WHAT COMES TO MIND … JOE JACKSON AND WAYS TO BE MEN, FOR REAL
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence, whose not-so-secret goal was to dig into my brain or soul or what might pass for both.
Each time, he pulls out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenges me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical, but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Joe Jackson – elegant, angular, provocative and spotted as always between two worlds – opens us up for bigger issues, higher planes and reality, if we can shape it.
_________________________
BOYS WILL BE BOYS, but will they be men? Honestly?
Recently, I was using this space to wonder about our need for ultimates: the best this, the greatest that, the most important, and how that did a disservice to those who saw value in doing something well, not in whatever might count as success for others. But this Joe Jackson photo, a reminder that his song Real Men was provocative in ways we’re still dealing with as another round of schoolboys behaving appallingly fills the news pages as the manosphere stink rises, a quote from an interview I did with him 15 or so years ago – “It’s hard to be a renaissance man when you’re living in the dark ages” – and the coincidental timing of Fathers’ Day, put me on the other side of the question. Or at least it felt like the other side of the question.
How do you measure your success as a partner or a parent as a man? Is it enough to say well it was better than what I saw growing up? To declare, as Jackson did in Don’t Wanna Be Like That, “take me away, I said take me away, I don’t wanna be like that”, and stop? That seems a pretty low bar, at least for me. But then that bar still has to be cleared, that goal still has to be set, even if you stop there at that point where you might objectively say, well I’m not that. But …
For a start, who’s measuring? If it’s you, aren’t you taking the risk you will merely be updating exactly the standard you claim to be exceeding, offering up some kind of “that’s good, that’s good enough, I can be satisfied” and moving on? You don’t belittle your kid or publicly humiliate your partner? Well surely that’s the bare minimum for any reasonable adult. You talk to your children not just tell them what to do, listen to them not just wait for them to stop talking? Ok, yes, and then?
“Time to get scared, time to change plan/Don't know how to treat a lady, don't know how to be a man.”
Watching bad fathering up close is pretty confronting at the time and sobering eventually, partly because there’s the fear of what if it’s in me too? and partly because you don’t know if you’re doing it right anyway. Not least because you find plenty of situations where you fall short of your standards, almost hear his voice coming out of your mouth.
And then there’s the way it – the culture it permits and perpetuates – permeates regular life, in the primitive verbal assaults and serious physical assaults, in the way attempts to talk about consent and respect end up with posturing male politicians complaining of the “feminisation” of schools, that we’ve gone too far, that boys are told they are the worst. A black armband view of the sexes you can imagine them thinking. Because, obviously, being respectful of someone else, seeking consent, not being bullies or abusive thugs, is unmasculine.
Interestingly the two most prominent examples of this line of posturing this past week – party leaders Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan – were both private school-educated in privileged boys-will-be-boys environments and are committed and publicly religious men. This at the same time a corruption enquiry was parading a series of private school-educated, religiously conservative men who approached business and politics as their privilege and women as tools or cover. And whether it is blaming teachers (where men are rarer and rarer each year), mothers, or bribe-washing wives who can’t get their story straight for the counsel assisting, when something goes wrong with or for men, it must be a woman’s fault.
Now, far be it from me to suggest causation but, well, it’s hard to be a renaissance man when you’re living in the dark ages.
At much the same time as I was sitting there, looking at Stu’s photo, news came through of the death of Gloria Steinem, a giant of not just feminism but of an idea that merely bringing an improvement was never good enough. Women could get a loan or credit without a husband’s co-sign? Good start. Equal pay supported? A fine step. Abortion as health care not moral debate? Fabulous (though eventually, rinse, repeat and relitigate). What about rape in marriage? Equal rights codified in the constitution? The added layers of repression and resistance faced by Black and Brown and Asian women? Lesbian or intersex respect and support? Or, for the hell of it, not raping?
Right up to her death at the age of 92, even or especially in the face of fetid Trumpism – or Abbottism or Pellism or self-loathing Hansonism, as we might call it here – she argued more was always needed; good was never sufficient, taking a W and leaving it so as not to annoy people you might need one day was inadequate. Learning what you didn’t know, the lives you hadn’t encountered, the misunderstandings you were making, is part of the deal. And then you go again, asking for more, for better.
Of the many, many things to admire about Steinem, that thinking has long stood out. As far as examples to be a better father, partner, adult male, that did more for me than any TV dads, earnest opeds from well-meaning academics (and shite opeds from ill-intentioned scolds keener on the crumbs they could pick up) or, god forbid, the close-at-hand real thing. Do it better, then try harder, do more – I’m down with that.
“And so it goes, go 'round again/But now and then we wonder who the real men are.”
SEE MORE
Find more work by Stuart Spence on Instagram @stuart_spence
READ MORE
Comments