Why you should envy your grandfather
Words: Oliver Jarvis
Finally an article where we can play the blame game and point our finger at other people for the state of our own masculinity crisis. It’s no backstreet rumour that the idea of the man in recent decades has been largely questioned… people just don’t think we’ve got our mojo anymore. This concept we firmly disagree with, and instead we take a look at the issue that every gentleman has; becoming the man that his Grandfather was.
It’s true, we all have an affable love for the man who falls asleep during Christmas dinners, who often mistakenly calls you by the wrong name and who possesses slightly old-fashioned views on foreign politics. We’re not taking a dig behind the back of your Grandfather, that’s just not our style, but in a way he really does have it easy nowadays, and we’re not talking about his pension fund or his weekend retreats to Dorset, we’re talking about society’s romantic perception of him.
Rightly, your Grandfather is deemed a hero for all he endured; a man who has experienced and survived a World War, near poverty and The Village People, deserves some recognition. It’s just how we, gentlemen, are painted in a negative light compared to him. In the eyes of society, we do not exert the same masculine presence as he does.
But surely masculinity hasn’t changed that much… just the world around it has. Now we’re faced with billboard images depicting the idea of the perfect man and Hollywood films starring air brushed celebrities. As a man compared to these images, we just can’t become what they present as masculinity; the Brad Pitt’s Fight Club physique, the Ryan Gosling hairline. We don’t like it. There is so much pressure and expectation of what a man should be nowadays that it is hard to actually ever live up to it. Arguably, your Grandfather did not have the same amount of expectation pushed onto him; you can’t imagine him working tirelessly in the gym just so he could fashion a chest like Marlon Brando, or keeping up with the latest style trends to exert an air of Elvis-esque panache.
We’re constantly compared to the war torn stories of our Grandfather’s childhood, and how we could never survive in those conditions. Society sees us today as having all the luxuries in the world gifted to us on a plate decorated with a Zucchini Flower. To ever complain about the state of things would level us to the social equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum in the middle of M&S, people simply don’t want to hear it. Our childhood cannot compare to all the war torn stories, we just seem as if we’ve been wrapped in bubble wrap and rolled through life on a red carpet. Like we’ve had it easy. However we know that if we were put in the same circumstances as our forefathers, then we would adapt. What’s stopping us from being viewed as wholly masculine is our lack of involvement in a World War, we need it to romanticize us and be viewed as heroic. Slaving at an office job, or working a machine at a factory does not make us a man anymore – so we seek extra tasks to try and fulfill that void.
Through the idea of trying to be seen as masculine, we guess that our Grandfather didn’t have the same confusion. It’s a different world to what it was before. Yet people still insist on looking at the modern times with an obsolete set of 20th century beliefs. Beliefs that place your Grandfather as the archetypal male, and places us as submissive to that fact.
In the words of Frank Sinatra ‘What is a man?’, well… it’s hard to define, and this is where masculinity gets more complicated for us gentlemen. We don’t know whether we should aim to be the valiant, virtuous man presented in the past, or the narcissistic, well-groomed man featured in television adverts and throw away magazines. Grandpa just didn’t have to worry about this choice. What it all boils down to is the way we are perceived in today’s society. Where your Grandfather is treated with full respect for the past that he came from, and we rather unfairly are judged for the present that we live in. That is why gentlemen, you should envy him.
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