‘Moatifs’ of masculinity: The stories told about ‘men’ in British newspaper coverage of the Raoul Moat case

Domestic masculinity

Normally our everyday notion of domestic life, and perhaps more crucially the role of heterosexual, paternal masculinity within the family, is seen, over and over and inter-factual/fictional-textually, as unproblematic, even when the evidence is to the contrary. Male violence is secure in the family, in the home, behind closed doors, because it is invisible and so symbolically and physically protected and kept secret. But in the Moat case his violence spilled over, from a history of violence against his ex-partner to the murder of her new partner, onto the streets, blinding a police officer, and then into the wilderness of Northumbria where he seemed prepared to take on an entire army of police. Nonetheless there is some evidence in the news accounts of the usual explanatory discourses for male abuse that attribute blame to the women in their familial lives, usually partners or mothers, showing what a powerful discursive resource, a first port of call, these are for representing gender. The most overt example is Moat’s own letter to the Sun newspaper that openly blames his ex-partner Samantha for his violence: ‘I never cheated on her, I wish she hadn’t on me. She pulled the trigger by doing so just as much as me’ (Guardian, 7 July 2010). Yet even he struggles to adhere to this view, focusing much more attention on blaming the entire police force for his imprisonment for assaulting a child, rather than his own failings as a man. It is nowhere clear whether this was one of his own children but Moat implies it was, in the letter:

‘I guess I’ve finally lost it. I’m not on the run, I will keep killing police until I am dead. They took it all from me, kids, freedom, house, then Sam and Chanel. Where could I go from there? Obviously I have issues but I was pushed. I never beat my kids. They’ve hunted me for years, now it’s my turn.’ (Guardian, 7 July 2010)

Moat admitted in the same letter he had ‘a history of violence over an ex-partner’s bits on the side’ (Sun, 6 July 2010) and told a friend he wanted to scar Samantha Stobbart’s body to ensure she never wore a bikini, indicating the possessiveness and jealousy typical of a domestic abuser (Harne and Radford, 2008: 154). These representations of Moat’s own words indicate how discourses of domestic masculinity are both part of his subjectivity and fit the socio-cultural repertoire of news making.

Moat had met Stobbart when she was just 16 and he was 31, and the relationship was allegedly actually abusive. Moat had recognised his own problematic temper months previously and asked for psychiatric support: ‘Taped recordings Moat made with social workers and the police from July 2009 until about April of this year suggest he was becoming increasingly paranoid’ (BBC News, 15 July 2010). Indeed, Moat guarded his home with 26 CCTV cameras and frequently dressed in army-style clothing, suggesting a dangerous paranoia about protecting his home and family as well as identification with a very macho institution, the army. Moat was also facing custody battles with a previous partner, suggesting two relationships in serious trouble prior to the prison term. Despite this biography, and though Durham prison warned police three days before the killings that Moat was threatening to harm Stobbart, police failed to act. In Moat’s case his transgression of the domestic context to public and then rural space, and his victimisation of not just Stobbart but her partner (whom Moat believed was a policeman) and a further police officer, plus his threat to all police and the general public, shifted the boundaries of possible discursive paradigms. The usual blame attribution that constructs male violence as caused by women’s promiscuity, feminism, foreignness or failure as housewife or mother (Wykes, 2001) does not work when, as well as domestic abuse, there are two shootings of men, the wholesale threat to kill all police officers and the terrorising of a whole rural community while living wild.

Looking for better interpretive frameworks to offer, but staying within the domestic/family narrative, journalists also focused on his childhood and his relationship with his mother. Again this entails blaming a woman for male crime but now the explanation is that male violence results from psychological damage due to poor mothering. Moat is described as estranged from his mother completely as a teenager, then turning up in 2007 and threatening to kill her. Her comment on his crimes, reported across the press, was that ‘he would be better dead’ (The Times, McIntosh et al., 2010b). The press made much of Moat not knowing his real father, compliant with a frequent focus on single parents (women) as causal of male offending. His last comment was ‘I have no Dad and nobody cares for me’ (Sunday Times, Swinford and Green, 2010). Like many children, he grew up with a stepfather he disliked but there seems little else in the actions of his mother to justify blame attribution by journalists.

The usual motif of making the maleness of offending invisible by blaming associated women is too weak here to be a convincing reason for Moat’s violences; but the very weakness of these domestic discourses is in itself revealing because it leaves interpretive space: if women (or youth, race, terrorists, gangs) can’t be blamed, who can? Moreover, if Moat himself struggled to blame his ex-partner(s) or mother it suggests a certain self-reflection or sensibility to his failure domestically, heterosexually, paternally and familially. The news stories reveal motifs of masculine identity that are very culturally familiar but have eluded him; he seems not to have been able to occupy meaningful masculine roles as a father, son or husband. The 26 CCTV cameras are indicative of how powerful those domestic discourses of masculinity are for male subjectivity, as audiences are shown his struggle to protect the home that is so symbolic of those roles. Moat is depicted as a man who did not fit domestically, however desperately he wanted to, and a man who knew he did not fit. These stories cannot identify Moat with normal domestic masculinity, the habitus (Bourdieu, 1986) of heterosexual masculinity; they represent a man who could not perform that gender role. Moat is depicted as alienated from it and angered by his exile. The news accounts not only reproduce very particular models of masculinity; there is evidence too that Moat subjectively struggled with heterosexual norms. There are clues in his rejection of his mother, his fathering of six children by at least three different women (Independent, Brown, 2010), his abuse of partners, his obsession with his body and a recent claim from a man that he ‘had a four-year affair with the “butch” bouncer, who kept their liaisons quiet because he wanted to maintain his reputation as a “hardman”’ (Daily Mail, 21 February 2011). Moat was not a man who could be depicted as comfortably performing domestic masculinity.

So the domestic accounts of Moat in relation to his childhood, fathering and his adult relationships, although evident in the news, struggle to employ the common accounting paradigm of explaining male violence by blaming the women in his life. Yet the efforts of journalists to try to use them as accounting paradigms indicates how powerful narratives of family and domesticity are to the inscription of masculinity. Successful masculinity is often measured by the evidence of good, respectable, faithful femininity, while masculine failure is attributed to feminine failings; in both instances women are normally seen as responsible for male behaviours. Yet in Moat’s case, invoking these discourses describes a man humiliated by failure and rejection in family relationships, largely isolated from the norms of domestic masculinity, who seeks instead to gain respect through alternative motifs of masculinity. No longer able to access traditional, local, working-class male work such as mining and shipbuilding with its structures, institutions and cultures, Moat is reported as having sought to occupy himself in other areas supporting a strong masculine identity; areas all on the edge of legitimacy. He is described as building his body ¹ and working as a pseudo police officer on the doors of nightclubs. The news depicts efforts at criminal masculine credibility with drug sales and regular arrests, but no prosecutions, leading to suggestions he worked as a ’police informer’ (Independent, Brown, 2010). Strong macho imagery of the SAS and survivalists, such as Bear Grylls, are invoked by allusions to him hunting and camping in the wild countryside of Northumbria. Thus we find in the news two further explanatory masculinity paradigms that both supplement the lacks in ‘domestic’ explanations to account for Moat and add interestingly to the suite of discourses inscribing masculinity in accounts of his relationship to very male institutions, and ultimately by aligning him to the elemental.

Institutional masculinity

Many major institutions are male dominated, particularly at more senior levels. In the police, prison service and judiciary, positions of power are most often occupied by male figures: and within the military and private security firms, there is often a specific working culture that reflects the qualities required to fulfil such roles. Courtenay even contends that institutional structures cultivate ‘stereotypical forms of gender enactments’ (Courtenay, 2000: 1394): gender both shapes and is shaped by the institutions it surrounds, to the extent that Connell recognises, ‘masculinity is an aspect of institutions, and is produced in institutional life, as much as it is an aspect of personality or produced in interpersonal transactions’ (Connell, 1993: 602; original emphasis) and that there are three key institutions that are particularly important in organising gender – ‘the state, the workplace/labour market, and the family’ (1993: 602).

The existence of police cultures and their links to aspects of masculinity has long been recognised (Fielding, 1994) as have the masculine elements of the prison officer culture (Crawley, 2004) and the military (Hockey, 1986). The factor that connects these cultures, and differentiates them from other masculine cultures such as the prisoner culture, is that these institutions have legitimacy ascribed to their actions – men are able to enter these institutions and use their working identities as a means to ‘do gender’ legitimately (Messerschmidt, 1993). Various labelling means are used in order to differentiate these groups from other men who are not afforded this legitimacy, such as uniforms, badges, equipment, titles, respect and even weapons. Gendered legitimacy is afforded to these institutions through the means of cultural power, indeed ‘the hegemonic definition of manhood is a man in power, a man with power, and a man of power’ (Kimmel, 1994: 125; original emphasis). Institutional identities and their associated masculinities, powers and legitimacies therefore have an aspirational quality to them – men are able to prove their masculinity by virtue of their location within this group affiliation. As in Remy’s discussion of the men’s hut, these are spaces where those males who have earned the right to call themselves men, or are in the process of attaining this emblem of privilege, gather (Remy, 1990: 46; original emphasis).

In addition, these groups are often permitted, by their very nature, to undertake acts of violence, which are deemed legitimate due to their state-sanctioned nature. Men who act violently without such state sanction are criminalised and policed by these very institutions. Messerschmidt recognises this as a result of the quest for masculine status where, without access to authoritative legitimate masculinity: ‘Particular types of crime can provide an alternative resource for accomplishing gender and, therefore, affirming a particular type of masculinity’ (1993: 84). In spite of this, however, the masculinity that such men achieve through illegitimate means is limited, in that institutionalised masculinity is often also valorised in social discourse. The police, armed forces, prison service and other such institutions of security and control are established for the protection of our democratic social values and norms, and provide safety and security, often at serious personal risk. Such institutional masculine identity is ascribed with images of legitimate manliness, toughness, bravery and heroism: images that resonate so strongly with masculine ideals that men unable to access them legitimately may emulate as closely as possible deviantly. Moat’s attempted alignment with valorised institutional masculinity – pseudo policing and pseudo special forces – can be seen both as indicative of the culturally available models of masculinity and the means through which he tries to offset his actual inadequate masculine identity: failed son, husband and father, ex-prisoner and illegitimately violent. The role of bouncer is afforded masculine status both legitimately in terms of being licensed to protect others in a group that, as Winlow describes, act as ‘gatekeepers to a thriving night-time economy’ (2001: 100), and illegitimately through such individuals’ enhanced access to the mechanisms of criminality and violence. Yet even here the story of Moat is of failure to achieve even illegitimate status as his one crime is shown to be child abuse.

Reports of Moat and the army offered another model of masculinity and a further example of him trying to fit into the men’s hut. Even here, journalists report that Moat failed to make an impression due to his illegitimate status and lack of official membership, with one commentator – a former SAS member – stating with reference to Moat’s commando-like efforts that:

Moat, a steroid-abusing, violent thug, has no concept of that sort of lifestyle, however much he might fantasise about himself as a macho hard-man. And with special forces closing in, Moat will soon find himself a long, long way out of his depth. (Ryan, 2010: 4)

In the final days of his life, motifs associated with Moat confirmed Connell’s observation that ‘it is common for different groups of men, each pursuing a project of hegemonic masculinity, to come into conflict with each other’ (Connell, 1995: 215). Many accounts of Moat in the media referred to him in a militarist fashion: symbols of war were used throughout the manhunt, and Moat can clearly be seen to be aligning himself with military institutions through dress, indicating the role of discourse in relating the social to subjective identity. At one point, he is described, dressed in khakis, as looking as if he was in preparation for war (The Times, Jenkins and McIntosh, 2010), and his reported ability to evade police detection (who were out in large numbers, occupying both the ground and the skies through the use of helicopters) and his capacity to survive off the land with few provisions does indeed conform to the image of Moat as a ‘self-styled commando’ (The Times, Jenkins, 2010). However, when juxtaposed against the police’s new technologies, his sawn-off shotgun may well have carried too many associations with the criminal realm to be successful in acting as a legitimate symbol of the war Moat is reported as openly threatening against police officers.

Such threats (The Times, McIntosh et al., 2010d) are used in international conflicts to legitimate the use of lethal force. Moat was positioning himself as a combatant, not a criminal, showing a conflict of legitimacy between his sense of masculinity and the discursive frameworks of masculinity used to account for him. This conflict evokes myths of the antihero who loathes the authority that he emulates but is excluded from. Moat seems to have seen himself as the antithesis of the legitimate institutionalised heroic male and a true legend for taking a stand against the forces of law and order. Rather than address his own failings, Moat is shown blaming the police for undermining his identity rather than admitting him to their hut. He is also shown blaming Northumbria Police for his problems over access to his two daughters from a previous relationship, for his latest prison term, and mistakenly for the end of his relationship with Stobbart (The Times, McIntosh et al., 2010c). The stories told about him show access to sources of masculine perfomativity finally closed off entirely, not only domestically but institutionally. Moat is shown isolated, literally outside like a wild animal.

The account in the news is of an ultimate conflict that leaves no place for such a man. Whereas domestic frameworks tend to blame women for men’s violence, the institutional account in the Moat narratives shows very clearly how masculinity is about men’s relationship to men. Such constructions show the importance of the state, the embodiment of socially legitimate male authority, in affording legitimacy to others’ masculine identities, most directly via law and policing. The ‘moatifs’ in the news support Kimmel’s contention that ‘masculinity is a homosocial enactment. We test ourselves, perform heroic feats, take enormous risks, all because we want other men to grant us our manhood’ (Kimmel, 1994: 129). Subjective masculinity is thus predicated on the perceived actual power or potential power of other men. The close relationship between institutionalisation and state-granted legitimacy may be problematic for some men, whereby they are allowed and expected to act in a violent and dominant manner towards others within their working spheres, but are criminalised if they do so in the wrong context where their institutional label does not afford them protection. This illustrates the constructive subjective role of such discursive contexts which sees actors overstepping the (invisible) boundary into illegitimate displays of violence. Many accounts reinforced principles of legitimate masculine power as protective of us all but also illustrated the dangers of offering desirable models that are deeply destructive when inverted. Moat was effectively the ‘other’ side of the coin; the dark side of the mirror. As such, the pairing of the heroic male and institutional masculinity ultimately shapes masculine identity development per se.

The close relationship between institutions and the legitimate masculine performance makes any other form of acquiring an equally legitimate identity particularly difficult for those, like Moat, for whom access to non-physical spheres of masculine hierarchy are unavailable due to class, education or economic restrictions; in other words, those who would, a generation ago in North-East England, have been working-class men: miners, steelworkers and shipbuilders. Making sense of Moat in the news shifted between the domestic and institutional until stories of his emulation, exclusion and alienation from both tropes of legitimacy saw a further framework emerge, much less tangential to the ordinary masculinity of domesticity and work but nonetheless a place where even a man who has failed ordinarily can still strive for manliness and be accounted for in ways which progress masculine ideals, demonstrating that ‘though they may not always be handsome, men doomed to evil possess the manly virtues’ (Genet, 1965: 5).

Elemental masculinity

In news about Moat we identified a third evocative narrative of such ideal virtues: what we refer to as elemental masculinity – a celebrated and idealised form of male identity that is culturally valorised and considered a genuine authentic representation of manliness. Elemental masculinity is closely aligned with nature and represented through images of the male as hunter, warrior and survivor, accomplished through heroic transcendence and triumph over adversity. Its embodiment is in brute physicality, prowess and muscular bodily forms, which display stoicism, fortitude, toughness, resilience and resourcefulness.

In a discussion of masculine subjectivity, Jefferson (1994) uses the metaphor of ascending great heights to experience transcendence over extraordinarily difficult circumstances as the ultimate value of masculinity. Jefferson argues that, at the level of individual experience, few men ever fully engage with or achieve this model of masculinity. Experiencing transcendence and overcoming impossible odds and circumstances is embodied and eternalised in the male hero and displays of heroism which are replete in Western popular culture. Such displays are often manifested in a process of ‘morphology’ in which the hero undergoes tests, overcomes obstacles, emerging triumphant at the end (Sparks, 1996: 351). The achievement of heroic transcendence characterises the ‘Ideal Masculine Self’ (author emphasis) internalised by men as an identity to be strived for, yet which is actually unachievable (Whitehead, 2005: 414). Kimmel (1994) argues that masculinity is about fear – fear of being identified and exposed as feminine or unmanly by other men. Men feel powerless as their performance as a man is constantly subjected to scrutiny. One mode of attaining and demonstrating achieved manliness is through physical strength, the visible evidence of the alpha male; and this was, in many ways, all that was left for Moat in his final days and a central prop of the final discursive paradigm evident in the news.

Elemental masculinity is discursively closely tied to muscular bodily forms, particular physical qualities and challenging environments. The location of masculinity at the level of the body through its physical exertion and toils is discussed in Carrington and Scott (2008). They describe the ways in which the rural order and the masculine coalesce to produce idealised constructions of rural masculinity that valorise notions of the warrior, survivor and violence. Engaged in physically demanding manual work in which male bodies are exposed to harsh environmental conditions, rural masculinity displays brute physical strength, resilience and the ability to survive and master nature’s harsh conditions. Carrington and Scott argue that this form of masculinity is rapidly becoming a consumer product desired by other men who engage in outdoor survival pursuits to harness this constructed notion of manhood which is deemed authentic.

In industrial Britain, similar visceral cultures instilled in working-class men a durable habitus, characterised by ‘hardness’, mental and physical toughness, resilience, stoicism and fortitude. This is a set of qualities and dispositions deemed necessary to work in and survive the harsh conditions of heavy industrial production and extraction (Hall, 1997b). The un-reflexive and durable visceral habitus continues to be internalised by generations of working-class men firmly committed to its desired qualities of brute physicality, strength, toughness and idealised masculine performance and identity (Hall, 1997b; Hall and Winlow, 2004; Winlow and Hall, 2009). Yet in post-millennial Britain, men are often excluded from the institutions that ‘stage’ such performance: industry and allied trades unions which have all but disappeared in the de-industrialisation that epitomised the Conservative governments of 1979–97. Instead, men like Moat hover on the edges of remaining masculinising institutions like the police (bouncer/informer) and the army (camouflage/hiking/guns) and/or dabble with the illegitimate masculine identity offered by crime. When legitimate masculinity removed these from Moat through imprisonment, and could also be blamed by him for the collapse of his domestic life, aspiration turned rapidly to aversion and Moat turned to the skills of survival, strength, stalking, hunting and hiding. He made himself appear an elemental subject dressing himself literally in the clothes of the hunter. His look and his acts allowed journalists to draw on a whole further narrative of masculinity that is evident in factual and fictional popular culture, with characters such as survival experts Ray Mears and Bear Grylls, and perhaps the epitome of elemental man, Hollywood action hero Rambo.

After featuring in several films, the Rambo character has developed a long history and broad popular appeal, which makes him an ideal interpretive schema for news audiences. Like much of the action hero film genre, First Blood, the first instalment in the Rambo film series, contains a strong anti-establishment rhetoric, exploring themes of alienation, abandonment, individuality and vigilantism (Sparks, 1996). John Rambo, a highly trained soldier and Vietnam War hero, finds himself alone and a vagrant in a small US town after being abandoned by the state and removed from the institutional structure and regimes of the US army. The character’s brooding intensity, the scars on his body, his rough demeanour and muscular frame all serve as drastic contrasts to the quaint, small-town community backdrop of the piece. He soon attracts the attention of local police. After being subjected to unjustified police harassment and wrongful arrest, Rambo manages to escape custody and disappears into the nearby wilderness. Unsurprisingly the press readily drew on the Rambo myth to offer an explanatory framework for Moat.

Discarded by the civilising institutions that provided a role for him, Rambo, like Moat, returns to nature, becoming, essentially, a displaced ‘wild’ man (Sparks, 1996). With nature’s materials at his disposal combined with his survival training, he is in his element, blending seamlessly into the mountainous woodland environment. Despite being outnumbered, against seemingly impossible odds, Rambo continues to evade capture. Finally finding himself cornered at the end of the film, Rambo surrenders at the behest and under the protection of his former army mentor, emerging heroically to an audience of police officers and soldiers with his ‘masculinity undeniably reconfirmed’ (Brown, 2002: 135); a typically happy ending reaffirming masculine ideals on both sides of the legitimacy coin, a fairytale ending that was unavailable in Moat’s story.

Aspects of the elemental as a particular trope of masculinity are present in the case of Moat. Depictions of his extreme violence, of his declaration of war against the police force and his subsequent disappearance into the Northumbrian countryside to evade capture, chillingly mirror aspects of the film’s plot and are permutations of the elemental masculinity present in the film and within broader culture. It is not uncommon for the media, when reporting on particularly horrific events, to draw on existing popular cultural sources to provide interpretive frames of reference that render these events intelligible and somewhat comprehensible for their audiences (Wykes and Welsh, 2009). The obvious similarities between the character Rambo and Moat, as well as the film’s plot and the events of the case, were noted by the media in several articles: ‘to many online communities he was a “Geordie Rambo”’ (Reynolds, 2010, Scotsman). The First Post ran with the headline ‘Moat says he’s like the Hulk – but he’s more like Rambo’ (Edwards, 2010), focusing on Moat’s knowledge of outdoor survival techniques, the military connotations in his declaration of war, and his perceived unjust treatment at the hands of the police.

Other aspects of Moat’s elemental masculinity were discussed in the media coverage – his potential for violence, and again his skills as an outdoorsman. Reports in the national media, some drawn from the testimonies of Moat’s acquaintances, depict a man of considerable local repute, particularly due to his reported capacity for violence, his reported association with members of Newcastle’s crime community, and his employment as a nightclub doorman/bouncer: ‘Mrs Hornsby said: “He has got a violent temper. Once he loses his temper he lashes out”’ (The Times, Jenkins and McIntosh, 2010). Bouncers ooze cultural capital in the form of violent potential, garnered through their experiences of socialisation within a durable working-class habitus, where violence and the threat of violence are encountered regularly (Hobbs et al., 2003; Winlow, 2001).

Moat evidently had a capacity for extreme violence and his actions, as described by Samantha Stobbart (his former partner), attest to this: ‘Raoul was waiting for us, hiding outside with a sawn-off shotgun… Raoul just jumped out and without a word shot Chris at point blank range in the legs’ (Sunday Times, Foggo and Hind, 2010). Stobbart’s description of the events suggests that Moat deliberately incapacitated Chris Brown, leaving him temporarily immobile while he turned his attention to Stobbart. As Stobbart fled back into the house, Moat returned to Brown and shot him twice before approaching the house and shooting Stobbart through a window (Foggo and Hind, 2010). The shooting of PC David Rathband by Moat appears to have followed a similar pattern, with Moat approaching PC Rathband’s parked vehicle and shooting him through the passenger window (The Times, McIntosh et al., 2010b). Moat’s actions, as described in Stobbart’s testimony and the media coverage of the shooting of PC Rathband, do not indicate that the violence in either incident was frenzied or committed spontaneously. In neither account does there appear to have been an initial confrontation, issue of threats, and then a subsequent escalation to lethal violence, as has been found in some research on homicides committed by men (Polk, 1994). Rather, the deployment of his violence, although brutal, appears to have been executed with a degree of calculation and planning, and, in many ways, appears to replicate the encounter between hunter and prey – with Moat appearing to be stalking the three victims. Coverage of the case confirmed this choice of identity. The Times ran with the headline ‘Gunman can survive in the wild for days on end, says ex-girlfriend’ (McIntosh et al., 2010a). CCTV images of Moat in a DIY shop show him looking muscular and dressed in camouflage-type attire. ‘He worked hard to build a body that stood out – even among the doormen of the city’s pubs and clubs’ (The Times, Jenkins and McIntosh, 2010). The presentation of ‘toughness’ of this kind is saturated in symbolic meaning that communicates to observers ‘that unusual physical risks have been suffered and transcended’ (Katz, 1988: 81).

In working-class communities, characterised by deprivation and economic marginality, men’s reputations are often founded on their ability to deploy violence effectively (Winlow and Hall, 2009). The evidence suggests that Moat emerged from such a context where violence, realised, threatened or symbolic, was a mode of appropriate masculine comportment. He, and we, are also situated within a broader culture ‘pervaded by images of hyper-masculine toughness, which valorises, in multifarious ways, the male body acting on space in conjunction with the skilled use and technical knowledge of weapons’ (Collier, 1998: 119). This is a culture in which – in particular contexts and at specific moments – the heterosexual male body and its destructive capabilities are celebrated and paraded in various popular cultural and media outlets for enjoyment and consumption. Unlike the majority of men who are likely to be drawn to the image of the heroic hard man, yet are incapable of performing it (Jefferson, 1998) as they become enmeshed within the seductions of conformity (Sparks, 1996), Moat was clearly a man who was willing to invest, copiously, in this particular aspect of his identity not least because his efforts at conformity had yielded little status. It is easy to see ‘how images of masculine bodies, bulging muscles and empowered actors might be enticing and seductive for men and boys who lack… any commanding status and presence in the world’ (Collier, 1998: 119). Moat’s body was entangled in a particular discourse of masculinity with its associated qualities and dispositions exalted in Western popular culture and one that we recognise, consume and are all too familiar with. In that discursive context, he is both depicted in the news, interpreted from the news as, and seems to have constructed a sense of himself as, a man connected with nature, resourceful, tough, and stoical in the face of adversity, with a powerful muscular physique; a warrior, a hunter and a survivor, a force to be reckoned with and a return to a form of manliness stripped of the vestiges of civilisation: he is the Elemental Man and ultimately he becomes only element through the alchemy of death by suicide.