If you are, and you haven’t read Iron John by Robert Bly, you’re missing a whole lot of insight into many of the cultural forces that have shaped what it means to be a man. But the thing is, it was published in 1990, though the fairy tale it refers to was written a very long time ago by the Brothers Grimm. Bly’s book was written at the end of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, a full 20 years ago. So I’ve often wondered what Bly would say about how masculinity has changed over those 2 decades.
I was deep into my Saturday morning newspaper(s) euphoria this week-end, when I came across a story about a study done recently in Manchester, England about the effects of our changing economy on working class men, and by extension, masculinity. Titled “I can’t put a smiley face on”, and written by Darren Nixon of Leeds Memorial University in the UK, the article interviews long-term unemployed working class men to try to analyze why so many of them are basically unemployable.
The backdrop of the study is the de-industrialization of, in this case, the UK. With the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the growth of the service economy, many of the “working class” (his words, not mine) men have not been able to adapt to find work in service jobs, and the author draws the conclusion that it is because service jobs require behavior that is antithetical to their view of themselves and their masculinity. As Nixon writes “Responding to the demands of customer sovereignty unquestionably is antithetical to young working-class men whose culture valorizes sticking up for yourself”. Margaret Wente, the Globe & Mail columnist who covered the study, wrote “His point is clear. The defining value of working class masculinity is the ability to stick up for yourself when someone tries to give you shit. The defining requirement of service work is (in the view of the study respondents) having to eat it”.
A word of caution before we try to extrapolate these findings to North America. The class structure in the UK is rock solid and a thousand years old. I haven’t seen the research but I would presume that working class masculinity in the UK is much more sharply defined than is blue collar masculinity in North America. But I’d bet they’re at least cousins. So what Nixon uncovered in the UK is at least somewhat at work here at home.
It seems a poignant time to recognize the potential implications on masculinity of the transformation of our Western economies, what with the growth of the service economy at the expense of what would historically be called manual labor. And with this being the week in which General Motors is likely to file for bankruptcy protection in both the U.S and Canada.
So what do we do with this? As is always the case, there are 2 macro strategies if you’re marketing a product and you feel a seismic shift in the ground under your feet. Go with it. Or go against it. In other words, either embrace the softer side of maleness in the way you position and communicate a product to guys, or go the other way and be the bastion of old-fashioned male-ness.
At zig we always root our strategy process in a “Cultural Debate”, a long-term and topical issue that our target audience is talking about, reading about, and living. We believe picking the right cultural debate to participate in gives our ideas a cultural currency that causes them to take on a life of their own thanks to our target’s willingness to spread them within their communities. “What does it mean to be a guy right now” is about as interesting and powerful a debate as there is.
