Our Side of the Mirror : The ( Re )-Construction of 1970 s ’ Masculinity in David Peace ’ s Red Riding

Copyright: © 2013 King M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abstract David Peace and the late Gordon Burn are two British novelists who have used a mixture of fact and fiction in their works to explore the nature of fame, celebrity and the media representations of individuals caught up in events, including investigations into notorious murders. Both Peace and Burn have analysed the case of Peter Sutcliffe, who was found guilty in 1981 of the brutal murders of thirteen women in the North of England. Peace’s novels filmed as the Red Riding Trilogy are an excoriating portrayal of the failings of misogynist and corrupt police officers, which allowed Sutcliffe to escape arrest. Burn’s somebody’s Husband Somebody’ Son is a detailed factual portrait of the community where Sutcliffe spent his life. Peace’s technique combines reportage, stream of consciousness and changing points of views including the police and the victims to produce an episodic non linear narrative. The result has been termed Yorkshire noir. The overall effect is to render the paranoia and fear these crimes created against a backdrop of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Peace has termed his novels as “fictions of the facts”. This paper will examine the way that Peace uses his account of Sutcliffe’s crimes and the huge police manhunt to catch the killer to explore the society that produced the perpetrator, victims and the police. The police officers represent a form of “hegemonic masculinity” but one that is challenged by the extreme misogyny, brutality, misery and degradation that surround them. This deconstruction of the 1970s male police officer is contrasted with the enormously popular figure of Gene Hunt from the BBC TV series Life on Mars.


Introduction
This article will explore, via the works of Peace and Burn, the literary portrayal of the impacts of investigating violent and sexual crime on the police officers and those around them. There are no heroes in these novels, only the morally corrupted. The article argues that characters such as the police officers in Peace's work reflect wider problems in terms of the construction of masculinity. They are forced to confront extreme misogyny and violence. They are overwhelmed by the brutality, misery and degradation that surround them. However, they share many of the attitudes that are at the root of the hideous crimes they must investigate, the attitudes being embedded in the institutions in which they operate. Similar themes, significantly apart from the issues of race, are explored, for largely comic effect, in the TV series Life on Mars [1]. The main character, Gene Hunt became a huge populist and media success, a representative of a world not dominated by political correctness and bureaucracy. Red Riding [2] represents a dark contrast to this nostalgic vision of 1970s' policing and masculinity.

Men and masculinities
As Hearn [3] has stated "studying men is, in itself, neither new nor necessarily radical". Hearn and Kimmel et al. [4] provide a comprehensive guide to the development of gendered work on men, what Collinson and Hearn [5] refer to a "naming men as men". This idea, originally advanced by Hanmer [6], refers to the way in which an excavation of how masculinity operates within wider society takes place.
The multi-disciplinary nature of this work often transgresses traditional academic venues [7] and the study of men in the arts has developed as an emergent area of study in its own right [8]. Much of this work has focused on the ways in which men in popular culture, particularly through their representation in the mass media, have either colluded with or provided a challenge to dominant versions of masculinity at work in Western society in particular. Connell [9] and Carrigan et al. [10] were the first to introduce the concept of hegemonic masculinity, drawing on the work of Gramsci [11], arguing that dominant conceptualisations of masculinity were reproduced through key institutions such as the state, education, workplace, the family and the mass media. Carrigan et al. [10] explain how hegemonic masculinity is not just about men in relation to women but is a particular type of masculinity. They characterise hegemonic masculinity: "not as 'the male role' but a variety of masculinity to which others -among them young and effeminate as well as homosexual men -are subordinated" [10].
A key feature of hegemonic masculinity is that it is explicitly heterosexual [12]. Carrigan et al. [10] see hegemonic masculinity as the way in which men reproduce their dominance, through particular groupings of powerful men. The importance of this theoretical development cannot be underestimated. It is their introduction of Gramsci's [11] cultural-Marxist perspective which examines notions of class and power along with gender that is particularly important. Gramsci's [11] concept of hegemony is summarised by Bocock [13] as: "… when the intellectual, moral and philosophical leadership provided by the class or alliance of class factions which is ruling successfully achieves its objective of providing the fundamental outlook of the whole society." Carrigan et al. [10] discuss how "particular groups of men" (emphasis in original) come to hold power and this is important in starting to unpack the grand narrative of patriarchy, for example, and begins to unravel the complexities at work where gender and class intersect. It is a concept which encompasses the notion of power being contested between groups [11,14] and Connell [15] builds on this idea and advances the notion of resistance and change. He argues that "many men live in some tension with, or distance, from, hegemonic masculinity" [15] and that hegemonic masculinity is supported by the collusion of dominant forms of femininity. Whitehead [16] advances the view that it is the "nuanced account" offered by the debate around hegemonic masculinity and its ability to signal the contested nature of male practices within a gender structure that distinguishes it from, and makes it a more useful concept than, patriarchy.
The debate around hegemonic masculinity then has become central to the field of critical studies of men [17]. Hearn [8] has argued that, as definitions of hegemonic masculinity have developed, they have come to incorporate a relationship between "the cultural ideal and the institutional power as in state, business and corporate power." Earlier critiques such as those by Donaldson [18], who saw the concept as obscuring economic and class issues, and Whitehead [16] who saw it as unable to explain "the complex patterns of inculcation and resistance which constitute everyday social interaction", or the different meanings attached to "masculinity", have been absorbed into an ever changing conceptualisation of hegemonic masculinity.
Brittan's [19] concept of masculinism provides a complementary approach, one which explicitly accepts that "both masculinity and femininity are continuously subject to a process of reinterpretation" [20]. Brittan [20] warns against "confusing masculinity with masculinism, the masculine ideology", an ideology which justifies male domination, sees heterosexuality as "normal", accepts the sexual division of labour and the fundamental differences between men and women and, therefore, underpins men's dominant role in the world of politics and business.
Brittan's [20] ideas allow for the emergence of plural masculinities or different versions of masculinity which challenge the masculinist ideology. Writing in 1989, he identified David Bowie's early 1970's flirtations with androgyny and presentations of self, which revelled in gender fluidity [21] as an example of this, thus seeing popular music, popular culture and its representation in the mass media as a space in which dominant versions of masculinity may be resisted and undermined.

Representations of men and masculinities
"Representation is the process by which members of a culture use language (broadly defined as any system which deploys signs, any signifying system) to produce meaning. Already this definition carries the important premise that things, objects, people, events in the world -do not have in themselves any fixed, final or true meaning. It is us in society, within human cultures, who make things mean, who signify" [22].
Hall's [22] work on representation, a development on his work at The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at The University of Birmingham in the UK in the '70s and '80s, draws heavily on the work of Gramsci [11] and Foucault [23] in arguing a social constructionist [24] position on the debate about the relationship between the mass media and "reality". The representation of different groups or issues has become a key focus of study for scholars of media and cultural studies [22,25] and the question of whether the media reflects or constructs reality is central to the debate on representations. Branston and Stafford [26] for example, claim that the "reality" represented in the media is "always a construction, never a transparent window", while Kellner [27] argues that within media culture "existing social struggles" are reproduced and that this has a key impact on the production of identities and the ways in which people make sense of the world.
Gripsrud [25] argues that the media plays a crucial role in the self perception or identity of individuals and groups, creating imagined communities and presenting new ideas, new (and old) "stuff" from which: "we simply have to form some sort of opinion about where we are located, so to speak, in the complex landscapes presented to us" [25].
This idea incorporates Berger and Luckman's [28] notion that "he (sic) who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality" and there would, of course, be no body of work on representations of men and masculinity had it not been for feminist analysis of the ways in which women's representation in TV and film played out in the reality of oppression [29][30][31]. Much of this work examined the stereotyping of men and women into traditional and widely accepted roles/positions on the screen, seeing stereotyping as a way in which power relations could be reproduced. Hearn [8] acknowledges a change in writing on men and masculinities with an increasing emphasis on the role of representation of masculinities: "If one is interested in social change in men and gender relations, it is necessary to attend to changing images of men which appear to have shifted considerably in recent decades".

The crisis in masculinity
One key concept which emerged in the 1970s [32] is the idea of a "crisis" in masculinity, perhaps not surprising in a decade that often seems to be characterized in terms of "crisis". The 1950s/1960s can be read as one historical period in which the idea of "crisis" has been explored, notably by Ehrenreich [33] and her notion of the male revolt. Brittan [19] argues that the notion of "crisis" is "founded on the observation that both men and women deviate from the master gender stereotypes of their society". Kimmel [17] sees it as a reaction to changing definitions of femininity while others, such as Edwards [34] see the whole concept as being somewhat unclear. An acceptance of gender as socially constructed [35] or performative [36] rather than a static, fixed category, leads to the idea that changing representations of masculinity in the media can also lead to the notion of "crisis". Edwards [34] argues that this crisis in representation, in which images of male "perfection" come to predominate, presenting new definitions of masculinity, is now an important field of study.
What has emerged from all of this work is an in-depth examination of the concept of masculinity, its role in establishing and reproducing male power and an exploration of the ways in which key institutions operate in this process of reproduction. So where do 1970s' representations of masculinity fit into this framework? "For all men, particularly within certain fractions of the middle classes, the post-war experience has been disturbing. There is a contemporary 'problem of masculinity' involving an adjustment to disintegration of images of 'self'" [32].
Tolson [32] relates this to the effects of the sixties "permissive society" while elsewhere Simpson [36] points the advances of feminism, the gay rights movement and the decline in traditional industry employing huge numbers of men, leading to a switch from "male" heavy industry to "female" services industry. Between 1960 and 1998, 5 million jobs were shed by manufacturing industry in the UK. Employment in the sector fell from 42% of male employment in 1955 to just 18% in 1998 [37]. Both Simpson [36] and Edwards [34] conceptualise the "crisis" of looking and looked-at-ness [36] as an 80s'/90s' phenomenon. However, it may be argued here that representation of masculinity in the 1970s is an important part of the discourse of "crisis" whether like Hunt [38] one thinks "it was clearly operating through a process of disavowal and overcompensation" or whether one considers there is a greater complexity at work than 1970s' nostalgists would allow.
Hunt [38] argues that this discourse can be read through the resurgence of an empowered male gaze [39] via scantily clad women on shows such as Benny Hill, Kenny Everett or Top of the Pops (the roving eye of the Top of the Pops cameramen is a also a factor here) or provocative advertising for the Cadbury's Flake or Mannekin cigars. However, Healy [40] argues that these displays, pandering to a male hyper-reality, can just as easily be read as a masquerade, a response to Tolson's [32] crisis and that the "hysterical displays of 'hard' straight masculinity". Hunt [38] needs to be contextualised within the range of representations of on offer in the decade. However, more recent reconstructions of the 1970s, in print and on screen, place the representation of hegemonic masculinity centre stage.

Cop culture and representations of masculinity
Criminological and policing research has, despite recent developments, been based on a series of assumptions about crime and gender: crime is a "male" issue: it is mostly committed by -particularly violent crime -and investigated by men. Policing has been seen as an archetypal expression of masculinity [41]. David Peace and the late Gordon Burn are two British novelists who have used a mixture of fact and fiction in their works to explore violence, masculinity and our society's obsession with brutal, sadistic killers. Both Peace and Burn have analysed the case of Peter Sutcliffe, who was found guilty in 1981 of the brutal murders of thirteen women in the North of England. Peace's novels [42][43][44][45] filmed as the Red Riding Trilogy [2] are an excoriating portrayal of the failings misogynist and corrupt police officers, which allowed Sutcliffe to escape arrest. Burn's Somebody's Husband Somebody' Son [46] is a detailed factual portrait of the community where Sutcliffe spent his life.
Peace's quartet of novels was published from 1999 onwards. Peace is clearly influenced by American crime writers such as James Ellroy. This can be seen in the violent and disturbing nature of his work. Peace has a very individualistic style characterised by short sentences or paragraphs with a number of repetitions of the same scene or line. In addition, Peace mixes clips from radio and TV news into the text. This has the effect of locating the action in a very specific period. The news headlines also show that the way one person or families trauma is, for the media simply news. For example "Out in the kitchen the six o'clock news came on the radio. Eighteen dead in the old people's home in Nottingham, is the second such fire in as many days. The Cambridge Rapist had claimed his fifth victim and England were trailing by 171 runs in the Second Test".
There have been a number of significant changes in policing since the events that Peace is exploring in his fiction. The novels allow the reader to explore these shifts in social attitudes and mores. Even though these are fictionalised historical accounts, the question for the readers and viewers is a familiar one: is the past really a foreign country and do they do things differently there?
Sackmann [47] defines culture as the collective construction of social reality. A great deal of the analysis of policing focuses on cop culture. There are a number of difficulties with using "cop culture" instrumentally. As Chan [48] argues occupational culture is not monolithic. Cop culture for Chan [48] is poorly defined and of little analytical value. In fact as Manning [49] argues there clear differences between streets cop culture and management culture. The term "cop culture" is, in fact, a label for a form of hegemonic masculinity found in police settings. The major themes here would be: an emphasis on action as a solution to problems; a strong sense of group identity and hyper-masculinity manifesting itself in a series of misogynistic and racist attitudes. In this schema, the police are hard-bitten, cynical and need to be aggressive to deal with the dangers that they face on a day to day basis.
Reiner [50] links the development of these cultural attitudes to the demands of police work itself rather than arising out of the wider society. Goldsmith [51] suggests that these cultural attitudes are part of a functional response to the demands of the post. Waddington [52] takes issue with the way that "canteen culture" has been used uncritically. For Waddington, the culture of the police canteen is, very importantly, an oral one. As he suggests, there is a gap between rhetoric and action. Despite the ongoing portrayal of police work as dynamic and exciting, the majority of it is not. To take one example, murder investigations involve a great deal of checking information, gathering statements and looking at tapes from CCTV, rather than the psychological profiling and car chases of the popular imagination. In the novel 1983, Peter Sutcliffe was finally arrested when he was stopped in a car with false number plates in the red light district in Sheffield. It is essentially a mundane everyday police action not the result of a Sherlock Holmes style flash of inspiration.
In popular culture, the dominant portrayal of police and policing is one of heightened drama with the investigation of serious crimes particularly sexual crimes, serial killers and murderous assaults by strangers dominating. This image has been developed to include the new technologies and techniques available. The high technique crime solvers of CSI [53] are a modern version of the Holmesian detective genius. One interesting result of this is that such programmes along with Prime Suspect [54], Waking the Dead [55] and Silent Witness [56] -all of which feature gruesome crime scenes and post mortems or both -create a pornography of death. This allows for the showing of images of brutally assaulted and defiled women or children -overwhelming the victims in such programme -to become acceptable on mainstream TV largely without comment.
On 1970s' TV, one cop show was largely responsible for constructing the police image; The Sweeney shown on ITV from 1975 -78. This removed the cosy image of the police. In The Sweeney [57], John Thaw and Dennis Waterman play Regan and Carter, two members of a specialist unit investigating armed robbery and other violent crime in London. The series was a ratings success and made even bigger stars of Thaw and Waterman, who were well-established TV performers. Regan and Carter were hard-drinking, despite the homoerotic undertones, womanising and willing to "bend the rules"; that is assault suspects or plant evidence to get the right results. They operated on the basic premise that they knew who the villains were but bureaucracy, defence solicitors and a motley collection of do-gooders and liberals were conspiring to prevent them from putting these men behind bars.
Regan and Carter's catchphrase "you're nicked" seemed to sum up their frustration with the petty rules that were getting in their way. The villains in The Sweeney [57] were all romanticised old school London gangsters. They were decent armed robbers -it seems that threatening ordinary working class people with a sawn -off shot gun whilst wearing a mask is a sign of your fundamentally sound moral views- Peace has argued that there is no need for crime writers to invent crime as real events throw up so many stories. Despite Peace's view and the fact that crime figures so prominently in the news media, it also dominates popular drama, film and literature. The two spheres overlap and influence each other. In fact, they have combined to create a third genre -the real-life crime drama, for example, programmes such as Crimewatch [58] 1974 is based on the Stefan Kisko case. Kisko was convicted of the murder of Lesley Molseed in 1976. Lesley was a school girl abducted on her way to the local shops. She was sexually assaulted and murdered. Stefan Kisko was a troubled and socially isolated man. A very large figure, he lived alone with his mother. He was regarded as odd by those living near him. At the time, he was receiving treatment for hypogonadism. At his trial, his defence led by David Waddington (subsequently a Tory Home Secretary) put forward a defence of diminished responsibility on the grounds that this treatment had increased his libido. Three local girls testified that Kisko had exposed himself to them in a local church yard. Kisko's mother and aunt campaigned vigorously that he was innocent. His conviction was eventually overturned. In fact, Kisko was impotent so could not have produced the semen that was found on Lesley Molseed's clothing.
In 2007, Roland Castres a local taxi driver was found guilty of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. As a convicted child killer, Kisko was subject to brutal treatment in prison. In addition, he developed schizophrenia so that when his conviction was overturned he moved from prison to a secure psychiatric unit. He died only a year after his discharge from hospital. His mother, exhausted by her campaign, died four months after her son. The police officer involved in the case, Dick Holland, had a key role in the Ripper Inquiry.
Peace fictionalises the Kisko case in the novels. Stefan Kisko's family were Ukrainian refugees. In 1974 ten year old girl called Clare Kemplay goes missing on her way home from school. She is found murdered, her body dumped on a building site with swan's wings attached to her back. A young man called Michael Myskin is arrested. Just as in the Kisko case, a confession is beaten out of the vulnerable Myskin. Myskin's "family were Polaks". After his arrest, his family home is vandalised. Peace is a very graphic writer, who does not spare the reader. In fact, there are occasions where it is difficult to read the accounts of brutality, sexual violence and torture. This scene illustrates the nihilistic undertone to his work. A cat is drowned in the bath; human excrement is smeared or deposited about the house.
The police are racist, misogynistic and corrupt In the TV adaptation, the level of police brutality is depicted in harrowing detail. The journalist investigating the case, Eddie Dunford, is subjected to mock executions, held naked in a cell and thrown out of a police van. The recurrent theme amongst the police is "This is the North where we do what we want". This is a reference to corruption but also the use of physical violence. They beat confessions out of suspects. They firebomb a travellers' camp. Their language is sprinkled with the casual racial epithets of the time: "nignog" "gypos"and "Paki". The Police and the media are shown to be complicit in the exploitation of the grief that the families of the victims feel. In Burn's novel, Fullalove [59] a cynical journalist plants a teddy bear at the sights of death of children so that shrines will be made that he can report on. For the journalists in 1974, the disappearance of a child is not a tragedy it is a "good story". Dunford sees the linked disappearances of the young girls as a way of making his name as a reporter. He shows no concern for the families. In 1980, a police officer, Peter Hunter, is sent from Manchester to investigate West Yorkshire's handling of the investigation. Hunter is based on John Stalker, who had a role in the original Moors Murder investigation. One key part of this investigation was finding a tape that Brady and Hindley had made of the torture and murder of one of their victims Lesley Anne Downey. This tape was found in a left luggage office at a Manchester Station. It was then played in open court at the trial. In a scene that could come straight from Peace's or Burn's work, a transcript of the tape was published by the Daily Mail in 2002 On the tape, one can hear Christmas songs being played including Little Drummer Boy by Alma Cogan. This disturbing scene becomes the basis for the conclusion of Burns' novel Alma Cogan [60]. In the first three novels, there are a number of references to the Little Drummer Boy.
Peace wrote the novels after he had moved away from Yorkshire. He was living in Tokyo and teaching English. It is almost as if he needed physical as well as emotional distance between himself and these awful events. This might seem a fanciful claim. However, the Sutcliffe case dominated the media for a prolonged period. He was finally arrested in Sheffield in 1980. There was a huge police investigation, later the subject of an official inquiry because of the errors made. A tape and letters which were later shown to be hoaxes were sent to the police and the Daily Mirror. A phone line was set up so that you could hear the voice of the Ripper. Billboards appeared across the country with an artist's impression of the killer. This was a period before 24 hours news channels and the internet. The impact in areas where the crimes were committed was even more intense. Peace shows the ways that these events such as major seep into the national psyche long after the events Peace has emphasised the importance of time and place. He sees the appalling crimes as inextricably linked to the society and place, in which, they were committed. This echoes Burns' arguments in Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son (1990) [46]; that these crimes are the product of a deeply misogynistic society. As Peace says: he was the Yorkshire Ripper not the Cornwall Ripper. The police in 1977 share many of the attitudes to women of the red light district punters [61]. Their language is full of degrading references to women. Peace makes no attempt to reflect modern social values. His use of language is an accurate reflection of the underpinning attitudes of the time. The police make continued casual degrading references to women. This is particular the case in regard to the view of the victims. The clear implication is that these women were, somehow, not deserving of public sympathy or protection because they were prostitutes. This is best illustrated by the opening of the third novel in the series 1980. Oldman, the police officer who is driven mad by his failure to capture the killer, gives an interview to a newspaper (that does not publish it). In the tape he says "But I don't regard him as evil. The voice is almost sad; a man fed up with what he is done, fed up with himself. To me he's like a bad angel on mistaken journey and while I could never condone his methods, I can sympathise with his feelings".
Wyre's [62] study demonstrated that the sexual politics and attitudes of the general male population had much in common with those of men convicted of sexual offences. These attitudes still persist as can be seen in the coverage of the Ipswich murders in 2008. In the novel and in the media coverage of the actual event, the killer is given a name, status and character that the victims are not. This is taken even further in the murders and assaults that Sutcliffe committed. In common with Burn, Peace sees the crimes as in some way organically linked to the local community. They cast a deadly shadow over a bleak, unforgiving landscape of industrial decline. In both, Peace's fiction and Burn's reportage the general attitudes to the victims is a strange combination of extreme misogyny and indifference until a student is murdered. In 1980, Leeds football fans chant "Ripper 13 Police 0". A recurring theme in the novels is that the police have sexual relationships with women working as prostitutes. Sex in the novels is not part of intimacy or an expression of love. Sex is a site of the domination and abuse of women by men, a site of hegemonic masculinity. There are a series of portrayals of anal intercourse. The style is sparse and brutal. Peace's work here has the quality of a Bacon painting with the blood and pain reflecting the nihilism of those involved. This is a world where there is not a clear defining line between the police and the perpetrators of the awful crimes that they are investigating. The violence and brutality that the police confront pollutes their lives and those that they surround them. This is summed up in a tremendously powerful scene in 1980 where the Sutcliffe character is being interviewed for the first time. Peace first lists the victims -part of his project is to reclaim the lives of these women and show them as more than victims -then he writes: "Sixteen hours later in the dark room.
The dark room on our side of the glass Our side of the mirror Drowning, we're drowning here Drowning here in his bloody sea".
Dunford, the journalist, Dawson the corrupt developer and Oldman the leading police officer represent different aspects of 70s' hegemonic masculinity. What they share is a willingness to exploit women and men they regard as weak to achieve their own ends. Dawson and Oldman do not question the sexual politics of the time. In some ways, Dunford is a more difficult character. He thinks that he is more enlightened than the men who operate the corrupt systems around him. He sees himself as a seeker of truth and representative of a new society. Constant reference is made to the fact that he has come back from London. London here seems to represent not only glamour and sophistication but the possibility of escape from the claustrophobia of the North. However, Dunford has far more in common with the hard-drinking slobs in the press room and police who populate his working life them than he would acknowledge. He is hardly a "new man" or a prototype "metrosexual. He is Dawson in a leather jacket. He sees his father's death and funeral as getting in the way of the breaking story. He shamelessly exploits the grief of an abducted girl's mother and sleeps with her. In many ways, the press reporting the crimes and the investigation are an extension of "cop culture". The police and journalists are two sides of the same coin -deeply cynical, misogynistic and soaked in alcohol. They draw clear distinctions between the "innocent", "respectable" victims of Sutcliffe and prostitutes who have been murdered.
The Red Riding Trilogy was met with general critical acclaim. Peace's novels have achieved cult success and he has been created with inventing his own genre Yorkshire Noir. However, a rather different recreation and examination of 1970s' policing enjoyed a much wider commercial and popular success in the same period. In Life on Mars [1], John Simm plays a modern PC detective who is in coma and finds himself back in the 1970s' Manchester of his youth. There is a comic tension between the Simm character and Gene Hunt played by Phil Glennister. Hunt is essentially a combination of Regan and Carter from The Sweeney [57]. The programme was a huge success tapping into the insatiable appetite for nostalgia in popular culture. There are several audiences here -including those who lived through that time and admire the period detail. Gene Hunt rapidly became a cult hero particularly for those on the right as he came to represent how the police force had lost its way crushed by political correctness and bureaucracy. This is part of a much wider discourse that suggests that despite nearly thirty years of neo-liberal government and a doubling of the prison population between 1992 and 2010, the Criminal Justice System has gone soft. For commentators like Peter Hitchens [63] increased crime is the result of these developments. Hunt represents a return to a better time. Hitchens [64] states: "Our first line of defence used to be people more or less like Gene Hunt in 'Life on Mars' and 'Ashes to Ashes'. Yes, they did rough up criminals (or 'suspects' if you must). They got away with it because they almost always roughed up the right ones. And the Confait case was shocking because it was untypical, not because it was typical".
It is worth noting here the facts of the Confait case. Maxwell Confait was found murdered in his bed-sit in London in 1972. He had been strangled and the bed-sit set on fire. In November 1972, three youths Colin Lattimore (18), Ronnie Leighton (15) and Amhet Salih (14) were all convicted of arson with intent to endanger life. Colin Lattimore was also found guilty of manslaughter. Ronnie Leighton was convicted of murder. The basis of the prosecution case against all three 1: 104 [65]. They appealed against convictions in July 1973. These appeals were unsuccessful. In June 1975, the cases were referred to the Court of Appeal. In October that year, the convictions were quashed.
Hunt, like UK comedy character Alf Garnett was devised as a character that meant to satirise reactionary views, but became popular on the basis of espousing them. As with Garnett, the more objectionable and louder the expression the more popular he became. There is no space to explore in-depth debates about political correctness. However one of the great claims is that political correctness prevents individuals saying what they really feel or that the debate is restricted. In this context, men have become feminised or in Hunt's terms "soft sissy girly Nancy French bender Man United supporting proofs". Despite the fact that the popular press in the UK is largely right-wing and Messrs Littlejohn, Clarkson and Hitchens (to name but three) have weekly columns, without apparent irony, saying things that they are no longer allowed to say because of the so-called shift to PC. Hunt represents a form of hegemonic masculinity that had allegedly disappeared. Cooper [66] argued that Hunt was popular with women as he represents strong males sure themselves and their roles. Hunt is contrasted with the modern metro sexual male, unsure of his role in relationships but at least willing to use moisturiser. This argument seems to assume that the use of male grooming products and the development of a more liberal politics of masculinity are somehow inextricably linked [46]. Hunt was clearly written as a comic character but the reactions to him highlight continuing debates and anxieties about the nature of masculinity [66]. Bauman [67] argues that the debate about masculinity is part of the wider anxieties, such as those around class and race, that manifest themselves in the crisis of late modernity.

Conclusion
Furedi [68] argues that the world has gone therapy-mad. He suggests that experiences that were once seen as part of normal or everyday experience have medicalised or perhaps more accurately "counsellorised". In many senses, Furedi [68], the radical political theoretician and libertarian, shares with the Tory Right a nostalgic wish for a past, where the personal remained that. He, along with Hitchens [64] wishes that the Britain of the "stiff upper lip" would return. This emotionally restrictive culture was the reflection of a class bound society. Hitchens [64] sees this as the essence of an England that has been lost but can be regained. It is harder to see how these views fit into a radical political agenda. The key point here is that within that imagined past, a past predating any discussion of the crisis in masculinity, masculinity and male roles were clear. Now they are not. Neither Hitchens [64] nor Furedi [68] have any real interest in the practice of therapy or the possible benefits for the individuals involved. The modern police force provides a range of emotional and professional support to staff that did not exist in the world of Carter, Regan, Hunt and Red Riding. These moves reflect and are part of the wider shifts in the roles of men and the construction of masculinity. Peace uses a modern cultural perspective to discuss the impact on individuals, revealing the ambiguities and conflicts raised by an essentially misogynistic organisation investigating violent crimes against women. However, the reaction to Gene Hunt shows that the nostalgia for a return to hegemonic masculinity and representation of it in popular culture remains strong in some quarters.