It’s 2019 and men have got their knickers in a right twist. For some, the sins of ‘toxic masculinity’ and macho lad culture cast a long shadow as we try to fight forward as new, better men. For others, men’s traditional roles are being stripped away and unfairly chastised by a tide of 21st-century feminism.

Whichever way you see it, the prescient question of ‘what it means to be a man’ has become a proverbial tail-chasing exercise. Men are going round and round in pursuit of the answer, prompted not just by movements such as #MeToo and other examples of men being called on their shit (as the saying goes), but also our own increasing need to examine, deconstruct, and reassemble our own sense of masculinity.

Surely there’s one thing we can agree on – that modern masculinity is a question with a million possible answers. There were male cheerleaders at this year’s Super Bowl. Chanel now sells make-up for men. That’s surely a good thing. Old-school ideas of manliness – strength, testosterone, toughness, the kind of thing that some would argue causes all the toxic behaviour and a gender imbalance – are now sharing the stage with different ideas, based on emotional intelligence or wellness.

Persistent stats tell us there is still plenty still to work out though. Men account for 75 per cent of suicides in the UK. As little as two per cent of eligible families take shared parental leave. And the recent Gillette advert targeting toxic male behaviour and asking “Is this the best a man can get?” caused a storm of gender debate.

But are traditional notions of alpha male identities really damaging? Or should old school bloke be something to be celebrated? Are we raising our sons to be good men? Or teaching them to make the same mistakes all over again? In other words, what does it really take to be a man in the modern age? We asked very different guys how to do it.