Sarah Ditum on Pop

Be more Wham!

IT’S BEEN A STRANGE FEW MONTHS to be a man. The publication of Caitlin Moran’s book What About Men? kicked off a mass discourse about the ills of masculinity: even the reviewers who disagreed with her specific analysis of men’s troubles were largely in agreement that there’s something amiss in male lives. More usually, it’s women who get the chin-scratching social issues treatment, so I sympathise with men who find it alienating to be the subjects of this kind of commentary. Especially because the consensus is so unflattering to men, who seem to appear in the popular imagination as emotionally stunted luddites railing against their own irrelevance. There is some truth here: the realignment of the economy towards service has devalued brawn, while the rise of women in the professions…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, August - September 2023

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