Grayson Perry & Hard Men

Grayson Perry (centre, back), in Episode One of All Man, Channel 4

Last night the UK saw episode one of a new TV series on masculinity, hosted by Grayson Perry. Channel 4's All Man began with an episode called 'Hard Men', which focused on what the programme characterised (problematically, to my mind) as a specifically North Eastern English breed of masculinity. In some countries, you will be able to watch the episode on 4OD here. Those who can't access this broadcast will be able to get a good sense of the programme from this review here. In fact, I want you all to read that review before reading on. It will save me a lot of time. Go on then - read - or (as they say in the North East) a'll kick ya heed in!

Now that you've read the review, I can move directly into what I want to say about the episode, specifically as it pertains to questions of masculinity, martial arts, and their intersections.

First, a confession, and a declaration of a kind of interest. Much of the programme was filmed in Newcastle. I am from Newcastle. And I recognised a lot of the context of my upbringing in the discussions and depictions of northern masculinity, and the imperative that so many there feel to 'be hard'.

But I didn't just appreciate it all because of that. Rather, I absolutely agreed with Perry's act of connecting this brand of hardness with industrial society. It chimed with the value of hardness once identified by Horne and Hall in a study of impoverished youth in the north east. I always remember this article whenever I think of the centrality of 'hardness' to so much of the northern masculinity that I remember. (I don't live up north any more, and I am, I suppose, by default thoroughly middle class, now that I am a propertied, middle-aged, settled and relatively senior academic in a prestigious university in the South West of the UK.)

I also appreciated the ways that Perry encouraged us to think of this brand of masculinity as a kind of 'callousing', in exactly the same way that Dale Spencer and others have done in relation to 'toughening up'. Of course, for Perry, the callousing in working class masculinity is not simply the toughening up of the body and developing the 'grit' to fight; it is more specifically the sedimenting of ways of thinking, speaking, acting and being. Horne and Hall refer to this in terms of sedulous patterns of thought created by living out lifetimes involved in repetitive and anti-intellectual activities, at the coalface or in the shipyards, for instance.

As both the academics and Perry note clearly, however, with the demise of coal mining and shipbuilding in the North East, the result has been economic devastation and an enduring type of masculinity that is essentially obsolete. Horne and Hall refer to an entire generation of people who have been structurally overstepped by capitalism. Castells once referred to this as the development of the Fourth World - i.e., conditions of absolute poverty in supposedly First World countries.

In their 1995 article, Horne and Hall call this the breeding ground of a situation of 'anelpis' - or conditions in which people are without hope and without fear. Perry, too, regarded much that he saw in former coal mining towns around Durham in terms of a requiem for a bygone type of masculinity. He construed the violence and suicide of so many affected men in the region as a symptom of this type of 'hard' masculinity being unable to cope with emotions - the hard shell becomes a dead weight and breaks if asked to change shape.

However, this is where my questions begin. I agree that this type of masculinity in this type of context is in a sense a relic of a bygone era of industrial life. But when Perry turned to the MMA fighters of the North East, what he regularly remarked upon was the fact that many of these men (but what of female MMA fighters up there, of which there are many?) were incredibly at ease discussing at least some of their emotions.

In many respects, the programme reiterated the 'boxing is therapy' idea that I have singled out for attention elsewhere. But, even if the programme added further evidence (were further evidence needed) that many fighters are working class or from chronic unemployment areas, and although many are in some sense at least a little bit 'screwed up', what it did point to was the possibility of violent practices like MMA acting as a kind of 'bridging point' or 'vanishing mediator' from one form of masculinity to another.

In other words, if people are screwed up because of living in a screwed up environment in such a way that they turn to martial arts, and if martial arts give them the ability not only to cope, but to construct values and identities and - crucially, perhaps - vocabularies that enable self-reflection when and where self-reflection is most needed, then perhaps we need not regard current northern masculinity as a hang-over from a bygone era. Whatever else it is doing, perhaps the uptake of MMA in impoverished regions like the North East is not simply what Freud would call a repetition compulsion. Of course, it is, a bit, a compulsion to repeat. But it is not simple repetition. It is rather, in Derrida's terms, 'reiteration' - a reiteration that involves alteration and change. The change Perry seemed to delight in during the programme included the 'freeness' and 'openness' of the fighters to talk about their emotions and their understanding of masculinity as performance.

In other words, there was perhaps no real need for Perry to conclude the programme by marching a banner (his artwork tribute to northern masculinity), sombrely, and to the accompaniment of an old colliery marching band, like a funeral procession into Durham Cathedral, specifically so as to mourn a bygone era. Perhaps this is only part of the story. Surely he could just as easily have constructed a joyful celebration of an emergent self-reflexive masculinity. Perhaps he did: elements of the artwork he created to display to his interviewees alluded to the need to change and develop, away from the masculinity of our parents' generation. But was it necessary, in the end, to try to move everyone to tears? … Probably, yes.