Loss of manual jobs could be driving toxic masculinity, says Sting

The fact many men no longer use their hands and physicality on a daily basis may be driving some of the toxic traits in modern masculinity , according to Sting. The singer, who on Wednesday announced that his musical about the last days of a shipyard was coming to the West End this autumn , told the Guardian that one of the byproducts of deindustrialisation was the loss of physical productivity for men. He said: “I work with my hands every day as a musician, and I’m lucky. It’s a rare thing for modern men to actually use their hands and use their strengths to do anything. We’ve lost something there. “I don’t have any answers, but maybe the toxicity in society at the moment is [a result of the fact] that we’ve lost that direction for our energy, that male strength. It’s rare we have to use it.” The Last Ship, which debuted in Chicago in 2014 before a run on Broadway, focuses on the fate of men who work at a shipyard similar to Swan Hunter’s in Wallsend where Sting grew up, before the yards closed during deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 80s. Sting, who wrote the music for the show and will star in a run at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in September, said the closure of the shipyards began an era when the north of England was failed by successive governments . “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards,” he said. …