Features

Masculinity has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember. The usual explanation is that post-industrial society doesn’t much care for brawn. We’re all office dwellers now, mutely churning out spreadsheets for other spreadsheet producers. The theory makes sense as far as it goes. But something else has changed much more recently: a rejection of the very concept of masculinity. The polling company YouGov found that just 8 per cent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. Males are routinely presented as inherently dangerous, aggressive and animalistic, incapable of controlling their own instincts. You can see it on public transport, where government adverts announce that staring is sexual harassment.

Never judge a country by its airport road. Georgia’s, from international arrivals to the heart of Tbilisi, is impeccable. The George W. Bush highway (yes, really) is smooth asphalt, with chic electric cars humming down avenues, punctuated by spanking new Lukoil petrol stations with fuel at dirt-cheap prices. It is impeccably clean. And when you reach the parliament building downtown, they have almost finished clearing up the detritus from three consecutive nights of protests, rubber bullets, tear gas and riot police. Tbilisi’s highway was built during the country’s most recent economic sugar rush, when a good-looking young president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was in his brief but glamorous heyday.

Pundits writing for a young audience are always telling readers to ‘stop pretending to be working-class!’ and stop ‘fetishising the working class’. They seem more angered by the imitation of class than the iniquities of class itself. Singer Lily Allen and the rap star Yungblud have both been denounced on Twitter for – to paraphrase E.P. Thompson – the faking of the English working class. Personally, I don’t understand the fuss. For most of my youth I pretended to be working -class – and so did most of my middle--class mates (sorry, friends). And we were not alone. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the voices of youth all sounded working--class, especially the middle-class ones like Jagger, Bowie and, yes, that faux working-class hero himself, John Lennon.

Michael Caine is 90 this week, and he offers to accept questions by email, which he will then answer by email, as if we are communicating between galaxies. Normally this would bother me – gah, actors – but it is Michael Caine, so I can’t mind. Maurice Micklewhite’s invention Michael Caine – he named himself after The Caine Mutiny – is as luminous a piece of 20th-century British culture as Eleanor Rigby. There are some people you want to be happy. They deserve it.  He replies quickly: this is a functional man. What did I expect? He has been nominated for an Academy Award six times in four separate decades, and won twice, and he is still working. This is work.