Grayson Perry likes wearing dresses. He’s done so since the age of twelve. Perry is also a straight, married father of one, with a passion for motorbikes, mountain bikes, model aeroplanes and making stuff, who dreamed of training as an army officer as a child. Perry is neither transgender, nor does he consider himself “feminine”. Perry is, to all intents and purposes, “all man”.
Perry’s not one for fitting into boxes, and in his new three-part Channel 4 documentary, Grayson Perry: All Man, the Turner Prize winning artist explores why other men shouldn’t feel the need to do so either, particularly boxes labelled “Manly”, “Masculine” and “Macho” – archaic terms in Grayson Perry’s book.
“Masculinity is the behaviour of the people with a penis,” said Perry, speaking to ShortList. “It’s a construct, so it’s fluid.”
Perry’s cause isn’t some flight-of-fancy crusade to get every bloke wearing a dress. Perry’s message does in fact have a pretty serious underlying motivation.
Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK. In 2014, 76 per cent of all suicides in the UK were men. Perry puts this down to the male reluctance to seek help when dealing with depression and other mental health issues – a reluctance that is fuelled by a socially conditioned perceived necessity to be “hard”. It is a viewpoint supported by a plethora of mental health charities and awareness groups.
“Men are more likely to kill themselves because they’re unwilling to open up and ask for help”, says Perry. “The masculine script is so tied to being certain, strong and inflexible, that they snap.”
In the first episode of the series, entitled “Hard Man”, Perry spends time with a group of cage fighters in the north of England to explore notions of toughness and weakness, and the perceived link between their physical and emotional manifestations.
Perry also suggests that the reasons behind why men are currently having difficulty grabbling with the notion of “masculinity” is not just physical but historical. As the decline of heavy industry and rise of industrial technology has seen the nation’s changing job market demand less and less of men physically over the last thirty years.
On taking part in the Durham Miner’s Gala as part of “Hard Man”, Perry ponders the significance of the waning requirement for men to “work with their hands” as a catalyst to masculinity’s crisis.
“These are old school men who grew up in heavy industries, but these heavy industries don’t exist anymore.”
“One of the problems I have found with working class masculinity is it is constantly nostalgic and is constantly looking back at a time when men were men.”
In his ShortList interview, Perry also highlights how men can learn from the positivity and focus on potential that feminism extols.
“[Feminism is] always looking to the future and a great world where women are equal. Men are always looking back saying, ‘Oh the old days when men were men. You’d cut you hand off and just wrap it up with a bit of Sellotape and then back to work.’ And that was the ideal of men, We don’t need that guy around anymore. He sounds like a bit of an idiot.”
“I think men have got too start looking to the future, to what man could be. And that’s flexible.”
Perry’s message is that you can keep your trousers on – but only if you feel like it.
