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This is one of the first films to draw an explicit relationship between male inadequacy as a result of sudden unemployment and male anxiety concerning his sexual potency. But in a final, hilarious, role reversal ending of the film, it seems to indicate that if men lighten up and don’t take themselves so seriously as ‘males’, things can get better!

Many of the popular films of the 1980’s in particular reflect nervousness in the face of advanced technology. There is a deep fear that man will be overtaken by the machine. In fact it seems that the man can only be a hero if he is incorporated into a machine. In the film ‘Robo Cop’, neither Alex Murphy nor Robo Cop is heroic as separate identities. It is this fusion of the man and the machine that reinstates a heroic masculine identity. By the time viewers reach the film ‘Robo Cop 3’ the USA. Police force are literally apologising for being merely men ‘we are cops, nothing more, we are not robots, if that’s what you mean’, states one anxious policeman. Robo cop is but one of dozens of such films incorporating a mixture of man and technology to create a super-hero. In the 1999 Box Office hit ‘The Matrix’ Keanu Reeves finally defeats the super villains who are machines disguised as men, but only after undergoing a machine induced nemeses which turns into a suitably powerful avenger.

 Masculinity is now legitimised by technology, rather than imposed by sheer physical or legal force-witness the recent war in Afghanistan. But hand in hand with technological developments is a collapse of certain fundamental beliefs. The questioning of what it means to be a man in a world constantly encroached by technology and women’s using the technology is inescapable.

One of the main focus pints of the crises in masculinity is the difficulty of combining private emotions and the public, the emotional and intuitive feelings and the rational. It is the struggle to protect the private and the personal life in the work place of an increasingly voracious and competitive economic system. People now go to bed early in order to spend more time at work and if anything has to be cut out its leisure time! As Oliver Bennett says in ‘Cultural Pessimism: narratives of decline in the post-modern world’-‘this latest phase of capitalism has reached a point of historic crisis, where the very structure of human societies are threatened”. Society has indeed sold its soul to capitalism!!
 		In the world today what physical aspects of masculinity can be said to be important, given that even war has been totally given over to the domain of technology? To be a brave soldier means nothing if you can be wiped out by a finger pushing a button on bombs of mass destruction and not even see your enemy in the flesh.

In Will Self’s book ‘Perfidious Man’ he says: ‘his manhood resides in his relationships with it, as a partner, as a father, as a patriarch…” these aspects are the true criteria of masculinity.

Society must endeavour to find a method of understanding why men behave in the ways that they do and how they might release themselves and women from the chains that such behaviour imposes, and to participate in the setting up of a post-patriarchal age. A mind boggling difficult and challenging manoeuvre. .


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