In defence of men

Men are under attack, and it's time women stood up for them, argues a provocative new book.

-  ANI O'BRIEN

The fragile dynamic between the sexes has always been somewhat fraught. Thirty T years ago, American relationship counsellor John Gray seemed to hit both a nerve and a gold mine when he managed to shift more than 15 million copies of his bestseller, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

Since then, things appear to have got even more complicated, with incels (involuntary celibates), #MeToo, easy-access pornography and revenge politics prompting some to question the gravitational forces driving the entire solar system. What on earth is going on? English writer and philosopher Nina Power thinks she knows. Chasms have opened up in society because the battle between the sexes has become a zero-sum game, she maintains.

In What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its discontents, Power, 43, attempts to paper over the cracks and engineer bridges over the canyons. The book is practically guaranteed to make everyone uncomfortable.

Parts will enrage feminists who want men to take responsibility for what they see as the many and varied crimes of the male specimens of our species. Other sections will frustrate men who see themselves as individuals rather than members of a tribe that collectively commits most human violence.

"The idea that all masculinity doesn't allow for is bad the possibility of men to be good."

Perhaps unity in discomfort is what is required to make all of us look up from our phones, stop tweeting #NotAllMen (whether in seriousness or sarcasm), and shuffle towards the middle ground. Or maybe Power will just enrage some people even more.

Her previous book, One Dimensional Woman, takes aim at consumerism and argues that the relentless drive towards accumulating more stuff has imprisoned women, rather than freeing them. Her latest turns her sights back on women, and particularly feminists who argue that men are the source of all the evil in the world.