, but I hope he is extremist and inconsequential, but I note what Henry Mance reports about the reach of online influencers. Perhaps it needs more debate. Fortunately some excellent playwrights are on the case and I look forward to seeing what gets represented this week.