MEN'S SERIES: Man (still) alone

Our heroes are tough, uncompromising frontier-types but has our birthright become our bane? Tim Hume reports.

There was no escaping him when we crossed paths, inevitably, one Friday night in Queen St. It had been more than a year since we'd last met I'd been overseas since then but I hadn't missed him one bit. And now: there he was, instantly recognisable as he swaggered towards me on a collision course, a nasty little crab with scowled face and hunched shoulders, body-checking every tenth person he passed to show the world exactly who it was dealing with. He needn't have bothered, as he was unmistakable a familiar, unwelcome acquaintance the staunch Kiwi dickhead.

New Zealand does staunch like Switzerland does cheese. It comes in a multitude of varieties: from the shoulder-barging footpath warrior, to the rugby captain reciting the expressionless platitudes of the after-match function; from my colleague's father, who once ripped a troublesome tooth from his own head with pliers and sealed the hole with Araldite, down to the nuggety everyman who thinks umbrellas are for pansies. That dour, stifling, provincial masculinity, inherited from the hard bastards who colonised this country and the Maori tough guys who preceded them, is our birthright and our bane.

The stuff that enabled such nation-affirming feats as Sir Edmund Hillary knocking the bastard off, or Buck Shelford playing part of a test match with half his bollocks on the outside, is equally responsible for countless senseless hidings and the sense of impoverishment that characterised our cultural life for decades.

Staunch set the tone of our young nation, and continues to do so; in the absence of singing the national anthem (which most of us are too staunch to do), our proudest ritual of self-display to the world is the sight of men dressed in black (the staunchest colour) performing the haka (the staunchest dance). The dominant model of the New Zealand man as outdoorsy, inexpressive and emotionally aloof persists, even in an age when those All Black heroes variously wear eyeliner, open fashion boutiques, or describe their lifestyles as "peripatetic".

Masculinity in New Zealand has been heavily influenced by the model of the 19th-century Pakeha settler, says Otago University gender studies lecturer Dr Chris Brickell, providing an enduring conception of the Kiwi male as a "rough, practical man who's good with his hands and good on the land". The idealised Kiwi bloke was a stoic, Man Alone figure, who provided for his family but was emotionally removed from them. Traditional folk heroes have been the black-singleted farmer, the soldier, the All Black, the hunter, the blue-collar worker: the Uphams and Crumps and Meadses and Footrots of the heartland.

These ideals have persevered, despite the fact New Zealand has long been a relatively urban society. The physical displays that traditionally asserted masculinity in a rural setting have found their equivalents in a suburban environment. "As more men became involved in white-collar work post-World War II, there was a growth in DIY projects, so you could express your physical skill even if you worked a desk job," says Brickell.

In recent times, this drive to demonstrate machismo has taken on less constructive expressions, such as the modern blight of boy racers. "It might be translated into who's got the most powerful car and who drives it fastest," says Brickell.

As a predominantly provincial ideal, staunch masculinity has always defined itself against urban values. City men are seen as broadly effeminate and status-obsessed, representing the dubious principles of intellectualism over pragmatism, appearance over reality, words over deeds. Self-expression through personal style is frowned upon; accordingly, New Zealand men today must rank as some of the worst-dressed among developed nations. In the words of local gossipmonger David Hartnell, compiler of annual best and worst-dressed lists, "New Zealanders are sloppy"; even many of the urbanites who consider themselves "style-conscious" adhere to a rigidly circumscribed look drawn from near the end of fashion's long tail: the striped dress shirt, the fauxhawk, the tribal armband tattoo.

Reinforcing these rural biases is the fundamental New Zealand ideal of egalitarianism, which holds sacred the notion of a classless society, characterised by mateship and based on the principle that no one is better than anyone else. The benefits of such a world view barely need stating, but there's a flipside too, in that displays of exuberance or flair are generally discouraged, except on the rugby field. Staunch is stultifying; it abhors difference and interprets individuality as showboating. Transgressors are brought back to earth swiftly through the "tall poppy cutter" of criticism or, more extremely, the bash.

Gays have long borne the brunt of this, says Dr Jan Jordan, a criminology lecturer at Victoria University. "Men have been victims of these stereotypes, men have been imprisoned by these stereotypes," she says. "There's an inherent conservatism in the culture. Even in the middle-class pockets, there's a fear of difference and the unknown which can put an emotional stranglehold over society."

The result is that many New Zealand men are inexpressive, either because they lack communication skills or the desire to communicate, or both. The traditional take on this state of affairs has romanticised the Kiwi bloke as a wise but humble purveyor of charmingly laconic understatement the farmer who appraises his beautiful only daughter's get-up on her wedding day with: "You'd be pretty pleased with that, then."

A more modern view would be that this kind of emotional hermitry can result only in an unfulfilled, half-lived life of gnawing regrets and pent-up desires, which seethe and fester and inevitably boil over during drunken blowouts (when alcohol gives staunch blokes greater social licence among their peers to become rough-housing larrikins, violent brawlers, or blubbering wrecks). Brickell says a whole range of negative behaviours stem from male stoicism, including a reluctance to reach out to GPs with health concerns, or friends and family for emotional support. "There's no doubt it can be emotionally crippling when there are experiences men can't deal with openly because they can't express themselves."

It's true that the staunch Kiwi male is not a great talker. You might say he was a great mute lummox. New Zealanders seem to have a fundamentally uncomfortable relationship with language. We mumble like Dan Carter, and use the adjective "big-mouthed" to describe all our closest cousins, those braying, obnoxious Aussies, or Brits, or Yanks. Meanwhile, they struggle to understand us and wish we would at least try to occasionally enunciate. An imported Brit on his "Zealand Whinge" blog explains that "Kiwis like to speak in a rapid monotonic mumble": "You will at first think they are speaking Maori, but this is not the case, as Maori has more vowels."

In conversation, we regress to the witless baby talk of hypocoristics (pet names like Chrissy pressies, sammies, the 'Naki) or vulgarity (exploited to comic potential by comedian Dai Henwood's trademark greeting: "F---en' hello!") Our linguistic heritage is about as rich as our culinary one; from the spare literature of Sargeson to our everyday speech, New Zealand English is as brittle as hokey pokey.

Even when you get us speaking, we're not sure what to say. For many Kiwi men, conversation doesn't flow so much as drip; the social lubricant of small talk seems a scarcer commodity here than elsewhere. One local "society" blogger recently noted the crisis in modern manners meant New Zealanders seemed confused over whether to even introduce themselves at gatherings these days. The staunch bloke's humour can also strike outsiders as uncouth; a California State University guide for American students heading to New Zealand broaches the subject diplomatically, cautioning departing students that Kiwi humour "can be rustic".

It gets more serious, though, than clamming up over our feelings and being a bit awkward at parties. Staunch ideas of masculinity have also heavily defined gender relations in New Zealand, creating among some men a proprietorial sense of entitlement towards female partners which has contributed to sexual violence. "We've had this Once Were Warriors model of family violence, this real tough guy mentality," says Jordan. "A lot of violence has come out of staunchness and toughness. Often beneath the tough guy exterior hovers a wounded and insecure individual, desperate to achieve the image of what he thinks a `real man' should be."

If this all sounds a bit much, it should be pointed out that New Zealand men also have much to be proud of, of course. And they are, says Brickell; younger New Zealand males seem to draw a great deal of pride from their national identity, which can carry connotations of being rugged and risk-taking (hence the popularity of adventure sports as a modern expression of traditional Kiwi masculine values). The current prevalence of Kiwiana icons in popular culture T-shirts, and even tattoos, bearing maps of New Zealand, cricket's moustache-wearing Beige Brigade, and retro advertising campaigns by L&P and Charlie's goes beyond ironic nostalgia and could be read as a gesture of affection for the stoic, uncomplicated manhood exhibited by that generation's fathers.

There's also a strong argument that modern Kiwi men are achieving their successes internationally through exhibiting qualities which could be viewed as quintessentially New Zealand traits: ingenuity and inventiveness, intrepidness and willingness to risk, ambivalence towards established rules and hierarchies, blindness to status or class and a down-to-earth lack of pretension.

These are all constructive variations of the traditional Kiwi brand of masculinity which has been uncharitably caricatured above.

Staunch once the dominant, and still a prevalent ideal of manliness in New Zealand is now tempered by a growing multiplicity of models of masculinity which influence how Kiwi men live their lives. The globalised media have exposed local men to new identities to pick and choose from and incorporate into their self-conceptions: the corporate raider, the gangsta, the hipster, the metrosexual the narcissistic model of manhood Brickell says was essentially the product of capitalism's desire to engineer male markets for vanity products.

Social changes, such as the movement of women into the workforce, have led to a greater involvement of men in parenting. "You never used to see men pushing prams or publicly looking after kids, and that's changed quite markedly," Brickell says.

Victoria University social psychologist Dr Marc Wilson says: "The idea has been, if women can do anything, then maybe men can do some of the things women have historically done as well. The best-adjusted men these days are highly masculine and highly feminine so they can fix a car and give someone a shoulder to cry on."

Brickell believes the perceived monolithic staunchness of the early pioneers was probably illusory; they were never as one-dimensional as they were later made out to be. "With some of the photographic evidence from the 19th century, you see a sense of playfulness and fun at times," he says. "You get men standing there with their arms around each other, sometimes in a blokey way but sometimes in a more intimate way than that."

But Brickell says that although some developments have been unambiguously positive such as the visibility of actively parenting fathers and of gay men the suspicion remains, given New Zealand's high rates of family violence and other negative indicators, that the "new man" is just window-dressing on the same old masculinity. "One of the criticisms is that men have started to look tidier and engaged with consumer culture more, but when it comes to things that count, it's still the same old story. That's the $64,000 question really. How much is style and how much is substance?"

The ambiguity of the changes in New Zealand masculinity is most evident in the example of the All Blacks. Once simply iconic sportsmen, they now embody a "hybrid masculinity", combining the ideal of the accomplished athlete with new models, such as the savvy businessman, the metrosexual, the sex symbol. But while it might now be OK for All Blacks to pose on billboards in their Jockeys, or break down in tears on television an unthinkable state of affairs for much of the black jersey's history they also occasionally piss on the floors of bars, and bash their wives. Sometimes they even shoot seals. Jordan remains unconvinced that too much has changed.

"I'm not sure whether there really are new men, or whether the emperor's just got new clothes."

• Tim Hume is a senior Sunday Star-Times writer based in Auckland.

 

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