Society: Men, masculinity, and mental health
About halfway through the second series of Tina Fey’s charming Netflix show “The Four Seasons”, one of the protagonists, 40-something Jack, is on the beach, deep in conversation with a new male friend. The two are talking about the grief of profound personal loss—close friends, parents. Sprawled on deck chairs some distance away, the rest of Jack’s group watches with bemused curiosity. “What are those two dipshits talking about?” asks one, a gay man, turning to Jack’s wife. They play out a bro-dude mini-sketch, all bass voices and exaggerated shrugs: “Oh I just bought whiskey-flavoured body wash,” intones the wife. “I’m gonna wash my taint with it,” grunts her companion. “Men do sound exactly like this,” giggles a third member of the mocking party. The real and imagined exchanges capture heterosexual masculinity’s current predicament. A traditional conception, in which male vulnerability is concealed beneath a gruff bravado and banter, is (very) slowly receding. A new, embryonic one in which men can be vulnerable with each other is emerging. This uncharted space is being fought over by everybody from empathetic feminists to misogynists who weaponise vulnerability to reassert gender dominance.
In Singapore, National Service plays a critical role in shaping masculinity. Young men are socialised into a hierarchical world that can “build discipline…but it can also sharpen the instinct to compare yourself against other men: Who commands, who follows? Who’s stronger, who’s weaker?” wrote Helmi Yusof in The Business Times. Thus imprinted, these individuals are then left to find their way in a highly competitive society that expects them to be stoic bread-winners, internalising their struggles.
Among local efforts challenging this patriarchal masculinity is Bros Before Woes, a group that argues for “healthier conversations, mindsets and practices around masculine identity and what it means to be a man in a modern and progressive society.” Together with 11 other groups, (a number that itself signals growing awareness of men’s issues) it has launched #mentoo, a movement to create space for men to talk about relationships, loneliness, financial stress, and modern life’s other vicissitudes.
Besides that, #mentoo has commissioned a study examining the pressures men feel at different life stages: young adults entering the workforce, middle-aged men becoming parents, and older ones confronting the prospect of retirement and loss of identity long anchored to work. “The idea is…to better understand the conditions under which men flourish, and under which conditions they would seek support or remain silent,” said Amy Lim, the Murdoch University lecturer leading the study.
Hopefully, #mentoo thrives, not least because it could occupy spaces currently dominated by the likes of Andrew Tate, and strangle poisonous outgrowths such as toxic masculinity, incel culture, and the red pill movement. The most depraved strands of these ideologies are still insignificant in Singapore, but Tate and his ilk exert a pull on the young man struggling to find his feet amid masculinity’s shifting grounds.
The only quibble is the name itself. At first glance, #mentoo can seem like a negation of or pushback against #Metoo. (Men in India have used the same hashtag to fight allegedly false claims of sexual harassment. The movement’s merits can be debated, but its framing seems to be confrontational.) But as awareness spreads, they will perhaps be seen as allies working for the flourishing of men, women, and all the other glorious strands that make up our wonderful human tapestry.
Some further reading: In “The new Gen Z male hustle”, Ee Ming Toh finds out how young men are navigating changing gender norms and economic anxiety in ways both brave and worrying. In “Boys will be boys? Masculinity in Singapore’s National Service”, Athena Thang emphasises that masculinity is not monolithic; nor should men be told so.
Society: Fighting deepfakes, protecting likeness
In December 2017, a Redditor named “deepfakes” used machine learning algorithms and publicly available videos to morph celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. Shortly after, deepfakes created a subreddit that swelled to 15,000 subscribers. Most were there to gorge on the smut; some created apps that allowed anyone to make more smut. Within months, “deepfake” had entered the cultural lexicon as any synthetic media created by combining elements from actual photos, videos, and audio. Reddit eventually banned the community, but the phenomenon had already taken a life of its own. In 2020, a cybersecurity company found a bot on the messaging app Telegram that made the process even easier. It was free but users could pay US$1.50 (S$1.93) to skip the processing queue or remove the watermark on the “stripped” photos. By 2020, at least 100,000 women had had their likeness compromised by it.
