Joe reveals the contradictions and failings of conventional ideas of masculinity by enacting rather than challenging them. He sees women in generic and instrumental terms, as means to particular ends; Mrs. Brown tells him that she initially did not like him because “you were so obviously using Susan to get what you wanted.” With the exception of Alice Aisgill, whom he sacrifices to his ambition in Room at the Top, women are a social and sexual resource for which he competes with other men. His enjoyment of them derives as much from his sense of success in this competition as from anything else. At the party in London he anticipates “[n]ot just the pleasure of having Jean but the pleasure of taking her from someone else”. Masculinity offers a way of legitimizing his actions, not least to himself; he can represent his pursuit of his own interests as a demonstration of virility, the fulfilment of an inherent drive to dominate.

In practice, Joe’s attempts to embody conventional ideas of manliness generate anxiety, for himself and the reader. In the first place, it exposes aspects of contemporary masculinity that are often obscured or disclaimed, revealing the way in which sex­ual assertiveness can spill over into sexual violence. Look­ing at Norah he considers “the need for rape” and he and Susan com­pulsively reenact their initial sexual encounter in Room at the Top as what she calls the “big pretend, the hurting pretend”, in which “I can’t stop you”. Even Joe is intermittently troubled by his desires; when Susan tells him that “I deserve to be hurt” he thinks that “I had never been so excited in my life; and I had never hated myself so deeply.” His reaction demonstrates a self-awareness that allows Joe, and Braine, to respond to dominant ideas of masculinity rather than passively reflect them.

Joe’s attempts to assert himself do not bring him security but reveal its absence. Having used his sexual charm to transform his social and material status, he finds himself occupying the con­ventionally feminine role of the “gold digger” and he is conscious that Norah will hear him described as a “superannuated gigolo . . . who’d risen from the working classes, not by brains, not by hard work, but by getting a rich man’s daughter in the family way.” Despite his fantasies of control, he is dependent on the desire of those he has tried to use; he is aware that “I hadn’t got as far as I wanted to go” but consoles himself with the thought that “women had wanted me”. The past tense is significant. In Life at the Top his body, the final guarantee of his masculinity, is ageing. He is “much fatter than I ought to be” and troubled by the decline in his looks; surveying himself in the mirror at Norah’s flat whilst she is out at work he confronts a face “more blotchy and more puffy” than before.

Joe hopes to find in established ideas of what it means to be a man a stable foundation for his identity and sense of self-worth. By the end of the novel these ideas have collapsed, un­able to bear the weight he piles upon them. His body, his sexual charm, and his position as a father are all revealed to be fragile, and his claims to masculinity are contested by those around him. Susan insists that even his controlled exercise of power demonstrates that he is “not a real man at all” but “like one of your bloody cal­culating machines”. The weakness of the conclusion demon­strates Braine’s inability to resolve these tensions, but he does, to some degree, recognize them. For all its failings, the conversation Joe has with his son, who has been punished after resisting a pri­vate school initiation ceremony in which they “whitewash your – thing”, suggests a tacit realization that established forms of male bonding and development, with their cruelty and contra­dictions, will not suffice, and that the conventional understanding of masculinity itself must be questioned.