***

Philosophy, claimed Étienne Gilson, always buries its undertakers. Gilson was himself a philosopher, so perhaps he had an interest in believing this. But there might be something in it: as the complaints pile up, about cultural stagnation and loss of meaning, Britain’s young people are on a renewed quest for higher things.

One of the forms this seems to be taking, at least for some, is a turn toward God. According to a new study a “Quiet Revival” is afoot in British Christianity, with young people leading the way: reportedly, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024: a startling increase. And yet it may also be true that England’s Christian heritage is as moribund as ever — at least in an institutional sense. For this reported church attendance is mainly growing in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, while the established, national Church of England continues to languish.

This isn’t the first indicator that some kind of religious backswing is underway among the young. A poll in January, for example, revealed that Gen Zs are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheists. The trend reaches beyond England as well, with the French journalist Solène Tadié recently pointing to a revival of traditional Catholicism in Europe, again especially among the young. Last year, too, Rod Dreher documented a similar pattern of Christian revival across the West, especially among young people, setting this in the wider context of a general, youthful turn toward spirituality.

Dreher argues that the governing feature of those churches that are thriving is their orientation toward the numinous, whether expressed through adherence to ancient high-church liturgy, or through intense, charismatic spiritual communion. But why would this be happening at all? Why especially young people, and why the mystical edge? I wonder if this trend is less about a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, and more about how sharply this contrasts with the generation that raised them: so-called “Gen X”, born roughly 1965 to 1980.

I belong, just about, to this demographic. It’s an open question for me whether Gen X exists at all or just comprises those Boomers born too late to enjoy the fun phase of smashing history, heritage, and the future. Either way, by the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in; and yet, growing up in an unusually peaceful and prosperous era, we combined this sense of post-cultural anomie with far too much time to think.

The result was a pervasive sense of nihilism as a kind of moral duty, and profound unshakeable truth. It’s difficult to convey in these virulently ideological times, but back in the Nineties Nirvana’s anthem to existential boredom felt fiercely real in its raw but morally empty energy: “Here we are now, entertain us.” The same restless, angry alienation energizes the work of writer Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting (1993) was for a while the definitive edgy zeitgeist text for younger Gen X: so much so, in fact, that Trainspotting’s opening monologue made its way onto t-shirts, posters, and other merch, all spitting in the face of what it meant to “Choose life”.

For Welsh’s heroin-addicted anti-hero Renton, “life” is empty of meaning and purpose. It’s mere mechanical, dull consumerist tedium grinding toward a loveless, pointless, neglected end: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

Renton declares: “I chose not to choose life.” And the 1996 movie adaptation, starring Ewan McGregor, enthroned Renton as one of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heartthrobs: as enthrallingly self-destructive a cultural icon as Kurt Cobain.

But what happens, then, when nihilists have kids? Raising kids requires innumerable choices, all of which tacitly concede a vision of the good. How does this square with a cultural outlook that denies any such thing? Describing his own predicament as a Gen X parent, the novelist Ewan Morrison — a friend and contemporary of Irvine Welsh — captured this paradox in a recent talk when he recalled seeing a young woman in the Nineties wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, over a visibly pregnant belly.

What does it mean to disavow futurity even as you’re gestating it? And how do you go about raising the resulting kids? The object of philosophy and religion has classically been eudaimonia: human flourishing. But by the end of the 20th century, pace Étienne Gilson, even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.

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In Trainspotting, the only parents are the addicts Lesley and Sick Boy, whose neglected baby dies while they are high on heroin. But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy, when it came to pursuing eudaimonia for their own children. Very simply, much of the circle was squared by pragmatists: parents who embraced a vague humanism, or New Atheism, while teaching their kids to say please and thank you and answering questions about Christmas and Easter with a shrug.

And yet at a deeper level the ambivalence remains, between the need to model the good for your kids and the relativist’s aversion to any such definitive moral stance. In turn, this produced a distinctive approach to child-rearing that the philosopher Agnes Callard characterizes as “acceptance parenting”. Acceptance parents, Callard argues, disavow any obligation to provide a substantive account of the good for their kids. Instead, children are left to determine what “happiness” means for themselves.

As the children of Gen X reach adulthood, we can thus ask: what kind of adults does such an upbringing produce? In What Are Children For?, published last year, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer some indication of how it feels to grow up under “acceptance parenting”. Wiseman recounts quizzing her own mother about whether there was anything at all she could choose to do that would disappoint her mother. Her mother demurred. Wiseman found this less supportive than incomprehensible: “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”

It’s not difficult to see how a generation that sang “oh well, whatever, nevermind” and pinned Welsh’s “Choose Life” monologue to their student bedroom walls might balk at defining eudaimonia for their kids. Who are they, after all, to say what the good life looks like? But this reluctance to impose values, Wiseman gently suggests, can result less in an enabling freedom, than a moral vacuum: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”

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Is it really so strange, then, that a generation raised in this void might, in some cases, turn to religious faith in search of clearer guidance? When the world’s faith traditions offer cumulative millennia of writing and practice on how to live well, it stands to reason that some young people would opt not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to fill the void.

And this, in turn, sheds light on why such an exploration might take literally any form other than the mainstream Anglican Church: in its conventional form, Anglicanism functions as a continuation of “acceptance parenting” by religious means. There are, of course, a great many deeply devout Anglicans; but by virtue of its historic role, the Church of England walks a precarious institutional tightrope between politics and faith, political and spiritual England. And this invites a public image less as a spiritual body, than as the representative of whatever remains of British institutional Christianity that hasn’t been subsumed by the welfare state and mainstream secular liberalism.

In fulfilling its duty as far as possible to offer spiritual welcome to the whole national community, our established Church risks appearing to stand for nothing much, or at best to embody the Christian equivalent of the moral vacuum Wiseman describes. Against this, young people weary of the effort to define their own values and happiness ex nihilo, and eager for guidance from somewhere — anywhere — might be forgiven for concluding that such direction is not to be found in a church whose leaders shrug at turning over their sacred buildings to silent discos or helter-skelters. Confronted by what looks overwhelmingly like a mass abdication of moral authority by parents and religious institutions, then, perhaps the last form of youthful revolt available is against nothingness itself: a rejection of relativism, and embrace of doctrine and mystery.

We can perhaps draw a few inferences from this. Firstly, taken at the broadest level, this presages an increasingly faith-inflected world as this generation matures — not just within the Christian Church but also across the fast-growing “spiritual but not religious” cohort. Secondly, as regards Christianity in particular, it suggests that predictions of the coming end of established, institutional Christianity in Britain, at least in the form it’s taken for the last century or two, may well turn out to be accurate. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is dying out in Britain.

If anything, what’s on the wane now is nihilism, physicalism, and the reductive “nothing-butness” characteristic of the “Nevermind” era. By contrast, Christianity appears to be growing stranger, more countercultural, and more resistant to corralling in mainstream political institutions. This is a faith whose God rose from the dead; a generation of relativists will not finish it off.

One of the forms this seems to be taking, at least for some, is a turn toward God. According to a new study a “Quiet Revival” is afoot in British Christianity, with young people leading the way: reportedly, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024: a startling increase. And yet it may also be true that England’s Christian heritage is as moribund as ever — at least in an institutional sense. For this reported church attendance is mainly growing in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, while the established, national Church of England continues to languish.

This isn’t the first indicator that some kind of religious backswing is underway among the young. A poll in January, for example, revealed that Gen Zs are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheists. The trend reaches beyond England as well, with the French journalist Solène Tadié recently pointing to a revival of traditional Catholicism in Europe, again especially among the young. Last year, too, Rod Dreher documented a similar pattern of Christian revival across the West, especially among young people, setting this in the wider context of a general, youthful turn toward spirituality.

Dreher argues that the governing feature of those churches that are thriving is their orientation toward the numinous, whether expressed through adherence to ancient high-church liturgy, or through intense, charismatic spiritual communion. But why would this be happening at all? Why especially young people, and why the mystical edge? I wonder if this trend is less about a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, and more about how sharply this contrasts with the generation that raised them: so-called “Gen X”, born roughly 1965 to 1980.

I belong, just about, to this demographic. It’s an open question for me whether Gen X exists at all or just comprises those Boomers born too late to enjoy the fun phase of smashing history, heritage, and the future. Either way, by the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in; and yet, growing up in an unusually peaceful and prosperous era, we combined this sense of post-cultural anomie with far too much time to think.

The result was a pervasive sense of nihilism as a kind of moral duty, and profound unshakeable truth. It’s difficult to convey in these virulently ideological times, but back in the Nineties Nirvana’s anthem to existential boredom felt fiercely real in its raw but morally empty energy: “Here we are now, entertain us.” The same restless, angry alienation energizes the work of writer Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting (1993) was for a while the definitive edgy zeitgeist text for younger Gen X: so much so, in fact, that Trainspotting’s opening monologue made its way onto t-shirts, posters, and other merch, all spitting in the face of what it meant to “Choose life”.

For Welsh’s heroin-addicted anti-hero Renton, “life” is empty of meaning and purpose. It’s mere mechanical, dull consumerist tedium grinding toward a loveless, pointless, neglected end: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

Renton declares: “I chose not to choose life.” And the 1996 movie adaptation, starring Ewan McGregor, enthroned Renton as one of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heart-throbs: as enthrallingly self-destructive a cultural icon as Kurt Cobain.

But what happens, then, when nihilists have kids? Raising kids requires innumerable choices, all of which tacitly concede a vision of the good. How does this square with a cultural outlook that denies any such thing? Describing his own predicament as a Gen X parent, the novelist Ewan Morrison — a friend and contemporary of Irvine Welsh — captured this paradox in a recent talk when he recalled seeing a young woman in the Nineties wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, over a visibly pregnant belly.

What does it mean to disavow futurity even as you’re gestating it? And how do you go about raising the resulting kids? The object of philosophy and religion has classically been eudaimonia: human flourishing. But by the end of the 20th century, pace Étienne Gilson, even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.

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In Trainspotting, the only parents are the addicts Lesley and Sick Boy, whose neglected baby dies while they are high on heroin. But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy, when it came to pursuing eudaimonia for their own children. Very simply, much of the circle was squared by pragmatists: parents who embraced a vague humanism, or New Atheism, while teaching their kids to say please and thank you and answering questions about Christmas and Easter with a shrug.

And yet at a deeper level the ambivalence remains, between the need to model the good for your kids and the relativist’s aversion to any such definitive moral stance. In turn, this produced a distinctive approach to child-rearing that the philosopher Agnes Callard characterises as “acceptance parenting”. Acceptance parents, Callard argues, disavow any obligation to provide a substantive account of the good for their kids. Instead, children are left to determine what “happiness” means for themselves.

As the children of Gen X reach adulthood, we can thus ask: what kind of adults does such an upbringing produce? In What Are Children For?, published last year, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer some indication of how it feels to grow up under “acceptance parenting”. Wiseman recounts quizzing her own mother about whether there was anything at all she could choose to do that would disappoint her mother. Her mother demurred. Wiseman found this less supportive than incomprehensible: “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”

It’s not difficult to see how a generation that sang “oh well, whatever, nevermind” and pinned Welsh’s “Choose Life” monologue to their student bedroom walls might baulk at defining eudaimonia for their kids. Who are they, after all, to say what the good life looks like? But this reluctance to impose values, Wiseman gently suggests, can result less in an enabling freedom, than a moral vacuum: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”

Suggested reading

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By Lias Saoudi

Is it really so strange, then, that a generation raised in this void might, in some cases, turn to religious faith in search of clearer guidance? When the world’s faith traditions offer cumulative millennia of writing and practice on how to live well, it stands to reason that some young people would opt not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to fill the void.

And this, in turn, sheds light on why such an exploration might take literally any form other than the mainstream Anglican Church: in its conventional form, Anglicanism functions as a continuation of “acceptance parenting” by religious means. There are, of course, a great many deeply devout Anglicans; but by virtue of its historic role, the Church of England walks a precarious institutional tightrope between politics and faith, political and spiritual England. And this invites a public image less as a spiritual body, than as the representative of whatever remains of British institutional Christianity that hasn’t been subsumed by the welfare state and mainstream secular liberalism.

In fulfilling its duty as far as possible to offer spiritual welcome to the whole national community, our established Church risks appearing to stand for nothing much, or at best to embody the Christian equivalent of the moral vacuum Wiseman describes. Against this, young people weary of the effort to define their own values and happiness ex nihilo, and eager for guidance from somewhere — anywhere — might be forgiven for concluding that such direction is not to be found in a church whose leaders shrug at turning over their sacred buildings to silent discos or helter-skelters. Confronted by what looks overwhelmingly like a mass abdication of moral authority by parents and religious institutions, then, perhaps the last form of youthful revolt available is against nothingness itself: a rejection of relativism, and embrace of doctrine and mystery.

We can perhaps draw a few inferences from this. Firstly, taken at the broadest level, this presages an increasingly faith-inflected world as this generation matures — not just within the Christian Church but also across the fast-growing “spiritual but not religious” cohort. Secondly, as regards Christianity in particular, it suggests that predictions of the coming end of established, institutional Christianity in Britain, at least in the form it’s taken for the last century or two, may well turn out to be accurate. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is dying out in Britain.

If anything, what’s on the wane now is nihilism, physicalism, and the reductive “nothing-butness” characteristic of the “Nevermind” era. By contrast, Christianity appears to be growing stranger, more countercultural, and more resistant to corralling in mainstream political institutions. This is a faith whose God rose from the dead; a generation of relativists will not finish it off.

In the Eighties, central Scotland was hit with the kind of mass unemployment, addiction and poverty that often weakens school performance. By the time I started high school in the Nineties the classroom was, for many, nothing more than a box you were confined to while the clock ticked and the clouds moved past the window. Lessons regularly slipped towards chaos, and for the teachers who struggled to impose themselves, impenetrability became a survival instinct.

In the midst of this I remember an English class where the teacher made small and regular efforts to impart something personal to her pupils. “I’ve read a brilliant book,” she announced one afternoon, just as the bell rang. “By a new, young Scottish author, if anyone’s interested?” The classroom emptied in record time, but I was intrigued. At 15, culturally isolated in a small town, I had no idea that young Scottish people were writing novels. It would have been fatal to my credibility to be seen to be interested, but I memorised the title and walked to the local library after school that day.

Morvern Callar, by Alan Warner, tells the story of a 21-year-old supermarket employee living in a nameless Scottish port town. When she finds her self-serious boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor by his own hand, she steals the unpublished novel he has written and sells it, using the advance to go clubbing in Spain. It was first published in 1995; my teacher must have read it upon release, and I shortly after that.

Trainspotting didn’t enter my teenage consciousness until it’s adaptation for the cinema in 1996, so until Morvern Callar arrived my experience of literature had been strictly dustbowls and waistcoats — school texts like Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, and An Inspector Calls. Our teachers worked hard to convince us of the relevance of things that had happened in Salinas, California, or Maycomb, Alabama, but now we had a local book; suddenly it seemed as though Morvern Callar — dangerous, youthful, Scottish — was lurking right outside the classroom window. I devoured the novel, as did my friends, as, eventually, did my mum and dad and sister. The thing that captured all our imaginations was the strange familiarity of the protagonist’s voice: Morvern was an enigmatic and illusory presence, but she still spoke like someone we knew from down the shops.

We all speak a dialect and this, whether we like it or not, forms part of our identity. Yet the use of dialect in modern novels has fostered debate on many fronts. How to represent class and nationality in literature is a question that stretches back to Dickens and the Brontës and beyond to the 18th century, when authors began to experiment with a wider variety of local speech. Today, authors are often under pressure to tone down dialect in novels for the sake of reader accessibility.

One only has to consider the furore over another Scottish novel — James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late — to get a sense of the controversy surrounding dialect. The novel, written in what critics described as working-class Glaswegian vernacular, won the Booker Prize in 1994 to the horror of the columnist Simon Jenkins, who claimed it was “literary vandalism” and compared Kelman to an “illiterate savage”. One judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, said the book was not “publicly accessible” and threatened to resign if it won.

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Perhaps it was the swear words that did it: an estimated 4,000 fucks. But Kelman wasn’t the literary disruptor some people painted him as: “Most of my stories were written from within my own culture,” he said, “so you use the language as people use it.” His book, which tells a day in the life of a newly blind ex-con called Sammy, is a letter-perfect feat of ventriloquism. The reader is fully immersed in the thoughts and speech of the Glaswegian protagonist and every aspect of his life in Nineties Scotland — the DSS, the worn cassettes (Dylan, Kristofferson, Cash,), the pubs called Glancy’s. We are treated not only to Sammy’s personality, but the personality of place.

But for many readers, schooled on did, do and done and raised on prize-winners from a mainstream novelistic tradition, the dialect understandably made the novel a slog. It was hard for some to see beyond the spelling — ye for you, didnay for didn’t, wasnay for wasn’t — and there were suggestions that Kelman’s writing was inaccessible to the very people he was apparently writing about, and for.

While critics lined up to disparage Kelman’s stylistic choices, it was Jenkins who perhaps pinpointed where the real controversy lay when he claimed Kelman had done no more than “transcribe the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk”. As is so often the case, arguments about language and spelling were a flimsy cover for efforts to define who belongs in literature, which writers are worthy of the major prizes, and which emotional crises can be considered valid novelistic fodder. Can the alley-bound, newly-blind Glaswegian ever be considered the equal of the Hampstead fig-eater, gazing down from his nine-over-six window?

Perhaps, though, it all comes down to the mundane question of sales. The head of books at WH Smith noted snidely that sales of Kelman’s book had quadrupled after winning the Booker Prize — from eight to 30 copies a week! By contrast, the 2020 Booker Prize was won by another Scottish novel, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain — a no-less brutal tale of courage and love, but one that wielded dialect very sparingly. The book was an international hit, selling more than 1.5 million copies around the world. Despite his reluctance to write in dialect, Stuart spoke of his own debt to Kelman: “How Late it Was, How Late changed my life… It is also one of the first times I saw my people, my dialect, on the page.”

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Of course, dialect is not the only way to create a sense of local identity. Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar is a far more accessible novel than Kelman’s, but it loses nothing in terms of intimacy and locality. Warner rejected the phonetic spellings (or “eye dialect”) used by Kelman, instead modifying standard English words with suffixes (silentness, queerish) to give Morvern a wide-eyed individuality that echoed the kind of front-room talk you might hear from your grannie and your auntie. The use of archaic colloquialisms (totey-wee, blethering, midden) and the proliferation of local nicknames — serve to illustrate the tight-knit informality of the community she comes from.

I hadn’t read Morvern Callar in a decade when I returned to it during the pandemic, bored and homesick on furlough in London. The feelings it gave me as a teenager in a small working-class town were undiminished as an adult in London — that there is darkness and poetry outside our front doors; that events worthy of literature can take place anywhere. I had probably decided I wanted to be a writer back in 1995, but as is often the case, school then jobs and life in general got in the way. With months off work I decided, finally, I’d have a go at writing my own book.

After living away from Scotland for such a long period, it wasn’t as straightforward as sitting down and writing from scratch. Dialogue is often mentioned as one of the trickiest part of writing to master, and if you are trying to replicate a specific dialect — even one you grew up with — it is doubly hard. I used my own way of speaking, the speech of my family and friends, as well as online resources like The British Library archives to polish the dialect of individual characters. The process revealed the threads of Doric dialect that I’d picked up from my father, who grew up in the northeast of Scotland: words like pechin (tired), birl (spin), and muckle (big), and the habit of dropping the “s” from the end of many pluralised words (“down the stair, seven year ago”).

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Reading a book written in dialect requires commitment from the reader. And yet so many of the attributes that readers prize in a book — atmosphere, authenticity, a sense of place — are enhanced by characters who speak and think in distinctive ways. The structure of our language defines not only our own identity, but how we experience the world, and opening ourselves to other ways of speaking can help us better understand other lives. For me, writing in dialect helps readjust the boundaries of who belongs in literature.

I never told my English teacher that I had been listening that day in class, or that I tracked down and read the book she recommended. Yet Morvern Callar is a book whose voice strongly informed my own attempts at writing. It taught me that there was profundity in my small-town experience. And it showed me that you could, in Scotland, write about those experiences.

So opens a rather brilliant and fun documentary on a topic that fascinates me: the ‘ideal man’. Many of my male friends — both gay and straight, have told me that masculinity is like a prison, giving them little flexibility in how to live and behave. Increasing numbers of us — whether male or female — are trying to work out what it means to be a man these days. Stereotypes are being challenged and gender roles supposedly more fluid.

In her new documentary, The Ideal Scotsman, Rachel McCormack looks specifically at Scottish masculinity. She explores the Scotsman in all his incarnations — from the ‘hard man’ of the Glasgow knife gangs, to today’s tearier version (Andy Murray, take a bow).

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McCormack, a proud Glaswegian, has long been fascinated by men in kilts. I’ve seen first-hand why: I accompanied her on a trip to Edinburgh while she was researching a book on women and whisky, and witnessed how she is generally treated by the male-dominated whisky industry. She wasn’t once phased by the often outrageous sexism she was subjected to; but she did challenge it firmly and reasonably while drinking the blokes under the table.

“Public life in Scotland”, she tells me, “is overwhelmingly male and unfriendly to women.” That’s why she decided to make the film. “I wanted to see what Scottish men were doing with all the space they are taking up”. Men are 50% of the population, she says, but they dominate public life.

But is that specific to Scotland? In many ways, yes, she says. “Despite our changing political culture, Scotland is still overwhelmingly male.”

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The best-known expression of Scottish masculinity is probably that represented in the 1995 film Braveheart, a fictional tale based on the life of William Wallace, who led the Scots in the First War of Independence against King Edward I of England. The film emphasises the machismo of Wallace and juxtaposes this version of a man with the heavily homophobic depiction of the English Prince Edward and his male companion — all make-up and feminine attire. The message here is that proper Scotsmen are hard and heterosexual and have a passionate love for their country. Nationalism is what true men fight for.

McCormack wanted to see if that is still the case. She tells me she was particularly “interested in what the male is like now that there is no hard industry to shape that ‘hard man’ caricature we remember. How do they see themselves and their position as men in Scotland today?”

And so she talks to actors, historians, writers, and even a celebrated male ballet dancer. She tracks the Scottish man through time, too, starting with the Highland Chiefs and ending with Rab C. Nesbitt and the uber violent Begbie in Trainspotting.

Throughout the documentary, McCormack manages to have intelligent and meaningful conversations with both hairy-arsed geezers and the new wave types; she gets them all to really think about what it means to be a man today.

And she finds that things are changing. Tough young men such as ballet dancer Chris Harrison and writer Chris McQueer have a much healthier outlook on life. “Harrison is one of the bravest men I have ever met,” she says, “a heterosexual ballet dancer when he was growing up in rural Stirlingshire was not something that would have been allowed to exist easily and it is very obvious he had a really hard time.”

Harrison is a great interviewee. In the film he talks about how it is now much easier for Scottish boys to do ballet — but stops short of attributing that change even slightly to himself, which one undoubtedly could.

McQueer, in turn, talks about the generation of working-class men being brought up mostly by single mothers, who don’t want to be like the older generation of men. “They didn’t want to disappoint their mums and their grans,” says McCormack. “I found that really sad as it appeared the only way to cut out a toxic legacy was if the men disappeared.”

In fact, one of the most interesting things she discovered was the way sons relate to their fathers. She said she noticed a particular “emotional repression” present in many father-son relationships.

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This really resonated with me. And it isn’t peculiar to Scotland. As a feminist who has spent all her adult life campaigning to end male violence towards women — one woman is killed every three days by a former partner — I am constantly confronting the reality and repercussions of toxic masculinity. All those men who assault women are, in the main, given permission to do so by the indoctrination and perpetuation of sexist stereotypes.

Behaviours are handed down from generation to generation. Boys are bullied in order to become ‘proper men’, taught to fight, told that women should be kept in their place and are simply sex objects. On a more common — if insidious — level, the casual normalisation of gender roles in the domestic setting, such as leaving the housework and childcare to women, is far more common than many so-called ‘modern men’ would like to admit. We feminists are, in a way, a man’s best friend. We know that men can choose not to be dicks and we are fighting to tell them as much.

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So it was refreshing to hear that there is a younger generation kicking back against the particularly rigid stereotype of the Scottish ‘hard man’. It is clear from both the film and from my own observations as a feminist that today, at least for the younger generation, masculinity isn’t nearly as restrictive as it was.

McCormack agrees. “It does seem to be changing dramatically,” she says. “The younger generation seem in a much better position to cope with life, like women and have a more pleasurable life.”

Thankfully, the stereotype of the Scottish man is shifting from that of Rab C. Nesbitt — the angry, lazy, middle-aged man with stubble and in a dirty string vest — to the point where male ballet dancers and pro-feminist sportsmen such as Andy Murray can get a look in.

Which isn’t to say that my work is done. When instances of male violence against women and other men falls to a record low; when fewer boys look to hard-core pornography for their sex education, and a few more of them pick up a vacuum cleaner and nappy every now and again — maybe then we will be able to feel assured that toxic masculinity is becoming obsolete. But until then, it is alive and, unfortunately, kicking hard.

The Ideal Scotsman can be watched on iPlayer.