British men assert themselves

“The promotion of metrosexuality was left to the men's style press…they persuaded young men to study them with a mixture of envy and desire.” Mark Simpson, Journalist, London

Britain seems to be reaching a tipping point. Men can not only stand up for themselves for the first time in a generation, but now they can even right some perceived wrongs. Since the 1990s, British men have gradually been discriminated against due to an ongoing feminising of society. But now, according to campaigners, it has become so damaging that they simply can't be ignored any longer. The number of men's rights groups has exploded, with the UK Men's Movement, ManKind, Families Need Fathers and Fathers4Justice leading the way. Once Fathers4Justice started pulling media stunts, the government started taking notice. More money is spent on men's health issues, the divorce courts are taking the position of fathers more seriously, and the male consumer market has undergone a dramatic rethink.

British men it seems are starting to build themselves up again. The male as portrayed in the media has shifted from the clumsy, lazy, and desperate, to the tentative, determined and confident. Men use this media image to counterbalance the social displacement experienced during 90s Britain. Men's magazines have become a fundamental vehicle for the representation of this renovated image of masculinity, characterised by his embrace of feminine universes, his deeper concern over personal looks and the greater importance attached to activities like fathering. True, men are more feminised as a result of two decades worth of social conditioning, but now they are also classically masculine. Unshackled from the now redundant metrosexual identity, British men are sounding more like, well, men again.