Grayson Perry's 'The Descent of Man': Deconstructing the Masculine Mystique
The English artist and media personality Grayson Perry has a sexually ambiguous pageboy haircut. He sometimes wears dresses. He dedicates his new book, "The Descent of Man," a plea for less toxic masculinity in the world, to his childhood teddy bear.
Scratch Perry, though, and you may nick a vein of macho. A cross-dresser with blue-collar roots, he grew up loving James Bond novels and military toys. As a teenager he had a shaved head and toted a skateboard, which he later swapped for a motorcycle and a leather jacket.
He's been a competitive mountain biker — so competitive he would urinate in his Lycra shorts rather than make a pit stop. He once entered therapy to cope with his temper and road rage. Oh, and he's married to a woman and has a daughter.
"Even when I am wearing a dress, I use the men's toilets — mainly out of respect for an exclusively female space, but also because there is rarely a line in the gents,'" he writes. "At social venues there are rarely enough women's toilets. Why is that? Nearly all architects are male."
Continue reading the main storyHe's a complicated fellow.
"The Descent of Man" (the title is from Darwin) is a short book that remixes a good deal of academic feminist thinking about braying masculinity. Little in it is truly original.
But Perry has a quick mind and a charming style of thrust and parry. He's a popularizer, an explainer, a stand-up theorist. His book is as crisp and tart as a good Granny Smith apple.
Perry calls himself "a doubter at the gates of the crumbling superdome of masculinity." He writes: "We need to get a philosophical fingernail under the edge of the firmly stuck-down masculinity sticker so we can get hold of it and rip it off. Beneath the sticker, men are naked and vulnerable — human even."
He's surely right. As Homer Simpson asked Marge, "What about my womanly needs?"
But the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard is surely right, too, to fret throughout his epic and autobiographical "My Struggle" series that he (and thus modern man) has become soft and feminized. We've become "indoor cats," in Dave Eggers's memorable phrase.
It isn't simple, these days, to possess a Y chromosome and know what to do with it. Like the guileful letter Y itself, men are asked to represent consonants and then vowels. To be graceful while toggling between modes requires Fred Astaire-level footwork.
Perry is aware of these sorts of ambiguities. He rightly has little sympathy, especially when it comes to the tribe he refers to as "Default Man" — white, middle- and upper-class heterosexual men.
"The very aesthetic of seriousness has been monopolized by Default Man," he writes. "In people's minds, what do professors look like? What do judges look like? What do leaders look like? It is going to be a while before the cartoon cliché of a judge is Sonia Sotomayor or that of a leader is Angela Merkel."
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Perry is a man who takes clothing seriously; he's a fashion critic in disguise. He notes the "colorful textile phalluses" hanging around the necks of establishment men. He burrows deep into the meanings of gray suits.
Here's one joyful snippet of his thinking about somber power suits: "Default Men dress to embody neutrality; it is not true that they are neutral. If George Osborne, chancellor of the Exchequer in Parliament, were to dress up as a cross between Flashman and the Grim Reaper instead of a business suit when he delivered his budgets, perhaps we might have a more appropriate vision of who is controlling the nation's finances."
That last sentence made me so happy I had to get up and go for a little walk around the room. It's a good game, to imagine the sort of motley our elected leaders should don in order to outwardly reflect their politics and personalities.
I hope he writes a book about clothes. Noting all the "pseudo-functional zips and buckles" on men's weekend get-ups, he writes: "Men are into frippery as much as women, but they cloak it under spurious function."
Perry takes a wide-angle view of masculinity, drawing his examples from many sources. He flips on the television, watches he-man shows like Bear Grylls's "Man vs. Wild" and thinks:
"They teach us how to survive in the wild; how to skin a deer carcass or build a shelter from tree branches. I would like to see them trying to find an affordable flat to rent in London or sorting out a decent state school for their children. These are the true survival skills of the 21st century."
Among his ideal modern men is America's 44th president. "I think Barack Obama presents a superb version of manhood. His calm thoughtfulness, emotional ease, wit and eloquence in the face of gross expectation and intractable problems is breathtaking." Donald J. Trump is mentioned only once, with disdain.
Perry's book has its own failure built into it. One notes the flagrant unlikelihood of the man who most needs this book's advice accepting it from a gentleman who wears patterned frocks and looks like their dotty Aunt Esther.
The author does discuss the plight of blue-collar men ("Instead of making iron, they are pumping it"), but he is unlikely to win them over with self-help strictures such as, "Men might need to work less on their biceps and more on their intuition."
Even at fewer than 150 pages, "The Descent of Man" is too long. In the last third Perry is reduced to stating poorly what he said well earlier in the book. He's begun to twist a dry sponge.
But when he's on, which is frequently enough, Perry is an eloquent and witty tour guide through the fun house that is modern masculinity. He wants us guys to be weirder, freer, less predictable. He's just the man for the job.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner
The Descent of Man
By Grayson Perry
145 pages. Penguin Books. Illustrated. $17.
A version of this review appears in print on May 24, 2017, on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Deconstructing the Masculine Mystique. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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