Yahoo Finance 'Why isn't crying manly?': a comic and a Bake Off star ask what makes a man
“I was baking in a fairly well known tent in Berkshire and was crying into a deep fat fryer”, the 2019 Great British Bake Off contestant 27-year-old Michael Chakraverty says of the inspiration behind his new podcast – Menkind. “Lots of men were messaging me, telling me that I was weak … And I couldn’t work out why crying wasn’t manly.”
The deep fat fryer incident in episode five triggered something, and after meeting the comedian Mark Watson online during lockdown last year, the pair decided to work together on a podcast around what masculinity looks like, interviewing a range of personalities, from performance artist Travis Alabanza to presenter Riyadh Khalaf and Olympic diver Tom Daley.
The description for the podcast opens: “Michael Chakraverty (Bake Off legend) is gay, brown, and obsessed with girl band Little Mix to a degree that is a bit strange; Mark Watson (scrawny cult comedian) is straight, white, likes football and drinking … Mark is 40, whereas Michael is a baby and doesn’t remember things like Teletext and hadn’t heard of Bovril until recently (Mark is writing this, incidentally).”
Throughout the interview, Chakraverty pokes at his co-host (“our worlds don’t meet, like Mark is 73/74 and a white straight man”). For his part, Watson seems happy to play along (“I’m 75 actually”). Chakraverty also admits that guests have leaned towards his “sphere”, as so far most of the people they’ve spoken to have offered a range of different non-heteronormative life experiences, from non-binary voices to transgender and queer perspectives more generally.
“Most of the guests we’ve had are people who represent an area of society that you still don’t hear a lot from,” says Watson, “and Michael is much more embedded in that community. Almost every guest we’ve had has said quite a lot of things that have made me think: ‘Christ, I’ve never thought about that before.’” And yet connections are made. One example that instantly springs to mind is the first interview, in which Khalaf bonds with Watson over their sense of dread around football at school.
But there’s a curveball in the form of Tony Blair’s communications chief at No 10, Alastair Campbell, whose interview will appear soon.
“He was interesting because the conversation wasn’t squarely about masculinity, but it was an example of a traditional guy in a lot of ways, like his wife does all the cooking. He claimed to have not cooked one meal in about 40 years,” says Watson, before swiftly adding: “He wasn’t overtly macho about that. He was just like, ‘OK, I’m shit at cooking. She knows what she’s doing’ … [But] he had a lot of the trappings of what we think of as traditional masculinity, and we’ve hardly spoken to anyone like that so far.”
Although there have been many distinctive and personal experiences, Chakraverty notes a thread that seems to link the contributors: “Everyone has sort of felt ‘othered’ at some point,” he says, with Watson chiming in to say: “A lot of people have talked about how masculinity is a performance for everyone.”
This pressure to perform in a certain way is something that Chakraverty points to as an underlying struggle he faced while growing up. “I have anxiety and depression, which I’ve had as long as I can really remember,” he says, “but I think I named it when I was about 18 or 19 around the time that I came out. I’d find that a lot of that has come down to policing my behaviour and policing how I act and how I think I’m going to be perceived.”
At a time when social media can expose individuals to the wrath of online mobs, “policing” has become a pressure that many people feel – at both ends of the spectrum – making it difficult to have nuanced conversations about masculinity and all things gender-related. That’s what makes these conversations more important than ever.
Many contributors to the podcast are public figures, which raises the question: how does being hyper-visible link to a person’s understanding of what masculinity is, and does it give people more or less freedom to express themselves honestly?
I’d like to feel that as I get older, I continue to be stimulated by the minds of much younger people
Mark Watson
“I do think that the more of a public profile a person has, the more guarded they are about how reflective of themselves they will be,” says Chakraverty.
Watson (who has more than 200,000 Twitter followers) is working hard to try to be more reflective himself, graciously accepting the banter about his race, age and sexual orientation with an extra helping of his own self-deprecation. Though it seems as if the questions about age are what most occupy him. “I accept I’m no longer at the heart of what is happening, and I want to understand it,” he says. “I’d like to feel that as I get older, I continue to be stimulated by the minds of much younger people, because if you’re not, then the alternative is you become more and more of a dick and reactionary as you get older.
“It’s like I want to say, I hear you talking about white straight men having it all their way for centuries and I basically agree with you. So what do you want? What can I do?”
So does he think he’s had it all his own way?
“If you’re on Twitter and you’re me, you read many statements a day about people of my demographic, being generically the devil, the enemy. It takes a certain emotional maturity to think, this isn’t about me … these days, I don’t hear attacks on men or white men or whatever as being directed at me. They’re about institutions. They’re about systemic problems.”
Watson explains that he doesn’t feel comfortable being put into boxes based only on his background. “I’m not exactly privileged and any success I’ve had hasn’t really necessarily come directly out of privilege, but as soon as you start embracing the full spectrum of who’s out there, almost everyone’s story, I think no, yeah, my childhood was a lot better than that,” he laughs a little awkwardly.
“I feel like I’ve worked for everything I’ve had and grafted really hard,” he continues. “And that is true. But that can be true at the same time as recognising you’ve still had it easier than loads of people.
“For people in my position, it’s trying to get past the kneejerk instinct of thinking, ‘Yeah, but what about all these things that went wrong?’, and instead thinking, ‘Yeah, but I didn’t fear for my safety, I didn’t fear for my life when I was 16.’ There are different degrees of trouble, and all of us had some. But for me it’s about learning as much as you can.”
