19. The Descent of Man | Grayson Perry
As always, you can buy her here or anywhere that your favourite books are sold.
Friends,
I’m not entirely sure how famous Grayson is outside of the island (🇬🇧) so if this is the first time you’re hearing about him I’d read this, this and this as a starter.
Grayson’s book is a necessary read for all of us right now as we start to question the ways in which we’ve been our mainly masculine world and what changes we all know are coming for men. I’m writing this in 2022 and all over the world disasters such as climate emergency; late-stage capitalism; incompetent and corrupt governments; unethical & greedy corporations; toxic masculinity and the threat of unnecessary wars are showing us that we need to make some pretty big changes to the status quo ASAP.
This is not a book about bashing men; eliminating men; or even cancelling men as a species, it’s a book about what it means to a man from the interesting POV of someone who identifies as a transvestite.
What makes a man?
How does masculinity operate?
Could it be in need of an urgent upgrade?
The book ends with a manifesto which I love:
Men’s rights
The right to be vulnerable
The right to be weak
The right to be wrong
The right to be intuitive
The right not to know
The right to be uncertain
The right ti be flexible
The right not to be ashamed of any of these
Some of my favourite parts:
“Because I am a transvestite, people often assume that this gives me a special insight into the opposite gender. But this is rubbish: how can I, brought up as a man, know anything about the experience of being a woman? It would be insulting to women if I thought I did. If anything, it gives me a sharper insight into what it is to be a man, since from the age of twelve I have been questioning my own masculinity.”
“I sometimes watch the evening news on television and think all the world’s problems can be boiled down to one thing: the behavior of people with a Y chromosome.”
“All of us males need to look at ourselves with a clear eye and ask what sort of men would make the world a better place, for everyone.”
“Many forms of masculinity can be very destructive. Masculinity needs to change. Some may question this, but they are often white middle-class men with nice jobs and nice families: the current state of masculinity is biased in their favour. Some forms of masculinity - particularly if starkly brutal or covertly domineering - are toxic to an equal, free and tolerant society.”
“Feminists and civil rights campaigners made white men visible in ways they'd never been before. They started to give the default dominant group equal 'otherness', and white men didn't like it. This feeling of visibility prompted men to adopt a victim status befitting an oppressed group. The patriarchy felt itself wobble and fall a notch nearer equality, but screamed as if it had fallen way below the groups it still oppressed.”