Man-ufactured Reality - with Gerry Parke

If we looked hard enough, we'd all find embarrassing photos of ourselves that exist both online and offline. But what happens when you've moved on from a certain stage of your life and photos of you are shared without warning or permission?

When a high school friend shared photos of Gerry Parke on Facebook, his reaction was visceral. In those photos, Gerry saw himself trying to mirror and perform a rigid masculine role that was celebrated and enforced by those around him. Having since grown from feeling confined to that role, to unpack the emotions that the photos provoked and the idea of performative masculinity, Gerry picked up his paintbrush.

Topics include: masculinity as a construct, the performance of masculinity online, permanence, the right to be forgotten, kids on social media and more.

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Shownotes:

You can find Gerry's work on his personal website and follow him on Instagram. If you're in Auckland, New Zealand, you can go to Gerry's solo show at Whitespace Gallery (on until February 14th, 2020).

Resources mentioned in this podcast:


Transcription:

Lucy O’Connor (Introduction): Hey, it’s Lucy here and just quickly, in case you haven’t heard, Selfie Reflective is now available on Apple podcasts, as well as Spotify, Stitcher and Deezer Radio, so wherever you listen, Selfie Reflective will be. I’ve left links in the show notes. If you do like this show, you can help improve it by emailing through some critical feedback, or you can actively show your support by leaving a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts, which really helps in these early days. So thank you in advance. 

The audio in this episode is a little crackly at times - the joys and the woes of talking to someone over the internet - but we have salvaged it to an incredible point so that you can get all of the ideas and take aways. I’m stoked you’re enjoying the show. Onwards we go. 

[Music plays, intro continued]

If you and I share a similar algorithm on social media you might find articles that unpack the idea of toxic masculinity popping up on your newsfeed. And if you and I share similar interests, it’s likely that you’ll click on those articles too. Despite some popular opinion, toxic masculinity does not declare that men are toxic for simply being born a man. 

Rather it looks at masculinity as a construct, as a traditional and outdated idea of what a man should be. How he should operate, what he should represent. Things like physical strength, emotional stuntedness, dominance, financial success and sexual gain have historically defined masculinity. But trying to conform to this construct is incredibly damaging to men themselves who vie to reach these masculine ideas. 

Helping us explore today’s theme of masculinity on social media is Gerry Parke, an artist who graduated from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. Gerry is predominantly a figurative painter and much of his work centers around unpacking his experience of having grown up in rural New Zealand, an environment that celebrates and encourages those traditional masculine roles. 

Gerry became interested in exploring this theme after a high school friend tagged him in some photos on Facebook. But these weren’t recent photos. These were photos of actual photos that had been taken of Gerry when he was a high school. These photos depicted Gerry and his mates, well, I’ll let Jerry share that with you shortly. 

Having had some distance between being at high school and those photos being taken, and then having those photos dredged up and shared on social media, it kind of made him feel uncomfortable.

Lucy: Gerry Parke, welcome to the show. 

Gerry Parke: Thank you. 

Lucy: Gerry, it would be great if you could just start by telling us a bit about your art practice? 

Gerry : So there’s a quote by Grayson Perry, from his book, The Descent of Man, which kind of sums up the core thesis of my practice, I suppose. And it’s the male role in developed countries is nearly all performance, a pantomime of masculinity. This idea that masculinity is more, been simply an inherent quality of the male sex, this performance conducted by men based upon friendships and gendered expectations of a societal construct. That’s kind of the nuts and bolts. 

Until recently my practice was reflecting on my own personal history, unpacking my own experiences and examining how I and those around me learn and then propagated these ideas of masculinity. 

Lucy: So, some of your work centres around some photos that your friend shared of your on Facebook. Can you tell us what those photos looked like? 

Gerry: Most of them are parties, but there were some adventures. I grew up in a small town, so everyone was friends with everyone in a kind of loose sense, so there was, yeah, photos of us at parties in various states of drunkenness, generally and a couple of rugby trips, on the bus to go and play an away game or something. Generally there was a photo taken on a pub crawl at the way home and there was various states of undress. 

Some of them were overtly macho, there was a little bit of bravado going on, but some of them were just these images of mates just hanging out. Having done a little bit of research into, or thinking about painting the performance masculinity, these just shone out like beacons.

It was interesting painting photos of me and my mates growing up.. It wasn’t necessarily about nostalgia, it was more almost.. It was like that kind of ambivalence almost between nostalgia and distain. I don’t want to be harshly critical or anything of these guys because I am one of them. You just did what you know at the time, you know? I't’s all very well being so woke now [laughs] but at the time I was just a young idiot. 

One of the catalysts that get me thinking of that, this was an article I read a couple of years ago by Katherine Dolan. She grew up in a similar rural background to what I kind of grew up in. She’s like the New Zealander, she grew up in like a staunchly anti-intellectual place that worshiped Spartan values of stoicism, physical strength, group cohesion, too. So that’s.. Not talking about feelings or anything like that. 

These are the kind of clichés of the New Zealand male, growing up in South Canterbury in the 90s, it was just, you know, this bloke-iness, dumb [laughter] behaviour, risk taking, conspicuous, over consumption of alcohol.. Your car, you know, was an extension of your manliness.. You don’t have any other options for mates, but I always felt a little bit cringey about the kind of performance. 

And I kind of did feel it is a bit of a performance then, but like I said, I didn’t recognise it until later and the benefit of hindsight, I suppose. 

Lucy: If I were to ask you about your personal relationship to social media, like when did you get Facebook? What kinds of things did you post? 

Gerry: I was a pretty late adopter. I’m a bit of a Luddite really, honestly. I didn’t get a mobile phone until I was well into my 20’s probably, embarrassingly. I remember getting Facebook and basically the general response was, what the fuck, you’re on Facebook? [Laughter] I thought you’d never be on Facebook!

Yeah and I think it was like, why the hell would I want to be friends with that person on Facebook? I didn’t even like that person in real life. I’m a very cynical person, I guess. 

Lucy: This is why we get on, I think. 

Gerry: I guess I’m old-school because I grew up in the pre-internet age that if I had a friendship, it would be worth having face-to-face. The only time I ever used Facebook was on the toilet anyway [laughs]. 

Lucy: Too much information!

Gerry: Yeah. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): You can see why Gerry felt such a visceral reaction to the photos that were shared of him on Facebook. Not only had he moved on with that part of his life, he also wasn’t hugely active on the medium anyway. I was interested to explore how this performance of masculine identity might play out on social media for people who were growing up as teenagers when social media came out. So I did the modern investigative thing and stalked people on Facebook. These are a few of the trends I saw:

A photo of a guy leaning against and admiring his freshly waxed car with a caption that says: ‘My favourite gir'l’. Videos of guys at festivals yell, singing into his selfie camera while sculling beer and grabbing at nearby women. Photos of a single man with his arms around a row of conventionally attractive women. A group of boys posing at a party.. Only these poses are kind of strange. 

One has his back to the camera, but is looking back over his shoulder seductively. One is pulling the fingers. One is staring down the lens like a zombie. One has his pants down while the other is slapping his butt. It’s strange. And of course, they all have beer cans. But what influences this kind of masculine behaviour on social media? 

Well, today people like Dan Bilzerian, Conor McGregor, Floyd Mayweather, Dan Toutuni, Travers Beynon and any man who tries to exemplify this heightened lad-like behaviour online, are celebrated for their excessive performance of masculinity. A performance that is now reinforced and propped up with likes, comments, shares and tags. So it’s no wonder that everyday men think that mimicking this type of behaviour might get them kudos in the realm of masculinity. 

Gerry: Unless a young man’s schooling in masculinity is very alternative, most guys have a fairly kind of cartoonish vision of the manhood and it boils down to the cliché. And these components are strictly enforced and every man has a sense that they’re under scrutiny and being policed by other men, just as they check up on other guy’s manliness. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): I was also reminded about a time that I spent a day on Waiheke Island with a group of friends. There we met a group of guys who were from Scotland and we spent a bit of time hanging out with them. Later on, one of them added me on Facebook and - I probably wouldn’t accept them today, but I did back then, okay? We’ve all done it!

I thought nothing of it, but a couple of days later I was scrolling through my feed and I saw a post that confirmed we’d become friends. I clicked on the comments. Underneath were a raft of derogatory comments aimed at me, implying that as a person in a female body, I was something he was sexually entitled to. Nice one bro, get it bro, hope you hit that bro. Of course, I deleted him as a friend, but the damage was kind of done. 

Gerry: There’s a kind of classic divide between that guy, he’s really nice in real life. He wouldn’t say that to your face, or none of his friends would either. 

Lucy: Yeah, but it was like, it wasn’t even me, you know, it was like the idea of what I represent or the potential of what I represent as someone in a female body. And it was just so dehumanising. And I know that that experience is so mild and so common and that’s what sort of scares me about how masculinity can show up on social media. 

Gerry: I guess there’s the uncertainty in how to behave. ‘You can’t say anything to a woman anymore’. The rugs been taken out from under them, but you know, they’re not willing to look at the actual harm that their masculinity has been causing the woman. They’ve never felt that harm. It’s empathy, isn’t it, or a curiosity and those are kind of two things that are crushed in boys, you know? In a traditional kind of masculine kind of learnt environment, they’re unaware of the harm perpetuating through ignorance basically. 

It’s the way society works, so you know, they feel like, oh, but it’s normal. It’s funny in a way, getting back to the roles we learn. When you’re kids, you come out the same, what’s learnt and what’s innate and what’s inherited as well. How different are we really? 

Lucy: I think when men are presented with the idea that they are a part of the problem, or that they are not helping the problem, it immediately kind of feels like, I didn’t do this or I didn’t do that and they have no concept of how, even what they tolerate or what they turn a blind eye to can perpetuate the same ideas. I mean where did you start on that journey? 

Gerry: Well for me it was really in Grayson Perry’s The Descent of Man. It’s really simply written, easy read and it basically just kind of lays out pretty simple feminist theory from the perspective of a man. I don’t know if you know Grayson Perry, he’s a British artist, he’s a cross-dresser. So I mean it was kind of a unique perspective, kind of being both sides. 

He grew up kind of working class, Northern England, a bit of a punk, I think. And once again, having a dad that loved him but never showed it, the same kind of perpetuated roles of how we should behave. Then to go quite extremely the other way and having this ultra ego of a glamorous female artist, is quite a unique take on masculinity. 

Having said that, he’s probably preaching to the converted. The people that need to read that book; it’s probably an impossible task. And once again, it would probably just confirm their own bias. There’s also a great band that I’m into at the moment called Idles. They feel like the most aggressive, brutal kind of punk band. But their songs are all about toxic masculinity. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): Now, I’m not allowed to add any Idles music here because of potential copyright issues, but I’m pretty sure I can say some of the lyrics. So here goes:

‘The mask of masculinity is a mask. A mask that’s wearing me. The mask, the mask, the mask, I’m a real boy, boy and I cry. I like myself and I want to try. This is why you never see your father cry. ‘

Gerry: Yeah, it’s really interesting, taking it apart a bit, taking it down a peg which was pretty cool. 

Lucy: Yeah, I watched this great documentary the other night called The Mask We Live In. It was all about masculinity, which was very timely for this conversation. I’ll send it to you after this. 

Gerry: You probably know more than me! [Laughter]

Lucy: I doubt that! I haven’t lived as (a man), you know. But it was so fascinating and so, it made this idea of masculinity seem so lonely, where you feel that you have these emotions, but the only way that you are allowed to express them, and in fact the way you express them is encouraged, when it manifests as anger or violence or frustration. 

Gerry: Yeah. 

Lucy: Or it’s sexual gain, and all these horribly damaging things where it doesn’t help anyone basically. 

Gerry: No. 

Lucy: It affirms for yourself your idea of masculinity for perhaps a second and then your friends might give you some feedback that that says, look, that was really manly, nice one bro. And then you do the next thing that will give you that same feedback. 

Gerry: My kind of focus, I guess, was on the burden of masculinity and it doesn’t have to be toxic masculinity, you know, masculinity, obviously it’s harmful to those outside of it. It’s harmful to the guys as well. It’s a straightjacket of onerous roles and impossible expectations. I can’t begin to kind of find an answer for all the world’s problems. It would undermine and kind of downplay feminists that have gone before me. 

So my focus on how masculinity is harming ourselves and it’s loneliness, you know? I watched some kind of clip on YouTube the other day and it was specifically about guys my age, and how our friendship base just dwindles. We get married, we have kids, you don’t make any new friends and all our old friends are doing the same thing we are. We go for months without talking to another guy and if we do, it’s about something superficial like sport or whatever. 

I read an article today by Jack Erwin, and he said, “How are you feeling today dad?” And he said, “Better,” and then he went to the bathroom and died of a heart attack. 

Lucy: Oh wow. 

Gerry: It wasn’t until the coroner’s report that they discovered that he’d had heart attacks in the past and he was on medication for his health. But it was like the family were the last to know. Cancer rates in the UK, 50/50 for men and women, as you’d expect, but the difference were higher for the male, was because they don’t seek help early enough. 

Lucy: And is that, do you think, down to how they’re socialised and -

Gerry: Yeah, historic kind of, she’ll be all right, don’t want to seek help; don’t want to talk about it. 

Lucy: So, I want to kind of touch on this idea that photos on social media can be shared from both the present, or the past. For me I get a sense that it’s really difficult to move on from things when they are permanently recorded on social media. I almost think we’re denied the right to move on in some ways because, like when I look back at photos of me at university or something and I think, oh man, I don’t like, it’s so embarrassing. 

But it brings up all these things that I might not feel or see otherwise, you know? It kind of keeps this looping back on the same ideals or feeling the same sense of shame or whatever it might be. 

Gerry: Yeah, I said before about painting those images and why I wanted to paint them because nostalgia is traditionally, or whatever, it’s a wistful sentimental union, for not only for the past, but who you were in the past. And because I felt quite awkward about that, I wanted to try and change it in a way, you know. By painting it I thought I might be able to address some of those issues that were kind of problematic for me, I guess. 

And it’s how I was trying to address that or unpack that in my art. It’s funny thought, it’s permanent, but a photograph has become so ephemeral in itself, like the whole medium is so fleeting now. A photograph used to be, like a permanent record of how things were. Because we’re so bombarded and saturated with images now, and there’s great statistics about how many photos of sunsets that there are on the internet, we don’t even pay a second glance. 

You’re scrolling through social media, how long do you spend on each post? So it’s a funny juxtaposition of the permanence and just disposable nature. Something that Zadie Smith was saying about the social media, the power they have now, you know?  

Lucy: Absolutely. 

Gerry: [The majority of us, we must be aware that modifying our behaviour 0.15.40].

Lucy (thinks aloud): Now, if you’ve listened to episode two of Selfie Reflective with Alex Beattie, you’ll know a bit more about the attention economy. During our conversation, Alex and I also touched on this issue of permanence and he had some really fascinating insights too. 

(Section from previous episode)

Alex Beattie: Part of the reason why some people have come up with the term, ‘the right to be forgotten,’ you know, to your point, should things that have been created in digital spaces just stay there forever? Or should they, if you think about a physical photo, they do deteriorate. Things do deteriorate in physical spaces, should things deteriorate in a digital space. 

Privacy is actually a form of freedom. To have privacy is to be able to live a life without the fear of making mistakes, of being judged or doing something embarrassing. To have elements of agency or control over what other people know about you. And I think the right to be forgotten was argued on the premise that after seven years, maybe your data should be able to be deleted.

Lucy: Like tax receipts!

Alex: And maybe we should be thinking about other types, the right to disconnect. I mean that’s also appeared in some countries. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): There are some photos of me on Facebook from my university days that I now sort of cringe at. It’s not that anyone else would find these photos shocking or use them against me, it’s just that I feel uncomfortable and that currently they exist online forever, whether they’re on my profile or not. Not only this, but I don’t own the images as I would a physical photo. Someone at Facebook does.

I for one would definitely like the option to choose to have them permanently deleted and have the choice to leave behind a past that no longer resonates with me. When I was going through my Achilles ordeal while running Monday Hustle, my retired personal brand, because I was loyal to being #authentic for my audience, I was posting some of the details online. 

But at the time I only considered that my audience would access this information. But now in reality, anyone who digs around has access to some very personal information about my medical history, and that’s information that I’d really like to have ownership over. Having awareness about this stuff has definitely made me really consider what I’m comfortable posting and publishing online, and I’d love to hear your own thoughts around this. 

Maybe go take a look back at your own early Facebook photos and let me know how they make you feel. Maybe you yourself have had an online identity that you’d now like to just leave behind already. The concerning thing for me is, I have made, what I now see as ignorant mistakes as an adult. So what about the kids? As someone with kids, what’s your opinion on how much screen time or how much access or the idea of putting photos of your kids on social media, for example? 

Gerry: Not really, although I broke that rule, it’s not really a rule. I don’t know, I just feel kind of uncomfortable about it because I don’t know who is going to see it, where it’s going to be used and it’s out there forever, you know, as you were saying. My kids have the right to kind of be guardians of their own online identities and if I’m sticking shit up all the time, they might not want that in 20 years’ time. But you know, having said that, really most of their peers will have. I just kind of feel uncomfortable about sticking photos of my kids -

Lucy: It’s strange now that as parents you kind of have the power to shape their offline identities and their online identities, if you choose to publish that sort of thing. You know, the way you present your children is now something that you can control. 

Gerry: Your own little brand.

Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. 

Gerry: It is what it is really isn’t it? I mean it’s like we’ve cut to the crux of the online identity thing, as a brand isn’t it really? I guess as my kids get older and they get on social media and I don’t know how to set up boundaries and stuff on it, how to teach them about what they should post and who they should talk to and teach them that it is all performance and it’s all highly modified behaviour. I don’t know, come back to me in five years and maybe I’ll have some answers. 

Lucy: So, do you have hope for the future? [Laughs] Social media?

Gerry: No, not really.

Lucy: Oh geez [laughter]. 

Gerry: Not really, can’t say I do. I mean maybe this is just a small bubble and it’ll move onto something else. Because technology is accelerating at a rapid pace and we’ll be into augmented reality and AI before they know it and it might just completely change the playing field. It’s another discussion that one. 

Lucy: Absolutely! That’ll be in five years’ time when I check in about what your kids are up to on social media. We’ll talk about AI and virtual reality, the merits of that [laughs]. Gerry Parke, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I know that your kids will be okay with a father who is so progressive, your views on the social media landscape, and also really extremely damaging gender roles. So yeah, really appreciate your time. 

Gerry: No worries. 

Lucy (Outro): How are you feeling? Did that episode make you think about how you might enforce certain gendered expectations on other genders, or maybe even your own gender? Did that episode challenge you or make you think about masculinity in relation to social media any differently? Maybe you’re busy looking through an account to follow, or things you like and are beginning to question what that reinforces. 

You’ll find links to all the resources mentioned in this podcast in the show notes, plus if you’re in Auckland city, you’re in luck because Gerry Parke currently has a solo show on at Whitespace Gallery in Grey Lynn. You can head along to see his work and explore some of the ideas that were discussed on this podcast through the medium of paint. 

Gerry’s incredible exhibition, which is called Cut From the Cloth, is running until 14th February (2020). If you liked the show so far, please rate and review in Apple podcasts and get in touch via email with any critical feedback. Until next week, I’m Lucy O, thank you so much for listening.

Selfie Reflective is written, hosted and produced by me, Lucy O, final sound quality and quality control is all thanks to Tom Frankish. 


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Lucy O'Connor