{"id":511989,"date":"2026-05-31T17:55:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T17:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/511989\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T17:55:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T17:55:10","slug":"sting-is-right-about-the-roots-of-toxic-masculinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/511989\/","title":{"rendered":"Sting is right about the roots of toxic masculinity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sting, formerly the lead singer of The Police, was recently interviewed<\/a> in the Guardian about his new musical, The Last Ship. The show is about the social tragedy that befalls a shipbuilding community when the industry leaves, and there are no more ships to build.<\/p>\n

The singer, who grew up in one such community in Wallsend in the north of England, aims to make a social statement about the effects of deindustrialization, specifically on men, when manual jobs dry up. \u201cI don\u2019t have any answers,\u201d he told the newspaper. \u201cBut maybe the toxicity in society at the moment is [a result of the fact] that we\u2019ve lost that direction for our energy, that male strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

This can be a touchy subject, and it would probably be best for everyone to retire the phrase \u201ctoxic masculinity\u201d, which can come off as an epithet used to blame working-class men for their lack of economic prospects. Nonetheless, in broad strokes, he\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

Way back in the late Eighties, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin warned<\/a> about what might happen in the transition away from industrial work toward the vaunted \u201cservice economy\u201d. He predicted that those workers who had nothing to sell but their brawn would never again be able to \u201cuse muscle power as an upward mobility\u201d as so many generations of working-class men had in decades past.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s precisely what happened. As deindustrialization destroyed high-wage jobs, and along with them the trade-union movement, it trapped working-class men in an economy of low and stagnant wages; or worse, it sent them into a spiral of addiction and despair<\/a>. Consider, according to a 2018 report<\/a>, \u201cthe share of good [living wage] jobs for workers without a bachelor\u2019s degree declined from about 60% of workers in 1991 to 45% in 2015.\u201d And the downward slide has only continued since then. Overall, blue-collar jobs have simply disappeared, down 30% since the Nineties.<\/p>\n

The toll this has taken on working-class men has been staggering, yet it has remained largely invisible to professional-class observers and the wider media. Consider that, since<\/a> 1979, college-educated workers have seen their wages steadily, if unevenly, increase \u2014 up 20% for college-educated men and 38% for their female peers. The same can\u2019t be said for non-college-educated workers whose wages stagnated over this period. Working-class women, for instance, experienced a measly 4% wage growth. But the story is much worse for working-class men, whose earnings have actually decreased by 10-18%.<\/p>\n

For those with nothing but sweat to sell, it\u2019s become increasingly difficult to earn a living. That has had profound social effects downstream. It means working-class men have more fraught romantic and social lives; non-college-educated males have the highest<\/a> rate of loneliness. As a result, family life has become more elusive for these men. These failings compound, too, as chronic unemployment is not a dignified condition. Self-esteem erodes. And in a society where success is measured by consumption, being broke, idle and alone is a recipe for resentment. In fact, it\u2019s the fuel that powers all those \u201cManosphere\u201d types whose brand of cartoonish, perverted masculinity represents a visceral attempt at imposing some form of male self-worth under economic conditions that have made muscle power, and the men who relied on it, redundant.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take some essentializing theory of masculine virtue to accept the basic fact that blue-collar men have been hit hardest by the transition to a \u201cknowledge economy\u201d, which has obliterated good manual jobs. Similarly, we don\u2019t need an economic policy that sends women \u201cback to the kitchen\u201d or any other policy of cultural backwardness to fix these problems. A jobs-first trade agenda, robust industrial policies, and generational investments in infrastructure could go a long way to bringing back family-sustaining wages for men and revitalizing the labor movement. These might even be the answer to our toxic politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sting, formerly the lead singer of The Police, was recently interviewed in the Guardian about his new musical,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":511990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[268],"tags":[221937,221938,434,96365,18,117,19,17,121807,18797,28911,221939,5279],"class_list":["post-511989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-bayard-rustin","tag-blue-collar","tag-celebrities","tag-deindustrialisation","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-masculinity","tag-sting","tag-the-guardian","tag-the-last-ship","tag-uncategorized"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}