Toxic masculinity isn't caused by a loss of manual work

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The musician and actor suggested this week that toxic masculinity has come about as a result of men not “using their hands” as manual labour jobs are on the decline.

“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,” he told the Guardian.

To be fair, Sting is pretty handy. My first exposure to him, as it was with most celebrities, was an episode of The Simpsons, where he takes the lead in digging Bart out of a well. Outside of a cartoon reality, Sting grew up in North Tyneside and worked in shipyards before finding success with The Police - and even then, he continued to get stuck in with setting up stages with amps and microphones.

Sting made the comments in promotion of his play The Last Ship, about his hometown’s shipyard industry, and he proceeded to go full-blown northern grandad in stating both how hard everybody worked back then, and how it shaped both individual character and a community. He didn’t quite add that he walked four miles to school in the cold and got up before he went to bed, but you get the picture.

Sting’s point seems to be that in the absence of hard manual labour, men are using their hands instead to make awful comments online and engage in the manosphere. Instead of lifting planks of wood to build ships, they are lifting weights to show off their physiques and look intimidating. Community is no longer taking satisfaction in a job well done, but found in a comments thread where toxic opinion breeds.

He might have a point. One in seven Gen Z men were found by YouGov to think that progress for women has been bad for men, while one in eight say they like Andrew Tate. Six per cent would even go as far as to say they do not like women at all.

The problem is there, but nostalgia is never the solution. It is not a bad thing that northern men now have options beyond working in their local pit or shipyard.

Sting’s view that toxic masculinity is caused by a loss of manual jobs is unhelpful. Not only does it suggest that those with white-collar or desk jobs are liable to have horrible views, but it also suggests that we need to create more, potentially even unnecessary, manual jobs for the sake of stopping a problem which could otherwise be tackled through education, healthy debate between male friends, encouragement of clubs and societies, and measures to stop toxicity breeding online. A need for community is just the same as it was when Sting was growing up, but it just might look a little different in an era when you left school at 15 to work six days a week on a freezing dockyard.

Unlike Sting, I am completely useless at any practical job. I failed woodwork, electronics and textiles at school, and only scraped by in food technology. Aged 26, it took me two days to badly put up an Ikea bookshelf that my dad stepped in to correct in an hour.

But this doesn’t mean I should give up and accept I was born in the wrong era. I at least try to improve, within my limitations, and setting up AV equipment at church is a job I do pretty badly, which perhaps meets the criteria of being manual and within a community.

But you don’t need to be a church-goer. Be it at home, in your neighbourhood, or at a Men’s Shed it is possible in 2026 for men to connect socially. And even if men are not in a manual job (of which many still exist, Sting) we, as a gender, should desire to add DIY skills as a string to our bow. A decline in manual work doesn’t have to lead men to have aspirations only as far as emulating an influencer.

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William Mata is a writer and SEO Editor for LBC

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

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