Broken Men

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Women believe that modern men are weak and wankers, spineless and impotent


British newspaper: The Times

Today’s Man:

Broken down by age and sex

Once again we modern British men have been baring our souls about the subject that seems to interest us most. Amazingly, it’s not breasts, booze or footie. All so passé! No, it’s ourselves. It’s existential angst about the shrivelled state of manhood in what is increasingly a women’s world.

At least, it is for the one in seven British men labelled “determinist” by the men’s magazine GQ. This illustrious organ has just commissioned YouGov to survey the attitudes of 3,000 British men to life, the universe and everything. It now announces self-importantly that it has “uncovered the two major trends in masculinity in the 21st century: evolutionism and determinism”. It admits that only 39 per cent of us are completely one thing or t’other (24 per cent evolutionist, 15 per cent determinist). But all modern men, it claims, veer towards one or other of these poles.

So in this context, what exactly is an evolutionist or a determinist? Very little to do with God or Charles Darwin, apparently. It transpires that what defines modern man is – surprise, surprise! – his attitude to women. Put bluntly, evolutionists believe that, if it is a woman’s world, it’s one to which men can happily adapt. They applaud female emancipation and, where it occurs, female leadership. And they accept that men have to be prepared to give a lot more – both in their relationships with women, and in the home – than may have been the case in the past.

Determinists, on the other hand, are unreconstructed “men’s men”. They feel confused, worried and possibly threatened by the feminisation of society. They believe men are already less relevant than women in the 21st century, and more than a third of them actually believe men to be “doomed” as a species – whatever that means.

If they have a female boss, they resent her. They probably would have been happier living in their dad’s era, if not their grandad's – when it was men who set the agenda in everything from politics to culture. GQ quotes one determinist as grumbling that “Jagger wasn’t defined by the fact that Marianne Faithfull fancied him, whereas Doherty is defined by the fact that Kate Moss fancies him.” (Of course, there might be a simple explanation for that. Jagger was a top-class performer.)

What GQ doesn’t tell us, frustratingly, is how evolutionists and determinists break down in terms of age and status. If the determinists are mostly middle-aged or older men stuck in deadend jobs, their bitterness towards women – a classic psychological transference of frustration at their own inadequacies – is still sad and misplaced, but hardly worrying. In time their generation will disappear, like the dinosaurs.

If, on the other hand, the determinists are mostly young, educated, high-achieving hot-shots determined to reassert macho values in what they see as an overfeminised world, that’s far more dangerous. It suggests that behind “laddishness” lies a dangerous anger that will keep the battle of the sexes raging for decades to come.

Let me pause here for an airing of private grief. I touched on the vexed question of male-female relationships a couple of months ago, in an article which (I innocently thought) was gently ironic and self-deprecating. The bulging postbag I received contained the most vitriolic responses of the year so far – and that’s saying something.

What does that tell me? Perhaps that we over-45s have indeed witnessed a revolution in gender relationships during our lifetimes – but that, like most revolutions, this has left a festering aftermath of bewilderment, resentment and acts of revenge. And not only on the male side. Some women feel not empowered but overwhelmed by the awesome notion that they can “have it all”. Some feel embittered because society has not moved as fast as they expected to remove the obstacles, overt and covert, that continue to discriminate against women.

And some, no doubt, are just as “determinist” as men. I don’t know a single woman who would say “a woman’s place is in the home”. But I know several – young, middle-aged and old – who are clearly at their most fulfilled in the home. And that’s a piece of observation, not male propaganda.

What makes generalisation about this prickly subject so difficult, of course, is that we are all tainted by personal experience. A couple who have a loving, mutually enriching relationship will regard the opposite sex in a very different light from a disenchanted thirtysomething singleton whose heart has already been broken half a dozen times. In this field, it is incredibly difficult to disentangle one’s objective perceptions from one’s circumstances, in order to survey humanity as a whole. Besides which, on this question humanity is at its least whole. I suspect that GQ would receive startlingly different responses if it repeated its survey in Italy or Russia, let alone Iran or Pakistan.

One statistic, however, made me sit up and scowl. Some 86 per cent of the 3,000 British men surveyed agreed with the proposition that “fathers should be a role model for their children”. Good grief, what on earth do the other 14 per cent think they are playing at? And what does that say about the roots of gang culture and youth crime?


Comment: What use to women is a man who is both educated and rich yet gutless and dishonurable. Modern men have done universities byt they dont know what women really want.

2007