Jarryd Bartle reviews What Do Men Want? by Nina Power:
“Most men are, like most women, a mixture of good and bad, but they are not, as a rule, irredeemable,” Power notes.
Indeed, if there is ever to be a reconciliation between men and women, it may require considering the interests, needs and desires of good men, rather than a laser focus on the bad.
What then, do men want?
When Power asked her male friends this incredibly leading question, the responses ranged from “To be left alone” to “Pussy” to “Beer”. However, the real answer seems to be: something to do.
Power writes, “It is hard to imagine how the role [of men] today could be any more evacuated of meaning or status.”
The old-fashioned role of the Patriarch has been dead for at least one full generation now, and we haven’t really found an adequate replacement. The result is that men are adrift in a state of nihilism. In pop culture men seem to play the role of the “horny jester” to the self-serious goals of feminine social change. But men aren’t just interested in sex and frivolity; they also want a life of meaning.
The consequences of this listlessness are all too evident. Men are vastly overrepresented in statistics on suicide, unemployment, drug overdoses and crime.
Most men aren’t violent, but they are far more violent than women. Women are sometimes the target of this violence, but far more often men take out their pent-up aggression and sadism on other men. Often, we are told to blame these pathologies on “toxic masculinity” — that men need to be liberated from their preferences and to embrace the feminine ideals of tenderness, openness and sociability.
This solution sees sex difference as an irrelevancy, merely a reified founding myth of hegemonic masculinity, perfectly capable of tinkering. For Power, this approach is exceedingly cruel, failing to accept men as embodied creatures with a distinct way of experiencing the world:
To describe masculinity as “toxic” is to suggest that not only have men been poisoned, but that they are extending their poison to the rest of society.
This recent call to feminise men also didn’t occur in a vacuum.
There has been a significant decline in the needs for physical labour in Western countries since the turn of the century. Our increasingly service-oriented, tech-mediated economy requires very different temperaments, often drawing on the feminine virtues of empathic communication.
For Power, these broader structural changes have meant “certain kinds of behaviour come to be rewarded over others”.
Whilst we can’t turn back the clock, this re-evaluation of the role of men in society should be done in a manner which respects the dignity of men as different from woman.
