Since ancient times, elders have expressed worries and complaints about young people, their behaviour, their manners, their lack of respect and responsibility. Most of this concern, including its more recent social-scientific forms, has been about young men.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of the concept of adolescence, along with a number of state measures and organisations designed to keep young working-class men healthily and gainfully occupied while developing respectable habits in their leisure time. Between the two world wars, social scientists turned their attention to problems of adolescence, notably in connection with deviancy and juvenile delinquency. A central argument was that the adolescent peer group was a key milieu for the transition from childhood to adulthood; when this transition became deviant, the clique could become a ‘gang’ in the negative sense. Displays of adolescent masculine toughness, competition and heterosexual experience and prowess were seen as central in Western societies to ‘gangs’ of either the functional or deviant sort.
Only after World War II did the concept of youth culture come into focus. The term ‘teenager’ had been invented in the USA in the 1930s and soon circulated in popular culture. Sociologists saw the new category as connected with the advent of the youth market. Muncie (2004:56) cites the first notable sociological study of youth culture in Britain as being Abrams’ (1959) The Teenage Consumer, which observes that ‘the consumer habits of youth were dominated by the interests of working-class males’. When W.B. Miller (1958) noted that working-class youth is intent on ‘toughness, trouble, smartness, excitement, fate and autonomy’ (cited in Brake 1985:7), he meant male youth. Well into the 1970s, studies of youth cultures often referred, by default, to male youth cultures.
Research associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s attempted to grasp a series of successive youth ‘subcultures’ in post-war Britain as ‘magical’ ideological resolutions of real contradictions in the experience of working-class youth. Accompanying the breakdown of tightly knit geographical working-class communities, these contradictions involved the restructuring of the labour market that particularly disadvantaged working-class young men: ‘Looking for opportunities in their father’s trades, and lacking the qualifications for the new industries, they were relegated to jobs as van boys, office boys, packers, warehousemen, etc., and long spells out of work’ (Cohen 1972, cited in Clarke 1976:32). From the appropriation and adaptation of the style of Edwardian dandies by the Teds in the 1950s to the exaggeratedly working-class braces and workboots style of the Skinheads in the 1970s, these working-class men’s styles worked their imagined solutions by performing new modes of masculinity.
Fighting, along with other displays of physical prowess and violence, was important to all these white British male youth ‘subcultures’, from the Teds, through the Mods and Rockers, to the Skinheads. The Teds were very ‘touchy’ about ‘real or imagined’ insults, especially about their clothes or style, often leading to fights (Jefferson 1976:82). Fights with other groups of Teds cemented the group and emphasised loyalty to it. Fights also involved asserting control over particular territory. Racism was often involved in targeting those who did not ‘belong’. The Skinheads likewise connected their various ‘mobs’ to their localities, expressing solidarity, especially in the face of ‘trouble’, violently exercising their resentments on ‘outsiders’ such as immigrants through ‘Paki-bashing’, and celebrating a ‘hard’ masculinity policed through ‘queerbashing’ (Clarke 1976).
Willis (1977) showed how both misogyny and racism were bound up in the white working-class male youth culture which he studied in the British Midlands in the 1970s. This culture was tied to the reproduction of the very class relations which exploited workingclass youth and which they resented. ‘Having a laff and ‘doing nothing’ became earmarks of masculinity (Corrigan 1979). Displays of physical prowess and sexual success, bravado, risk-taking, and winning and defence of respect are all crucial to the male youth culture of subaltern strata. The celebration of physical prowess is related to traditional labour processes for working-class men (Willis 1977), and the emphasis on respect compensates for the lack of it for the marginalised in class society (Bourgois 1995). Bourgois shows how the male youth culture which maintains a feeling of dignity among crack dealers in the US Puerto Rican barrio is profoundly patriarchal and riven by contradictions. Status in this youth culture is derived from masculine violence, sexual exploits and substance abuse, yet these behaviours undermine the basis of adult masculine status, which depends on heading and providing for families.
Relatively little has been written about ruling-class male youth cultures, since they cause less concern. Yet ‘gangs’ are equally central to male youth culture in the ruling class, above all in the elite private boarding school. These male youth cultures split emotion from friendship and devalorise affection and caring. Interpersonal relations are instrumental, and trust is seen as weakness. Rulingclass young men who express feelings are mistrusted; their masculinity depends upon separating rationality and emotion. The expression of feelings other than anger, jubilation, scorn and jocularity is considered feminine, and homosexual relationships are despised. Bullying is endemic, institutionalised in the hierarchy and indeed celebrated. Competitive individualism rules, and ruthlessness is inculcated (Donaldson and Poynting 2006). In men whose work and familial relations are undergoing profound change we may now fmd new and distinct male youth cultures emerging.
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