The Engineered Man: Styles of Victorian Masculinity

 In this episode, I explore how Victorian masculinity was not a fixed ideal, but a fragmented, competing set of identities forged in a time of social upheaval. From Sherlock Holmes to Oscar Wilde to Eugen Sandow, I trace how men attempted to redefine themselves in response to shifting gender roles, scientific doubt, and cultural anxiety. What emerges is not a single model of manhood, but a spectrum—intellectual, aesthetic, physical—each striving for dominance. Ultimately, I ask what this tells us about masculinity today, and whether, after decades of deconstruction, it’s time to build something new. 

https://www.facebook.com/TheMakersRage/
https://www.instagram.com/themakersrage/

Music by LiteSaturation from Pixabay

Transcript

The Engineered Man or Victorian Masculinity – Edited Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, my name’s Darren and welcome to the Makers' Rage Podcast, The Engineered Man, or Victorian Masculinity. How is this relevant to a podcast on creativity? I hear you ask. Masculinity wasn’t exactly invented in the 19th century. The differences between girls and boys, men and women, anatomically, biologically—well, that’s been understood since the caves.

Performatively, though—well, that’s been elaborated over time. Academics today will say, controversially, it is an evolving social construct. In most periods of history, of course, gendered roles are more clearly defined, more precisely delineated. The Greeks and Elizabethans had a more fluid conception, as we do today. Of course, though, our understanding is less playful and, I suppose, more controversial [00:01:00] because it is politicised, linked to social activism, and this isn’t in response to the Greeks and what Shakespeare was doing on the stage, getting boys to dress like women disguised as boys, as Viola in Twelfth Night.

I want to argue that its origins lie in the 19th century, during a period of social upheaval resulting, to a large degree, from the increasingly prominent role women were beginning to play in society.

Women were being afforded greater legal and educational rights, and they weren’t going on sex strikes like in Aristophanes to get their way. They were organising, demonstrating, vandalising, smashing paintings that supposedly objectified women, even martyring themselves, as Emily Davison, who threw herself in front of King George V’s horse, Anmer.

They wanted suffrage, the ability to vote as individuals and not as their [00:02:00] husbands might direct them. They wanted, moreover, to go to university, to have a profession, and this meant moving into the workplace alongside men and, God forbid, having a profession previously restricted to men.

And all this was happening, of course, while advances in science were calling into question “truths” that were previously taken for granted. “If only the geologists would let me alone,” said John Ruskin, “I could do very well. But those dreadful hammers—I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.” If He really didn’t create the world in seven days, did He also not create us, man and woman?

And as old certainties were seemingly being eroded away by the geologist’s hammer, what began as an age of doubt, of scepticism, was becoming an age of anxiety.

Tennyson, for example, knew Darwin well, but still trusted God was love indeed, and loved Creation’s final law, though Nature, red in tooth and claw, with ravine shrieked against his creed.

And Matthew Arnold, who I suppose knew Darwin better, saw the Sea of Faith withdrawing roar, and understood that we are heroes on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.

So with all this happening and women getting to vote and moving into the workplace, what were we poor men to do? I suppose, re-evaluate, and then reaffirm a modern conception of masculinity.

The obvious place to look for this, of course, is in fiction like H. Rider Haggard’s Quatermain or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Not a unified conception of masculinity—one’s more obviously muscular, the other cerebral—and I don’t think it’s an accident [00:04:00] that the first Quatermain novel, King Solomon’s Mines, was published by H. Rider Haggard in 1885, and the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes was only two years later in A Study in Scarlet.

And though the differences between them are as interesting as their commonalities, the fact that we have, in the Victorian age, not one but a diverse mix of competing masculinities is apt for an age of uncertainty that nonetheless wants to retain its monoliths.

H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain represents a reluctant hero or imperial adventurer who relies on marksmanship and bushcraft to survive the colonial frontier. He ensures the stability of empire abroad. Sherlock Holmes does so at home by ensuring the Napoleons of crime are kept behind bars.

Both characters are defined by their extraordinary precision—Quatermain with his rifle, Holmes with his logical reasoning. They both operate as masters of specialised knowledge that borders on the fantastic, and they moreover have unique hyper-masculine professions that no woman can possibly impinge upon.

I mentioned the diversity of masculinities competing with and yet complementing one another. The early Victorians, of course, had the pater familias, or man defined in a role of breadwinner. It was the self-made man, represented by the heroes of the Industrial Revolution, the engineering genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The mid-Victorians had their muscular Christians, popularised by writers like Thomas Hughes, and they had a professional gentleman, a middle-class ideal. You inherit your aristocratic credentials, but you earn your professional ones.

But it was with the late Victorians that we saw a kind of fragmentation, where the imperial hero abroad was competing with the intellectual or domestic hero at home.

And I’ll propose, too, the decadent hero or new man exemplified by the not quite so fictional Oscar Wilde. If there was at least one unifying factor, it was that these masculinities were relational, in that they defined themselves primarily in their opposition to femininity and its domination over the domestic realm and increasing encroachment on the political and professional realms.

I mentioned that King Solomon’s Mines was published in 1885 and A Study in Scarlet in 1887, but The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890. What’s interesting is that this was occasioned by a meeting between Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde the year before.

I’ve heard Stephen Fry relay this story, who described it as a golden evening, August 30th, 1889. It was in the Langham Hotel in London and was hosted by the managing editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Joseph Marshall Stoddart. Doyle was 30 years old, still an emerging writer, but well known for A Study in Scarlet. Oscar Wilde was 35 and already famous.

On the surface, you wouldn’t think they’d have much in common. Wilde, the charming, loquacious aesthete; Doyle, of course, more conventional, a young doctor trying to make it as a writer of detective fiction in his spare time. But they got on very well, like a house on fire, you might say.

In fact, Fry notes how Wilde completely captivated Doyle and complimented him on a little-known historical novel he wrote, Micah Clarke, which he probably didn’t think anyone had read, let alone Wilde. His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind, Doyle later recalled. He towered above us and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say.

Even after Wilde’s downfall, Doyle remained sympathetic and publicly argued that his two-year sentence for indecency—for being gay—was monstrous, and that he was puzzled over Wilde’s obsession with Lord Alfred Douglas and speculated he led a kind of double life.

But this is what makes such a character, fictional or not, interesting. Consider Holmes, epitome of an austere logical certainty, unaffected by the caprices of passion and emotion. The emotional qualities, he says, are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

Then what about his occasional drug abuse, so out of accord with the impression we get of steely practical Victorian self-control? Is this really the paragon of manliness we want young boys to emulate?

Originally, I think Doyle wanted to make him a figure less multidimensional, less convoluted. What was needed was a stable, unadulterated paradigm of pure intellect, of virtuoso asceticism—a kind of oracle during a time of confusion.

In The Sign of Four, which Doyle wrote for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine after the meeting with Wilde, Holmes says: “Love is an emotional thing and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.”

Despite this avowed asceticism, over time Doyle confers on Holmes a kind of a bohemian quality. He becomes almost dandy-like, with his violin, clean-shaven, refined, eccentric—a languid style he might have associated with aesthetes like Wilde.

And his self-justification for continuing to take cocaine is almost romanticist: “My mind rebels at stagnation. I abhor dull routine of existence. I crave for mental stimulation.”

So paradoxically, the cocaine bottle represents a kind of striving after that equanimity and perfect clarity of thought and vision which he’s supposed to embody.

I think originally Doyle also wanted to make the extent of Holmes’s knowledge profound but limited to the scientific fields, or those fields relevant to his unique profession. Hence his knowledge of all varieties of tobacco or the kind of dirt he might find in certain streets in London.

When Watson describes his expertise in certain fields of study, only his knowledge of chemistry and sensational literature is described as profound, while in everything else—including philosophy, literature, astronomy—it is described as either feeble or nil.

However, the man who was supposed to be ignorant of literature and poetry quotes from the Bible, Horace, Taoism, Shakespeare, German Romantic literature, and others in the original.

By the way, the critic Martin Dakin, whom I quoted just there, says that pretended ignorance is a common form of vanity.

But I wonder if, after meeting Wilde, Doyle—who originally modelled Holmes on an old professor back in Edinburgh—wanted to confer on his hero qualities not only belonging to the great man of science, but a great man of the arts, exemplified by Wilde, of course.

Accordingly, Holmes, who said he would never marry, almost falls in love with Irene Adler, who only appears in A Scandal in Bohemia and yet is one of the most memorable characters Conan Doyle created. She’s important precisely because she triggers an emotional reaction, albeit one of profound intellectual admiration.

She never appears again in the stories, but Holmes would continue to refer to her simply as the woman, one who “eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.” She’s not just a woman, though—Doyle knew what he was doing. He depicted her as the embodiment of the New Woman prototype of the late 19th century: independent, self-reliant, and financially self-sufficient. Being an opera singer, she defies Victorian domesticity while at the same time encroaching upon Holmes’s world, which threatens and exhilarates him.

She cross-dresses as a man and outmanoeuvres all the men around her, and proves that, in the game of intelligence, gender roles are irrelevant.

I wonder, when Doyle said Wilde lived a kind of double life, whether he was thinking of Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Interpretations frequently view the novel as a direct reflection of Wilde’s own double life—living publicly as a conventional married Victorian gentleman while privately engaging in homosexual relationships and seeking forbidden sensations in the London demi-monde.

The novel’s central themes of hidden sins, societal hypocrisy, and the decay of the soul behind a beautiful façade serve as an allegory for Wilde’s own experiences. In 1890s London, the portrait in the attic acts as a mirror of the soul, revealing the true, sordid nature of Dorian Gray’s life while his physical appearance remains youthful and innocent—and this mirrors Wilde’s need to present a charming, witty public persona while hiding his private, “grossly indecent” life.

And indeed, The Picture of Dorian Gray was explicitly used against Wilde during his 1895 trial for gross indecency.

And the three characters in the novel can be seen as facets of Wilde—three competing masculinities warring inside his own psyche. Basil Hallward, the artist—the conscientious, sensitive, and moral side of Wilde, obsessed with beauty, terrified of the consequences of hedonism. Lord Henry Wotton, the cynic—who can be seen as the public face of Wilde: witty, paradoxical, charming conversationalist who towers above us all. And Dorian Gray himself, the aesthete—representing the uncontrolled pursuit of sensation and embodying the forbidden desires for which Wilde would eventually be condemned.

Multiple, very Victorian masculinities folded into the one unique persona of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, which he engineered, in a sense. Though as an aesthete and follower of Walter Pater, he wouldn’t have used that word, I’m sure.

I’m sure you’ve noticed I haven’t spent much time on Quatermain, and to be honest I haven’t read much beyond King Solomon’s Mines, which I read at 12. But once I discovered Holmes, I found a kind of Victorian masculinity I was more inclined towards.

Quatermain represents the more muscular masculinity, which I’m not averse to, but there was another Victorian who could be seen as his real-life embodiment and who, over time, has proved far more influential: Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, better known as Eugen Sandow.

He began his career as a typical Victorian strongman, lifting heavy things in the circus, but he didn’t have the height nor the corpulence of your typical 19th-century strongman, such as Ludwig Durlacher, for example—stage name Professor Attila—who recognised Sandow’s potential and mentored him and encouraged him to go to London and compete in a strongman competition, which he did in October 1889, just a couple of months after Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde’s golden evening, which resulted in the commissioning of The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The strongman competition took place at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster, where Sandow competed against the reigning strongman champion Charles Samson, whom he defeated resoundingly after first besting Samson’s assistant.

By the way, I’d encourage you to look up pictures of these people online. It was described as an explosive debut in Britain, and although people were drawn to his feats of strength, they seemed far more interested in his bulging muscles.

As I said, strongmen around this time were interested not only in demonstrating feats of strength, but in engineering a physique that approached the Grecian ideal. And so, alongside demonstrating feats of strength with barbells, Sandow began incorporating poses, which turned muscle display performances into art forms.

In 1894, Edison Studios created three short actuality films in which Sandow performed some of these poses. These indicate a shift away from displays of strength as a convincing masculine ideal, towards choreographed movements that showcase the masculine form in its most muscular, well-proportioned, and lean state. And remember, this was the age before steroids.

If you look at his old photographs—and even the Edison films—you see a physique which he deliberately modelled after the Grecian ideal, and even posed imitating famous ancient statuary like the Dying Gaul, the Farnese Hercules, or even the Artemision Bronze, which I mentioned in my episode on the body and art, in which, in retrospect, Sandow might have featured.

When you think about it, there’s a kind of dandyish quality to deemphasising feats of strength and foregrounding instead its aesthetic—and all the posing and flexing smacks of pageantry.

For the Greeks, it was no accident that their greatest soldiers and athletes possessed muscular, heroic physiques. They moreover saw it as a manifestation of inner excellence—the concept they termed kalokagathia: the union of the beautiful (kalos) and the good (agathos). So basically, if you have a six-pack and biceps, you must be a great person.

So by their cultural logic, the outward form was seen as the efficient cause or proof of the underlying virtues of strength, discipline, and even divine favour.

Of course, Socrates—famously ugly, pot-bellied, and bulbous-nosed—represented a radical counter-argument that also suited his interior form, which suggested that a satyr-like shell could contain a luminous, virtuous character. And Aristotle did criticise over-masculinity in professional athletes—that excessive bulk or physical display was vulgar and a sign of brawn over brains.

Sandow would have agreed with this. If his photographs were published today, many would likely balk at his physique being the result of steroids. The Victorians had no such excuse. Indeed, they wanted to know how to achieve such a physique—to engineer one of their own.

So in 1894, he published the bestselling Sandow on Physical Training; in 1897, Strength and How to Obtain It. He even had a magazine of physical culture, which ran until 1907, the same year he published The Construction and Reconstruction of the Human Body, with a foreword by Arthur Conan Doyle.

And in 1901, Sandow organised the “Great Competition”, which is widely considered the first major bodybuilding contest. Unlike traditional strongman events, winners were chosen based on muscular symmetry, size, and general health rather than just raw strength. The winner received the Sandow Trophy, which was modelled after Sandow’s own Grecian ideal physique.

Incidentally, a replica of the original third-place bronze statue has been awarded to the winners of the Mr. Olympia contest since 1977, which is why Eugen Sandow is considered the father of modern bodybuilding. And I’m pretty sure many young men today would look at those old black-and-white Victorian photographs and wonder how Sandow did it without steroids too—and how they can engineer such a physique of their own.

So before the Victorians popularised so many competing masculinities, what was the great archetype or quintessential model? Adam, alone in the garden, introspecting until Eve came along and ruined his solitude—and then pater familias, head of the household and breadwinner. What is, frankly, a mundane example still exists today, has always existed, and has always been just as uninspiring as the Victorian masculinities I’ve exemplified.

Sherlock Holmes, the gentleman, oracle, and intellectual hero who says the emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. Oscar Wilde, the dandyish wit who wore a green carnation in his lapel and nonetheless towered over us all. Or Eugen Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding, who proved that those Greek statues didn’t overly exaggerate what it was possible to achieve with the male form.

What commonality can we distil from just these three? The critic James Eli Adams identifies the gentleman, the prophet, the dandy, the priest, and the soldier as styles of Victorian manhood. I suppose my selection of Holmes, Wilde, and Sandow is kind of arbitrary—but so are James Eli Adams’ five “styles” of Victorian masculinity.

You won’t find a figure, fictional or historical, who fits neatly into one or the other. The fictional Holmes might be the gentleman, but I mentioned he also had a dandyish quality about him with his robe and violin; his quoting German Romantic literature in the original and his propensity for mind-altering drugs. As for the priesthood, well, I suppose he subscribed to the celibacy at least—but even under conscription, you could never imagine him a soldier.

Wilde might be typified as the dandy, although I think he’d have made a fine soldier—as long as he didn’t have to fight—and he’d have been as popular among the troops as he was among the local coal miners he met when visiting Colorado on his tour of the USA. “They are the only rational people in the world,” he said of them, because they apparently enjoyed his sermons on aestheticism.

And if he belonged to a priesthood, it wasn’t a celibate order—a priesthood of the soul, perhaps, and of beauty and individualism. The public-facing Wilde could also be the gentleman, even the prophet, who passed down proverbs and told parables like the one about the hermit or desert saint who becomes jealous when the devil tells him his sinful brother has become the Bishop of Alexandria – I’d encourage you to lookup Stephen Fry’s telling of this btw.

And what about Eugen Sandow? A gentleman off stage, a dandy on it. If he was a priest, he’d have been a Jesuit practising Loyola’s spiritual exercises, though including a few tricep extensions and squats. A Funny notion, though there are plenty of jacked priests on Instagram like Father Raphael Capo, and I suppose bodybuilders and priests do share some things in common—extreme discipline, dedication to routine and ritual, with strict observances on diet and exercise, at least aspirationally. I remember as an altar boy seeing chain smoking priests, and gyms are packed with bodybuilders who can’t stay away from McDonalds.

And Sandow was a prophet or evangelist of sorts for this new discipline of bodybuilding. And to this day, his physique, his publications, serve as a testament to what can be achieved with the human form.

I suppose what this indicates is that there are no well-defined models of Victorian manhood, and even if we have the types like the gentleman, prophet, dandy, priest, and soldier, good luck finding a perfect archetype of each, even in fiction.

Well, as mentioned earlier, with women moving into the workplace and demanding equal rights, and of course an exploding middle class, there were some loud and influential voices that demanded more clearly defined archetypes to more easily distinguish between the sexes, the classes, and to ensure everyone knows their place.

What didn’t help was that literacy levels were at an all-time high in the late 19th century, and this, of course, played a huge part in the development of a popular culture whose influence was causing fundamental normative changes in the social fabric. And this was contributing towards the unseating of patriarchal manhood, as Eli Adams expresses it.

This was already underway the generation before, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing. There was a growing isolation of middle-class fathers from their sons due to the separation of home and workplace and the increasingly rigorous gendering of that division. Conservatives today will consider that division somewhat conventional, traditional—but even in Victorian England, it was considered problematic.

So in order to place a limit on the amount of time boys spent under the feminising aegis of their mothers, the boarding school was created. These became institutions where young boys could be immersed in a male collective that provided a distinctly masculine environment, which was a substitute for the paternal influence that was absent at home.

There were, of course, girls’ boarding schools, but these were far less prevalent, and you feel these were for wealthy mothers who preferred to have none of their kids around. Of course, few parents could afford to send all their kids to boarding school, let alone their sons.

Soon there would be a more accessible alternative to these surrogate family structures, which became a kind of movement started by the soldier Robert Baden-Powell. I suppose I had to fit a soldier in there somewhere, and who better than the eminently Victorian founder of the scouting movement.

His Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship was actually published in 1908. Victoria was a few years dead, but a crisis in masculinity didn’t die with her.

The manual is easy enough to follow. Baden-Powell advises instructors that, first of all, Boy Scouts must be sworn in. After that, their daily activities are strictly regimented. First thing in the morning, they parade, hoist the Union Jack, and salute it. They then play scouting games, practise salutes, secret signs, patrol calls.

Mid-morning, they do physical exercises, drill, and, curiously, perform self-measurement—something Eugen Sandow might do. They march out to patrol the neighbourhood, learn to note direction by compass first, then by wind then the position of the sun, learn the details about landmarks, etc.

In the afternoon, they’re awarded with more scouting games, or, if they’re indoors because it’s raining: jujitsu, scouts’ war dance, boxing, scouts’ chorus and rally, etc. Evenings are for campfire yarns from certain recommended books or rehearsing a scout play or holding debates.

So these weren’t just surrogate family structures, but a kind of preparatory barracks.

That said, when I was a kid about six, seven, eight, and I first joined the scouts, I thought it was the best fun a young boy could have – even better than Nintendo. And we stuck very much to Baden-Powell’s manual. Though we named our patrols after characters in the Jungle Book. I was in the Bagheera patrol.

But looking at the date at the end of the foreword Baden-Powell wrote—January 1908—how many of these first Boy Scouts would only a few years later willingly sign on to participate in the war to end all wars…

Believing in all their jingoism and youthful ardour for some desperate glory, that all they’d be doing in France is saluting the Union Jack, drilling, tying knots, and telling campfire yarns

—an estimated nine to eleven million military personnel were killed during World War I.

And because women were largely barred from direct combat, these military fatalities were almost exclusively male. And these were fighting-age men, of course, between 18 and 45, and most of them who were killed, let’s keep it real, were on the younger side of that age range.

In Western Europe, France was hit hardest. In total, 52% of all French men born in 1894 were dead by age 24. And we can use France, I suppose, as a microcosm of what was happening across Europe, east and west.

In that same 1894 cohort, for example, while roughly half of the men were dead by 1918, approximately 70% of the women were still alive, and with the loss of millions of young men, this created a marriage squeeze, as it were.

In Britain alone, it was estimated that there were nearly two million surplus women after the Great War who had no prospect of finding a partner within their own age group. And to sustain national economies, women were needed in the permanent labour force.

Whether they were drawn there for ideological reasons or not, the death of these men led to a birth deficit, of course, as millions of potential fathers never returned to start families, causing a permanent gash in the population pyramids of Europe.

Now imagine the impact of another, even greater war, less than a generation later. While military deaths were again predominantly male in World War II, the scale of total war meant that women and children were killed in massive numbers due to strategic bombing, the Holocaust, and famine 

in the Soviet Union, he gender imbalance was catastrophic. In 1945, there were only 77 men for every 100 women in the USSR. For those born in 1923, roughly 80% of the males did not survive the war.

The point I’m trying to make is that every time a large cohort of young men is killed, it creates a hollow in the population tree, and despite the baby boom—a brief spike in births after World War II—it wasn’t enough to offset the long-term trend towards smaller families that was created because of this quick succession of population hollows after two catastrophic wars. 

The loss of so many men in the first half of the 20th century forced a rapid social shift. Women entered the workforce permanently, and social security systems were built.

Today, it can be argued those systems are under pressure because there aren’t enough young workers to support the massive and aging boomer generation, and with the devastation of European infrastructure and the loss of rural manpower, it just accelerated the move into the cities and the need for migrant labour.

In fact, the “guest worker” programmes of the 1950s and ’60s, notably in Germany, were a direct response to the lack of working-age men left after 1945.

So psychologically and economically, it seems these wars shifted Europe towards a quality-over-quantity approach to child-rearing. And now, in modern Europe, what do we have? Lowest fertility rates in the world, well below replacement, which leads perforce to a natural decrease, where deaths outpace births.

And even if every couple wanted to have more than the 2.1 children needed to reverse this trend—who’s going to raise them? Women fought hard to earn the right to a profession. Should we bring back the boarding school? Who can afford that? State sponsored childcare is an idea – like boarding schools for socialists lol.

I notice scouting is making a resurgence. Little girls and boys are now scouting together, and men and women, are now fighting together, with many modern armies having women in combat roles, notably in the Air Force.

I mentioned before, gender is performative. When Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts, he could, as the critic Joseph Kestner states, plausibly endorse tales as constructing a masculine script, given that they confirmed qualities which were radically gendered as masculine in Victorian culture: observation, rationalism, factuality, logic, comradeship, daring, and pluck—qualities clearly girls and women can evince as well.

Gender is not something that one is, says Judith Butler; it’s something that one does. It emerges from repeated behaviours and social expectations.

Today, masculinity once again exists in multiple competing forms. Some emphasise emotional openness, equality, vulnerability—traditionally feminine qualities—while the more traditional ones of strength, stoicism, and testosterone-induced alpha maleness are still valued, as they’ve been since the caves.

And I suppose in recent years there has been a bit of a pushback against the tendency to make not just gender but anything that has traditionally been understood in terms of a duality or dichotomy into something fluid, spectral.

And so we now have movements promoting “traditional masculinity”, traditional families, and the associated gender roles.

Well, in whatever way a culture decides to express or perform its gender roles, the only way to produce children is to bring male and female gametes together. However it’s done—through sex, in vitro, and whatever the family structure—we must simply accept the biological reality that some dualities aren’t fluid.

So to close, what does my discussion on Victorian masculinity have to do with masculinity today? That, like other so-called social constructs, it is subject to change—but there are natural forces in place which inevitably influence the nature of that change.

In 1960s Paris, a fashion emerged which still exists in academia and has seeped into popular culture for deconstructing everything. After all, it’s easier to dismantle than to build.

So after so many decades of dismantling these grand narratives, what are we to do with all the debris that surrounds us? Maybe build something for once—something aspirational.

After all what are family, country, Western civilisation? Merely grand narratives, constructed, contingent. Nothing to take up arms for and defend. Nothing worth dying for, surely. Well, tell that to the veterans and all those fallen soldiers.