We are in the midst of a renewed discussion about masculinity in crisis. The latest contribution comes from Iain Duncan Smith, who this week suggested at a Tory Conference fringe event that unmarried men from poorer backgrounds are prone to become “dysfunctional” human beings who can be problematic for society. His words mirror other recent descriptions of masculinity as “toxic”, “broken” and, especially, “in crisis”.

The rise of this purported crisis debate is indicative of the fact we are living in a time of significant social change. Because so many of the historical constructions of society are fundamentally patriarchal, when those ossified structures are loosened – whether by a movement (first- and second-wave feminism, for example) or circumstance (de-industrialisation, financial crisis, or the fracturing of political predictabilities) – then any one-size conception of masculinity buried within them is thrown into the open.

Football, with its rigid and simplified codes of accepted behaviour, can provide a very clear lens for viewing the relationship between what a man is expected to be in a particular world, and what can become of a man who does not meet those expectations – both inside the squad, and on the terraces.

And nowhere is the triangular relationship between football, place and hard-clung hegemonic ideals more pronounced than in the post-industrial heartlands of the north: Glasgow, Liverpool and the north-east. Which, statistically, are the areas where men are markedly “in crisis”.

The most recent ONS figures show the north-east has the highest avoidable mortality rate for males in England. Suicide, the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, has its second highest rate in the region – a fact that, for many commentators, bears some relation to statistics on joblessness and employment precarity. The north-east had the joint-lowest average actual weekly hours of work by men during the last tax year.

The post-industrial heartlands of the north-east are, statistically, among the areas where men are markedly ‘in crisis’. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Throughout history, a common instigator of the masculinity-in-crisis conversation has been the shifting of cultural constructions of the workplace – and it was one such fretful period that gave rise to the institution of football in the first place. As Victorian men moved from the fields into factories, so grew a fear that their sons, now spending more time at home with their mothers, were at risk of becoming feminised, or “inverted” (the Freudian term for homosexual).

Organised sport, with its emphasis on male bonding and toughness, was a concerted work of remasculinisation. Over time, as football clubs gained popularity, that masculine paradigm remained in place, bolted on to the parallel institutions of heavy industry that grew alongside the sport.

For a great many men, there is still a safety in the familiarity of that structure. The industry may be gone, but the way of life – the kind of man – it embodies still echoes out from every empty shipyard and derelict factory. Picking apart the threads of its masculine tradition can, to some, feel tantamount to the denigration of a people’s history. Take away the external edifice to expose the inner core of any man with a fixed belief system – one that might traditionally promote hardness over shyness, the repudiation of emotional expression – and what is often revealed is an anxiety of relevance.

The Men’s Voices Project gives an absorbing insight into this anxiety. It is a sound exhibition curated from dozens of interviews with men and boys in the north-east – from Deerbolt Young Offenders Institution, Barnardo’s Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programme and The Woodlands Pupil Referral Unit – in which we can hear, as the undercurrent to many of the conversations, the issue of control.

One of the notable refrains is an unease, particularly of older men, at the so-called feminisation of the workplace, as clerical and service industries have taken the place of manufacturing labour. Even though these newer industries are themselves mostly insecure forms of employment, a private insecurity repeatedly shows itself at the idea of a man not being the breadwinner:

“If my missus was … the sole provider, I think there’d be a lot of friction in the house, because my manliness would be gone… I would feel really angry at her, and at myself. But probably at myself more.”

To some men, the balance of power has reversed and, in the words of another interviewee: “It’s the man that needs the equal rights, not the woman. It’s the man that’s getting put out.”

‘Lost sense of masculinity’

The loss of industry over the last half century has taken with it a vital signifier of identity for many men. And in their reconstruction of who they are, their football club is sometimes the last remaining bastion.

There are men in the stands at Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesbrough, as there are throughout the north, who used to work in factories, shipyards, steelworks. It is natural enough that their sons and grandsons beside them might feel a connection to that heritage, steeped as it is into the culture of match day – from the names of the pubs they drink in before the game to the stories at the bar of times gone by, that lock together into a framework of belonging.

Middlesbrough fans: ‘If men want to use football to regain any lost sense of masculinity, they’d best look elsewhere.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

But thinking of that framework as inviolable is problematic. For one thing, the match day environment is, slowly but surely, moving with the times. As Simon Bolton, of the Middlesbrough Official Supporters Club, puts it: “If you want to mix purely with other men and feel that you’re in an environment of male dominance, forget going to a match at the Riverside … Boro fans come in all ages, young and old, and all genders. If the men of today want to use football as a way of regaining any lost sense of masculinity, they’d best look elsewhere.”

Furthermore, a preconceived identity can be a burden as much as it can be a celebration. The image of the Newcastle supporter, in particular, can be a trying one to live up to. I spoke to one fan whose father worked as an oil rig electrician, and whose grandfather was a foreman joiner at the Swan Hunter shipyard. Dan, however, “can’t wire a plug”. He works in new media, and moved away from the city two decades ago. His own sense of belonging comes, now, from the outside, and he has an honest appraisal of the typecast of a Newcastle supporter:

“I’ve always felt it became a parody of itself. There’s a real media perception of what Geordie men are like, that becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a kernel – it comes from reality – but the perception of it means that you actually live up to that stereotype. It’s an inherited way of behaving.”

When I asked him what that way of behaving is, he told me a statistic about champagne drinking: that Newcastle has the highest rate of champagne consumption per capita outside of London. “Hedonistic,” he says, “is an apt word for the Geordie man.”

Hedonism, certainly, is associated with the popular perception of the city, in a way that, in the other post-industrialised urban centres of the region, it is not. And hedonism as an identity, a stereotype, can be a difficult cross to bear too.

‘Love the lunatic’

Dan grew up in Whickham, the town next to Dunstan, birthplace of the ultimate Geordie self-fulfilling prophecy. Paul Gascoigne was the son of a hod-carrier father and a mother who worked in a chip shop and as a cleaner. He came from a background of working-class masculinity – and signed as an apprentice for Newcastle with the purpose of taking on the role of family breadwinner.

From this lineage of Geordie Men, as the cultural fabric of the area began to change, the persona of “Gazza” led the way for a new kind of post-industrial masculine identity. He was every inch a Geordie, but one that came to represent the hedonistic, hard-drinking party spirit that started to brand Newcastle in the nineties. He was daft as a brush, drunk; yet limitless, messianic.

The constraints of such an act, however, can have the consequence that, once the structure around that life falls away, so too can the individual attached to it. Gascoigne’s struggles, pre- and post-retirement, with alcohol, mental illness, bankruptcy, gambling and bulimia have been lengthily documented. His ex-wife has written about the years of domestic abuse he subjected her to. He has been prosecuted for assault and, more recently, racist abuse.

Paul Gascoigne celebrates with fans in Trafalgar Square in 2002. Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters

But throughout his psychological and physical deterioration, when what he has clearly needed is a supported departure from his old way of living, it is notable that the barometer of his health has habitually been measured, publicly, not by signs of a new Gascoigne, but by applauding any reversion to the man he used to be ...

“Great to see Gazza back on form” ... “Great to see Gazza in such sparkling form. Love the lunatic.” (Piers Morgan and Gary Lineker tweets after Gascoigne’s appearance on the Fletch and Sav show, 2015)

It is not only Paul Gascoigne who has found himself emotionally and socially hamstrung by that tagline: “love the lunatic”. The expectation to behave in a prescribed way (which, pertinently, for Gascoigne does involve showing emotion) brings us back to the anxiety of relevance that many men feel.

A recent book about Tyneside, Akenside Syndrome: Scratching the Surface of Geordie Identity by Joe Sharkey, describes an alienation felt by those men of the area who are not in tune with accepted codes of masculinity. The author outlines “four pillars” of Geordie identity – class, accent, drink, football – to which the Geordie male is supposed to conform. There is a pressure to be that person which comes from the outside, as Dan describes, and also from within.

Andrew Hankinson, the author of a brilliant, bruising narrative about the Tyneside murderer Raoul Moat, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) – a story that Gascoigne has a brief, bizarre connection to, as he tried to bring a chicken and a fishing rod to Moat during the police stand-off – explained to me his own feelings of Akenside Syndrome:

“There’s an unreconstructed nature to masculinity in the north-east and I don’t come up to scratch: I don’t have a Geordie accent, I’m not into football, I don’t go out on the piss on Friday nights, I do childcare ... I once had a ticket inspector on the metro ask me why I was looking after my kids on a weekday.”

Hankinson ascribes a similar feeling of not fitting in to Moat himself: “He hardly drank, he didn’t like football. People assume he was trying to overcome a crisis of masculinity by working out and developing big muscles and being violent, but I actually think his crisis of masculinity was as evident in what he said and wrote about money.” According to Hankinson, “he regarded an expensive car and big house as status symbols of masculinity, but he couldn’t achieve them, and it made him feel horrible about himself.”

‘I’m crying, I’m angry’

Performing a man is not the same thing as being a man. There can be a security in the performance, though, because it sidesteps the difficulty that confronting emotions and thoughts entails. One of the Men’s Voices conversations that most struck me was one in which an interviewee admits the emotional challenge of walking his dog – because being alone, without the surrounding noise of work, sport and banter, can be hard:

“I find myself, the longer the walk goes, [getting] more upset … Well, actually, more de-stressed – but through that period to being de-stressed, I’m crying, I’m angry, I’m running … It takes a while to get to that place.”

What some men need – not only in the north-east, but in all those areas of life (private and public) where an old, familiar order has broken down and men have yet to let in different kinds of identity – is help getting them to that place; acknowledging rather than avoiding the difficulty of the transition. Focusing attention on the everyday crises that people are facing is part of that. Support (together with its counterpart: governmental relieving of the policies and ideologies that put men, and women, in economic and social hardship) is another.

And such support is growing. The Men’s Cree project in County Durham is one such initiative. Set up by the East Durham Community Trust in 2010, each cree (a vernacular word for a pigeon shed) provides an encouraging environment for men to come and simply talk. From 11 crees the project has grown, by the time of the council’s recent taking of the project in-house, to 41 across the whole of the county.

Much of the spread was achieved, the trust’s chief-executive Malcolm Fallow told me, by word of mouth: “At bus stands, or by people mentioning it to men who they knew had been bereaved or lost their job.” The success of the scheme is in its straightforwardness. There is always an activity – repairing bikes; growing vegetables; stonemasonry; heritage site visits – around and through which the men can talk to each other.

Fallow related one especially moving story about a former miner who used to do the shopping “for his wife”, as the man saw it, and would not tell her if he knew she had missed items off the list, knowing it would mean he’d get another trip to the shop. “That would fill his afternoon in. But once he had the [pigeon] shed to go to, that wasn’t necessary.”

For this man, as for many others who have benefited from the project, simply finding a new activity to organise his time around improved his mental health. Replacing an entrenched structure with nothing is an inevitable cause of real crisis. Replacing it with a new box to be put in is not healthy either.

Dialogue, openness, empathy and equality are what is needed by us all – men and women – both to aid those in trouble, and to move the crisis conversation on from “how to be a man” to “how to be a person”.