A review by coronaurora
The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry

4.0

Impassioned and well-argued plea to all current and prospective men to take on their gender role with more emotional literacy, openness to failure and adaptability rather than donning the straitjackets handed down to them. I can't fault that one bit as the whole gender-as-learned-performance thesis has always had more traction for me than the overstated biological differences. It's filled with pithy dissection of the social mores, the "normal" defined and thrusted through cultural outlets by the Default White Man including the cinematic "gaze", the pathological habits in imprinting gender habits and tragicomic ways in which contemporary men seem to botch fitting themselves into the mould of the "Ideal Man". The extrapolations to societal and political disorder from problematic gender inhabitation gave me much to think about. Perry draws a lot from his own experiences and work which gave his opinions weight and I agreed with his informed little manifesto for manhood's future.