Machismo might be back in vogue, but boys are as frightened as ever

Telegraph

2 days ago

Fashion, famously, is a reflection of the zeitgeist. And the cover of this month's GQ magazine certainly captures the present mood. It features a grizzled, muscle-bound Brad Pitt leaning back against a wall, legs spread, glowering from under a fisherman's beanie with a look of murderous intent.
Inside, there's plenty more of this real-man aesthetic. Pitt – no doubt exhausted after another day down the mines – reclines on the bare mattress of an unmade bed, veins bulging on his tattooed biceps, his white T-shirt covered in smuts. Turn the page and we find him seemingly cosplaying as Vladimir Putin, smouldering in his aviator shades in the middle of a wild, rushing river. Raising the butch levels all the way up to Russian warmonger.
In case you hadn't noticed, machismo is back. More so, I think, than ever before in my lifetime.
When I was young, in what feels like a vanished Eden of global stability, men were fearlessly girly. Male pop stars wore eyeliner, frilly shirts and coloured braids in their hair, just like the teenage girls who swooned over them. Male actors – Pitt included – were slender, hairless, soft-lipped and doe-eyed. The sexiest man alive (Prince, of course) wore crop tops and feather boas, and stood 5ft 2ins in his spangly heels.
Today, with the exception of tiny Timothée Chalamet, all the heart-throbs look like massive sides of beef. So do the nerds, come to that. Jeff Bezos, the formerly pigeon-chested Amazon founder, has taken up weight-lifting, developed huge biceps and shaved his head so that he looks (at least with the sun behind him) like Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. Mark Zuckerberg has taken up martial arts and donned a gold medallion.
No teenage boy of my generation ever went to the gym, unless they had been picked for the Olympics. Whereas my sons work out diligently, as well as doing boxing, jiu-jitsu and muay thai. The eldest – an otherwise gentle, bookish sort – belongs to one of the many MMA (mixed martial arts) gyms springing up all over London, where he goes twice weekly for bouts of mutual head-kicking.
Some of this is just about appearances. We live in a very visual age, and boys are under almost as much pressure as girls to be physically perfect. But isn't there something more obvious – albeit subconscious – happening too? Mightn't they be preparing for an actual fight?
Their world is becoming more dangerous, both locally and geo-politically. It's useful, if you don't want to get mugged on your way home from school, to look like a tank. If you do get jumped, you need to know how to disarm your attacker. And one day, these skills may come in handy on a bigger battlefield.
All the teenagers I know believe they will have to fight in a war. They used to joke about it, back when Russia first invaded Ukraine and it all seemed impossibly mad. But now mad is the new normal, and the prospect of having to fight feels less amusing.
This is, I'm sure, one reason for the huge popularity of MMA among teenage boys. It's a much less rule-based, refined sport than old-fashioned boxing. You can do more or less whatever it takes to subdue your opponent: punching, kicking, elbowing, wrestling. In other words, it's more like a real fight. For real, frightened, future men.