JAKARTA - Sting has an interesting theory about the rise of "toxic masculinity". According to the Grammy-winning singer, one of the causes could be related to the loss of many manual jobs that used to give men space to channel energy, skills, and identity.
According to a report by HuffPost, quoted on Saturday, May 30, Sting expressed this view in an interview with The Guardian published on Thursday. He is currently preparing the premiere of his musical, "The Last Ship", in the West End, London.
"I work with my hands every day as a musician, and I'm lucky," Sting told The Guardian. "It's rare now for modern men to really use their hands and their strength to do things. We're losing something there."
Sting, whose birth name is Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, admitted that he didn't have a definitive answer. However, he suspected that there was a relationship between the loss of the direction of the distribution of male energy and the increase in toxicity in society.
"I don't have an answer, but maybe the toxicity in society today is happening because we've lost the direction to channel that energy, that male power. We rarely have to use it," he said.
Toxic masculinity usually refers to a pattern of male attitudes that are aggressive, dominant, demeaning to women, or rejecting emotional vulnerability. The term emerged from the men's movement in the 1980s as a reaction to second-wave feminism.
HuffPost noted that a 2020 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the domestic manufacturing sector fell 35 percent from 1979 to 2019. The U.S. economy has also lost 77,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump was elected president in 2024.
A study shared earlier this year on Psychology Today said that psychological research on toxic masculinity is not much. However, out of 15,000 research subjects, 10.8 percent showed "clear signs" of such behavior. The characteristics associated include narcissism and hostile sexism.
Sting's views are also directly related to the musical "The Last Ship". The work was inspired by his childhood in England and his relationship with his father, Ernest Sumner, who worked as an engineer in Wallsend when the shipbuilding industry was still thriving.
Sting recalls the "pride of the people" and "community" that grew from these jobs. One of the male characters in the musical is depicted questioning his identity after losing manual labor: "So, what do we mean as men without a ship to be completed?"
"Britain's wealth was created in coalfields, steel towns, factory towns and shipyards," Sting said. To The Guardian "All those skills were thrown into the scrap heap... for Thatcher's dream of a service economy."
Elsewhere, HuffPost alluded to tech figures such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman who often describe artificial intelligence as a path to an ideal future. However, critics argue that the high cost of data centers and their impact on the environment show that the problem is not as simple as that.
Sting does not call his theory a definitive answer. He only raises the possibility: as physical work and manual skills are reduced, some men lose space to channel their energy and build their social identity.
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