Steve Biddulph on the mask of manhood

By Jackie Randles

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 82 summer 2010

According to Steve Biddulph, most men don’t have a life. What men call their life is mostly just a big act, a mask that they clamp to their faces each morning and don’t take off until they fall asleep at night.

Many in the audience agreed with this provocative statement, men and boys among them. Biddulph went on to talk about a better time for men. He took us back to the traditional hunter gatherer societies of not so long ago on an evolutionary scale, where men were nurtured by groups of other men and at a very young age, taken in hand to be taught how to assume their responsibilities in a tribe.

Now that most men are no longer exposed to this experience of group mentoring, Biddulph thinks that men simply don’t know how to be men. While women, who have the advantage of being raised by many female role models, generally know who they are and what they want, men, starting at boyhood, gradually shut themselves away behind traditional roles and the effect is a desperate loneliness.

By the time he is a grown man, he is like a tiger raised in a zoo - prowling about, confused and numb, with huge energies untapped. He feels that there must be more, but he does not know what that ‘more’ is. So he spends his life pretending - to his friends, his family, and himself - that everything is fine.

Biddulph’s masks include: tough guy, mad piss head, conscientious worker, tatts and goatee guy, wan poet lad. He argued that whatever mask a man assumes, his aim is to “prevent vulnerability and exposure”, which “is important if you are not sure who you are or what you are allowed to feel”.

A lot of men ‘act tough’ and have forgotten how to drop this mask, so that it now “stays put, and behind it is often a confused, scared figure.

Most men spend their whole lives pretending that they’re fine when they’re not. Pretending, and having a life, are very different things.