How to be a man

A few years ago fourth-wave feminists coined the phrase “but what about the menz?” to lampoon men who effectively derailed discussions of women’s issues by asking how those issues affected themselves. The term certainly nailed a tendency in the gender struggle but, judging by events in 2014, men are still attempting to hijack the debate. So far this year, we have seen the Fawcett Society’s "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt campaign turned into a battle about who of Clegg, Cameron and Miliband would wear one; parades of male celebrities holding up pro-#heforshe feminist placards; Obama’s somewhat jarringly-titled “It’s On Us” anti sexual violence campaign—and, inevitably, Britain’s first populist, pro-male “backlash” book, Peter Lloyd’s Stand By Your Manhood: A Game-Changer for Modern Men.

Many of these developments are positive and apparently driven by good intentions, but it’s interesting how much of it involves conspicuously identifying with feminism rather than changing male behaviours to help facilitate equality. Perhaps it has to do with the attacks on masculinity about which Lloyd is so fond of writing; to be fair, they are not in short supply. Christine Largarde, MD of the International Monetary Fund, has said that Lehman Brothers would not have defaulted had it been run by women; Harriet Harman wants to use equality law to force more women onto “macho” bank boards. The futurologist and marketing consultant Faith Popcorn has gone further, claiming that “It is clear that women are going to create the future,” because they “are better at synthesizing multiple data points and thinking holistically. And the areas of their brains devoted to long-term planning are better developed than the male brain.”

Of course it’s always easy for moaning menz to take quotes like these and call misandry, and anyone with any sense can see why less machismo and more cooperative “feminine” values will be important in reshaping organisations to meet future demands. But arguments like Lagarde’s and Popcorn’s are fairly common, and they do invite a question. If women are better at planning, cooperation and synthesising information, and if they also have the superiority in other skills that are routinely claimed for them, such as listening and nurturing, then what qualities do men have? In other words, if some virtues are essentially feminine, then are others essentially masculine? And if so, what might they be?

The question is as important to feminists as it is to men, because it raises the issue of what kind of settlement we’re working towards. Is the future one in which gender ceases to matter or even to exist, or one in which we recognise men and women as being different, but grant equality to both? And if it’s the latter, then what are the desirable masculine values in 2014? It is a difficult question to ask in polite company these days, because the old ones have been recast and the enduring ones reclaimed. Risk taking? Not a virtue, look at Lehmann Brothers. Stoicism? Too much like emotional illiteracy and poor communication skills. Decisiveness? Are you’re saying women can’t be decisive?

How should a man be in 2014? I have heard men in liberal north London discussing this issue with some anguish. Scared of being called out for sexism by their partners in polite company, they say, they take great care to do equal shares of ironing, cooking and childcare. “The next thing,” as one put it, “her and her mates are talking about how they think it’s sexy watching the tree surgeons working in our street, because they’re so 'rugged.'”

But it isn’t just a chattering class issue. A few months ago I interviewed two women who ran gender workshops with young, urban males for the Rights and Equality Action Trust (GREAT). The teenage boys' vision of masculinity tends to be what you might call limited, being comprised mainly of sports cars, money and large-breasted, sexually-available women; one of them once asked if it was true that crying prevented the penis from growing. When I asked the GREAT women what version of manhood they put forward as an alternative, they said their experience had taught them they had to push for a “de-gendered” future; they felt feminism wouldn’t fulfil its promise until men had dropped the concept of masculinity altogether.

Which is a nice idea, maybe, but I’m not sure it’s going to help men in the immediate future, when there is a pressing need for it. I was born and brought up in the industrial north of England, where old primary and manufacturing industries helped to sustain semi-macho, monocultural masculine identities that can now leave individuals isolated as others around them change. I have spoken at length to male and female social workers there who say that while they do at least have a sense of what the specific women’s issues are and how they can help with them, similar thinking about men is barely developed. “No one has a clue what to say to those men,” one woman told me in Doncaster in 2010. “No one knows how to tell them to adapt, because no one has any ideas.”

If we know how to tell women to adapt, it is at least partly due to the debates in the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which did much to establish big, social, economic and ontological ideas that could be built on. It is a somewhat overlooked fact that in the past, ideas about the social construction of masculinity were similarly debated and disseminated through channels of influence in the church and educational establishments. In Eminent Victorians, the famed biographer Lytton Strachey gives a wry account of how the educator and historian Thomas Arnold used his writing to develop notions of masculine self-denial and piety that shaped the men of the British middle and upper classes in the 19th century. The ideas spread because he was a successful headmaster of Rugby School, and at a time when the ruling elite was drawn from a small pool of schools, other heads copied him. In the case of the Muscular Christianity movement, which was in part the origin of our modern version of the association of masculinity and sport, the ethos was debated in correspondence between Charles Kingsley and the reviewer TC Sandars; by contrast in the mid-18th Century, under the influence of the sentimentalist movement, writers such as Laurence Sterne were boasting in novels and periodicals of how easily they were moved to tears by commonplace events.

There have been similar polarisations and debates since at least the classical era; critics have argued persuasively, for example, that Shakespeare’s charismatic but vacillating heroes (Hamlet, Anthony, Prospero) are set off against limited, militaristic counterparts (Fortinbras, Caesar, Antonio) to critique the cult of the nationalist, warrior hero that was then being encouraged by Protestantism.

And there are now signs, like this year’s Being A Man conference at London’s Southbank Centre, that the renewed energy in feminism is helping to begin a new, male discussion for the 21st century; a debate of men’s own, rather than one they have hijacked from the womenz. Certainly judging by attendance at these events there seems to be a hunger for it; for those of us who think the future might be better if we make it together rather than in gender-silos, it can’t come fast enough.

Richard Benson will be asking "How To Be A Man" at The House of St Barnabas in London on Tuesday 2nd December as part of cultural consultancy BUG's talks series "37 Things you need to know about modern Britain"