What a man's got to do

Female professional success, however, is not the source of men's second lament. Along with their success, women have also won social acceptance for their right to reject work in favour of motherhood. In other words, women can hold the briefcase, or the baby. Or they can hold both. Or they can hold the briefcase, then the baby, then the briefcase again. But at least they can choose. As one men's rights campaigner in New Zealand puts it: “A man's got to do what a man's got to do, but women can do anything.”

For men, it is contended, that choice is unavailable. This strand of complaint joins two loosely related voices. The first is that of the professional man, trapped on the one hand by the fierce social expectation of “man as provider”, and on the other by the fierce social suspicion of “man as stay-at-home father”. Fatherhood websites are overcrowded with the anguished pleas of would-be full-time fathers who have to confront the scary squads of mothers at the local park or the school gate. “If we stay home, we're outcasts, flung from our ‘natural' role as provider and alpha dog,” wrote one man for salon.com recently. “If we consider, for a moment even, my father's approach,” he continued, “we are cast, quite fairly, as Neanderthals.” America is awash with books offering working fathers consolation and tips on how to cope.

The other voice is more bitter and political. It sees men as victims of 30 years of the women's movement which blamed men for women's troubles. This group tends to view matters as a zero-sum game: the more choices available to women, the fewer available to men. Warren Farrell, the author of The Myth of Male Power, who is regarded as beyond the pale by many feminist writers, claims that the legal and social discrimination faced by men who want to be custodial fathers today is as bad as that faced by women who wanted a demanding professional career in the 1950s. This is a move to fight what is seen as a legal conspiracy to separate fathers from their children. Most family courts award custody to mothers, while men are hounded by child-support bills. As single fatherhood has grown, so the fathers'-rights industry has flourished. In 2000, there were 4.4m American single-father families, or 4.2% of all households, up from 3.4% in 1990. A quarter of all American single-parent families are now headed by men.

On the opposite flank is the conservative fatherhood movement, with its links to the religious right. Whereas the men's-rights argue that their disconnection from their children is involuntary because the divorce courts discriminate against them, the fatherhood lot argue that men should not get divorced in the first place. The National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), a conservative lobby, has blossomed in recent years. It condemns “deadbeat dads” and vigorously disapproves of divorce.

Its influence is great. Wade Horn, formerly head of the NFI, is now the assistant secretary for children and families under Tommy Thompson, President George Bush’s secretary for health and human services. Where once the political emphasis was on the irresponsibility of women, getting pregnant while young and single, the culprits now, it seems, are men. “Fatherless households” have replaced “female-headed households” as the subject of study, subtly shifting the blame. “In 1960, fewer than 10 million children did not live with their fathers”, stated the department earlier this year: Today, the number is nearly 25 million. More than one-third of these children will not see their fathers at all during the course of a year. Studies show that children who grow up without responsible fathers are significantly more likely to experience poverty, do poorly at school, engage in criminal activity, and abuse drugs and alcohol.

Men, it seems, cannot win. They are the new guilty and the new victims. Worse, increasingly beset by self-doubt, men are confronted with the breezy self-confidence of independent young women as depicted in popular culture. Take Sex and the City, a TV series about sexual conquests of single New York women, or The Simpsons, a cartoon family of feckless men and savvy women.

Big boys do cry

The third source of male angst is to do with emotion. There is nothing new in the idea that men are conditioned to suppress emotions, but a movement now exists to reclaim the right to express them. Much of this grew from the American “drumming retreats” inspired by Robert Bly, author a decade ago of Iron John, a call for men to get back in touch with the “wild man” within. Today, men-only retreats promise to achieve “emotional release” and to “use sacred space as a container wherein men can be awakened to their masculine power”. As the publicity for one recent event in California put it: “The wild and woolly raw energy of maleness via drumming, dancing and story-telling opens the door to authentic, heartfelt expression.” In recent centuries men have been taught not to show their feelings, but to sublimate them in competitive behaviour. Now this self-sacrifice is being questioned. To be fully-rounded individuals at ease with themselves, it is asserted, men need to learn to weep.

A more important emotional catalyst appears to be the death of a father. A generation of men has been brought up by women, with shadowy fathers who were either physically absent, because of divorce or long working hours, or absent in spirit, because that was how fathers behaved. The death of a father, by causing men to confront the gaps in that relationship, can make them try to improve their relations with their own sons. After talking to scores of ordinary American men, Ms Faludi found that “a broken relationship with a father almost always surfaced as the primary preoccupation underlying all others”.

The alpha male lives

Ah, detractors will reply, this self-analysis is all very well, but what about Britain's laddish culture, or Hollywood's glamorization of male aggression? Surely the self-assured alpha male is alive and well? After all, laddishness, which exploded in Britain in the 1990s with the boom in sales of magazines such as Loaded, FHM and Maxim, unapologetically celebrates heterosexual hedonism and a defiant fecklessness. Loaded, declared James Brown, its first editor, was for men who “have accepted what we are and have given up trying to improve ourselves.” Twenty years ago, Reader's Digest was the most popular monthly magazine among British men; today it is FHM, which sells more copies each month than Cosmopolitan and Vogue.

But perhaps such phenomena could also be seen as a response to all those male anxieties. “Lads’ mags are all about the denial of the real problems that men are facing,” suggests Peter Howarth, editor of British Esquire. Dr. Clare goes even further: “Men, renowned for their ability and inclination to be stoned, drunk or sexually daring, appear terrified by the prospect of revealing that they can be—and often are—depressed, dependent, in need of help.”

In the end, while many of these male grievances are heartfelt, they need to be put in context. Full-time working women in America still earn, on average, only 72% of the wages men receive. Women occupy only 14% of the seats in America's Congress. Today not a single woman runs any of the G8 governments, finance ministries or central banks.

Even the preponderance of dysfunctional men in popular culture probably says less about a masculinity crisis than about the fact that men are still largely in charge. Men can be mocked, because men are not—yet—as vulnerable as women. You never kick a man when he is down.

(http://theeconomist.com)

Exercises

1. Look up the following allusions for relevant cultural information:Doris Lessing, Vanity Fair, NFI, The Simpsons, Loaded, Maxim, Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Esquire, G8.