Introduction

Abstract

Masculinity is increasingly being addressed as an issue. Even in popular culture (where it tends not to speak its name) masculinity is being treated with increasing self-consciousness. The Full Monty, for example, directly concerns itself with a sense of what is currently happening to men. Its male characters have all lost their jobs in the steel industry in Sheffield and are shown to be suffering the psychological consequences of this loss of a traditional source of male power. The central character is estranged from his wife and will be denied access to his son unless he comes up with £300. His overweight friend is suffering from sexual problems which are said to have started when he became unemployed. The film assumes that gender roles are changing. An early scene shows a woman using a male urinal. The men respond to their situation by becoming strippers, by adopting a role traditionally regarded as feminine, and the film therefore focuses on the male body and male self-regard and finds much of its comedy in this implied role reversal. This stresses the men’s disturbing new vulnerability. The older man among them is using anti-wrinkle cream; the overweight man laments the absence of an ‘anti-fat bastard cream’; there is an anxiety throughout, explicit and implicit, about penis size.