The new man was a media-created archetype of male behaviour, widely discussed in mass media in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and 1990s. The new man was typically represented – positively or negatively – as a heterosexual man who combined two principal characteristics: a concern for style and personal grooming with broadly pro-feminist attitudes.[1] From the early 1990s, the concept of the "new lad" emerged in deliberate contrast to the new man; the dominant lad culture of the later 1990s was often explained as a male backlash against the undesirable effeminacy of the new man.[2] Gender-studies academics such as Rosalind Gill have seen the discourse around the new man and the new lad as marking a significant moment of social change, when masculinity was for the first time very widely and openly discussed, rather than being understood as the "invisible, unmarked norm of human existence and experience."[1][3]
References
edit- ^ a b Mort, F (2013). "New Men and New Markets". Cultures of Consumption. Taylor & Francis. p. 15. ISBN 9781135079925 – via Google Books.
- ^ Tim Adams (23 January 2005). "New kid on the newsstand". The Observer. Guardian News and Media Limited. Retrieved 20 November 2009.
- ^ Gill, Rosalind (2003). "Power and the production of subjects: a genealogy of the New Man and the New Lad". In Benwell, Bethan (ed.). Masculinity and men's lifestyle magazines. Oxford, UK Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell/Sociological Review. pp. 34–56. ISBN 9781405114639.
Where once men represented the invisible, unmarked norm of human existence and experience, today they are hyper-visible as a gendered group, with academics, marketing executives, journalists and others devoting considerable attention to masculinity or masculinities.