Pity the hopeless, bewildered male

JOHN CASEY thinks he knows where the blame lies

WHATEVER men try to do, however much they try to change to please the opposite sex, women are never satisfied. A marketing firm, Tomorrow Research International, this week presented "a depressing snapshot of men failing hopelessly to come to terms with the late 20th century".

The report sets out to study men and their attitudes in 46 countries. If the picture it presents is anything like the truth, men are to be pitied.

They really are utterly confused about what women want, and whatever they try, women profess themselves irritated by it. The report is full of young men dolefully admitting failure.

An Italian says: "If you go for sex immediately you are a maniac ... if you let her take the initiative, you aren't a real man."

A Canadian agrees. "We have a lot of guys wandering round wondering just what the heck they are supposed to be and how they're supposed to act."

According to the report "men the world over yearn for a return to traditional values. From Austria to Argentina, Sweden to Singapore, they value physical strength and, deep inside, still want to be the hunter and breadwinner."

But women, it seems, lead them a terrible dance. They demand that men be gentle, sensitive and accommodating, then they round on them and call them wimps.

When British men are out of earshot, women "compare them unfavourably to Italian, Spanish and Portuguese men" and long for societies in which "women are allowed to be female and men are allowed to be male."

But the women of Rome and Madrid despise machismo and long for the wimps of northern Europe.

Threats to male self-esteem pop up (it would seem) in the most unexpected places. We are not surprised that Canadian men "sort of walk around on egg shells, worried about being accused of sexual harassment" - but it is a shock to learn that in Finland "you are instantly considered gay if you drink cider at a bar."

NEW Zealand heroically preserves the masculine ideal as though feminism had never happened. New Zealand men like their rugby, the outdoor life, drinking and male camaraderie. At parties in country, the sexes still keep to opposite ends of the room.

But in northern Europe and north America, male anxiety and female contempt seem to be the rule.

One Englishman said: "They want to be able to shout and holler at you like a man, but they also want to use their feminine wiles. They want equality, but they also want chivalry." Freud famously asked the question "What do women want?" - and answered, in effect, that no one could ever know. To keep men guessing has traditionally been part of what women want. One of the greatest successes of feminism has been to persuade thousands of suggestible males that they can discover the answer to the unanswerable question, and adopt ever more ridiculous postures to satisfy the iron whims of the opposite sex.

Will this gentle male whingeing turn into open rebellion? When David Mamet's play Oleanna, was staged a few years ago, there was a telling moment, just before the end. A university professor knocked to the ground a young woman who had been falsely accusing him of sexual harassment and attempted rape, screamed abuse at her and kicked her. At this point, audiences in London burst into applause. (In New York they whooped and cheered).

It was as though a dam had suddenly burst, and anti-female resentment had surged through.

Given the feminist-inspired sneering at masculinity that is now the usual thing in the media TV advertisements routinely show men making fools of themselves to the amusement of self-possessed, superior females - I wonder whether misogyny, in reaction, will become the hate that dare not speak its name? Feminists are keen to sniff out misogyny as though it were a scandalous secret that needs to be dragged into the light of day.

Yet resentment between the sexes, as well as attraction, is normal. What is new is the demand that males should take it without dishing it out. A misogynist tradition runs through all cultures. Aristotle thought that women were failed men - produced when the sperm did not have sufficient vital heat to develop the foetus into a male.

THE Roman naturalist, Pliny, believed that menstrual blood tarnished mirrors, blunted knives and destroyed crops.

Chaucer has his Wife of Bath boast of her tricks and stratagems that enable her to get what she thinks women all over the world really want: `maistrie' rule over their men.

The German philosopher, Schopenhauer, argued that women will never honestly say what they really want, because their chief wish is to avoid speaking the truth: "As nature has equipped the lion with claws and teeth, the wild boar with fangs and the cuttlefish with ink, so it has equipped woman with the power of dissimulation as her means of attack and defence."

Unjust to women, no doubt.

But it is hardly more absurd than the denigration and trivialisation of masculinity that has become the norm.

To be masculine is at best to be blokeish, at worst a football hooligan.

Masculinity is depicted as nothing more than an interest in games, camaraderie, sex and violence. We are endlessly told that men have inferior social skills, that they are pathologically aggressive, that they are incapable of getting in touch with their feelings, are no good with words. In a curious reversal of Aristotle's beliefs, masculinity is coming to be regarded as virtually an abberation in nature.

It is all ludicrous. Men may be biologically aggressive, but they are also the creators of the world religions that stress universal benevolence and self-sacrifice. Violent as they may often be, males have been the creators of systems of law and equity, of the institutions of representative government.

They have been the supreme masters of words. There are no greater expressions of grief and sorrow than in the psalms of David, King Lear, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Men have also been extraordinarily good at verbal comedy.

Apart from Jane Austen, there are no female equivalents of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, the Shakespeare who created the fat knights, Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch.

If men really are "failing to come to terms with the late 20th century" the blame lies partly in their own abject failure of nerve, but mostly in the self-serving mendacious propaganda of witless feminists.

John Casey is a Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge Men in 46 countries around the world are reported to be utterly confused about what women want from them.

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