“I was a sensitive kid,” he recalls, “and that phrase ‘man up’ always irked me, before I really found out why. I was never good at sports, I did theatre and I liked to paint, but there was this construct of what it is to be a man, and I wanted to be like that. But I also hated it, because I felt that if I wasn’t that, I was a let-down. At the same time, that behaviour seemed so unnatural to me – all the shit that surrounds that whole idea really bothered me, and it always has.
“When you get out of adolescence, you find your feet and figure out who you are – or you try to, anyway,” he continues. “I knew I was a heterosexual binary dude, so I knew where I was at with my sexuality, but when I was really young, it was like, ‘I like all this other stuff, so does that mean I’m not, like, a guy? What does it mean?’ I saw so many kids who were sensitive like me suffer – and I even knew some kids who killed themselves because of it. So many people have so much trauma from this idea that you can’t bare your feelings because you’re a man and you have to man up; that showing your emotions is being vulnerable and being vulnerable is weak. That’s always bothered me. It’s something I really felt that I had to sing about.”
Although Henry believes that showing emotion has become less stigmatised in recent years, he also doesn’t think that the notion of what constitutes ‘real’ masculinity has disappeared entirely. Rather, he feels that because of social media and the pressures of the internet age, the world has become even more compartmentalised. That means it’s easier to find like-minded people than it ever was before, but the issues and the prejudices that people previously encountered, sadly, still remain.
“Toxic masculinity has become part of the conversation,” he says. “People reject the idea a lot more commonly than they used to. But in so many parts of the world – even where I live right now – it’s still incredibly prevalent. I remember being a little punk kid, wearing skinny jeans, and being made fun of in school and called names by ‘lad’ lads. Now every fucking Creatine-guzzling knobhead wears skinny jeans. I also see a lot of butch lads’ lads and Geordie Shore motherfuckers wearing make-up. I’m not shaming them for that, but if you were to tell the kids that used to pick on me and my friends in school that 10 years later they would be wearing skinny jeans and foundation, they would have punched you in the face.”
So that archetypal, toxic notion of masculinity isn’t quite dead then?
“I think,” ponders Henry, “that the idea of what a ‘man’ can be has changed, at least aesthetically, but we’re a long way from men being comfortable about being vulnerable. I think a lot of it is down to the individual. People need to start asking themselves hard questions. Sometimes, the hardest part is being honest with yourself. You’d be surprised how much shit you lie to yourself about every day, just to push things away. The further you push them away, it becomes comfortable and easy to put things in a little box and not think about your problems. But as soon as you start saying these things out loud, you can start to ingest them and begin sharing them with other people. I’ve a way to go yet, but I feel I’m really vulnerable in the lyrics on this record, and that was a big challenge for me. I’m a fairly heart-on-sleeve kind of guy compared to a lot of my male friends, because I had those problems when I was younger. I learned that the only way I could get through this was to talk and not bottle things up, because it makes it real when you do that – you can’t hide quite as well. Never be afraid to reach out, because most people will always want to help. I’d encourage anyone who’s having any sort of difficulty in their life to do that.”