Fed up with magazines only catering to male stereotypes, Martin Robinson set up a new kind of men’s bible

He explains why the revolution is overdue
Martin Robinson7 June 2018

Rewind exactly two years and I’ve just lost my job but handily gained a new life as a depressed drunk.

Cast adrift from the world of men’s magazines where I’d plied my trade, I felt humiliated, shamed, emptied out. I couldn’t get commissioned for freelance work anywhere so I wrote a novel, which didn’t get picked up.

What saved me was being a full-time dad for my children (two and four at the time), who never told me to ‘man up’, and a partner who convinced me I wasn’t entirely worthless, even as she picked up the slack and went full-time. Nevertheless, after a lifetime in the playpen of magazines, I was in a desperate position where I needed help with everything from ‘Nappy-rash or meningitis?’ to ‘How do you cook things that aren’t in breadcrumbs?’, plus a royal flush of anxiety issues.

There was little out there. Certainly nothing in men’s media, which had barely changed since the Nineties. Gentlemen’s glossies at one end — Power! Wealth! Status symbols! Elitism! James Bond! — and post-boobs lad titles at the other — Beer! Falling-over videos! Animal videos! Nihilism! James Bond! — with only a new lack of public interest to differentiate the eras. According to publishing, men have no interior life. The choices of being a man? The Suit, or The Slacker.

The seed of my new venture, an online ‘support network’ for men called The Book of Man, was duly sown, on to a barren wasteland. But as I developed the idea and gained investment, the ground shifted. Weinstein’s towel dropped and the world became appalled by men. The term ‘toxic masculinity’ caught an entire gender in its greasy net.

Many men thought, ‘fair enough.’ Such monsters deserved a comeuppance, and further, it seemed time for a broader reassessment of male behaviour. What I prefer to call ‘old-school masculinity’ still reigns but many younger men see it as a trap that screwed up our fathers and grandfathers, caged by the idea that ‘men are stoic and unbreakable’.

Despite this feeling, amid the social-media hurricane, men fell mostly silent. Partly, this was to listen. Partly it was fear of a backlash. Meanwhile I was desperate to get The Book of Man launched. My take was: why be afraid? Why not be inspired to seek change? Because right now really does feel like a watershed moment.

The Book of Man finally launched in April this year, with the aim of interrogating masculinity, most often by talking about issues men are supposed to deny: mental health, emotions, relationships, anxiety. We feel it’s our job to talk about such ‘weaknesses’, to normalise them, to stop men dealing with them in isolation, and to show there is help. The launch provoked a huge response from audience, press, and industry — ‘About f***ing time,’ is how one ad director put it.

We have partnered with the male suicide prevention charity Calm, and recruited Stephen Manderson, aka Professor Green, to be our columnist. He has swiftly become the perfect figurehead for our philosophy of showing what’s really going on with men: he writes electrifyingly about men’s greatest fears, such as loneliness, break-ups, illness and struggling against our pasts. We’ve also run stories on mental health in the Square Mile, how to treat the women in your life better, dad advice on how to assassinate nits and why it’s on men to call out the predators in our midst.

As such, The Book of Man may be the exact opposite of the men’s titles dominant when I entered the industry at Maxim as a young man, when I’d be quizzing models about serial killers, doing the Full Monty in a Brighton ‘hen club’ in February and listening to elder staffers tell me, ‘The only time readers see your words is when their sperm soaks through the pages.’

And that is precisely the point. From our tiny office in Peckham, with a staff of five big-thinkers, The Book of Man’s mission is to create a New Masculinity. A looser one, in which we can be sensitive, compassionate, creative, thoughtful, responsible and emotional, without being called a ‘great big ballerina.’

Illustration by Berta Vallo

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