WHAT ABOUT MEN? TRY NOT PATRONISING THEM
In the 1990s, a strange kind of equality between men and women was proposed: if women acted more like a particular kind of man – outgoing, hedonistic, up for a laugh – then we could all have more fun and get on better. Thus the “ladette” was born, and along with her, a cheery realism: a world of “bums” and “fannies”, of seeing the world through beery music-festival glasses and never taking yourself too seriously. Women could be, at last, who they always wanted to be, which was apparently a bloke in Adidas Gazelles drunkenly wailing along to Oasis.
Caitlin Moran has perpetuated, and indeed perfected, the art of the ladette. Married with two daughters, she nevertheless writes from the standpoint of someone who has never stopped being a good laugh. She had huge success with 2011’s How to Be a Woman, blending memoir with light-hearted observation and popular feminism. As she says in her new book, What About Men? – which she couldn’t exactly have called How to be a Man, though that would have been a more amusing book – “when it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz.”
In What About Men?, “bantz” abound. This “very selective, very personal” crack at the topic is motivated, Moran jokes, by a “very petty urge”, namely that of being able to say: “Well, no man had got around to writing a book like this, and so, as usual, muggins here – a middle-aged woman – had to crack on, and sort it out all out.” Those men who have bothered, in Moran’s narrow selection – namely Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate – are dismissed for crying in the case of the former (“I wouldn’t accept rules for life from someone who appears quite sad, and lonely”), and in the latter, for being a vile misogynist.
Moran’s readers are unlikely to quibble with her choice of dislikeable men. But there’s something strange about who and what she doesn’t mention. Perhaps she finished her book too early to hear Rylan Clark-Neal’s BBC radio series How to Be a Man; she has less excuse for ignoring, among other things, Richard Reeves’s 2022 book Of Boys and Men, in which Reeves proposes a practical solution to one of the problems that Moran identifies with boys at school, namely that “the schooling system means that boys are forced to start writing before they can actually, physically manage it.” (Reeves proposes that boys start school later than girls.)
For Moran, sexual equality is really just a matter of messing about with socialisation. Men and women may have different “bits” – there are more than enough “cock” and “balls” jokes to go around – but it’s all about how we’re brought up. She studiously avoids mentioning transgenderism, as if the past decade hadn’t happened. Drag queens are like “superhero versions of girls”, and there’s no fun for women in “being a man”. Moran claims she has never heard a man be envious of women’s capacity to give birth. It’s all rather blessed – but the logic is one of binary sexual difference, and you have to wonder whether she doesn’t confront that because she knows that mis-stepping in this territory would bring her “bantz” to a hasty terminus. Moran wouldn’t deserve that, but nor did any of the women who’ve been pilloried for digging properly into the topic in recent years.
If the ladette era was about being more like a bloke, What About Men? wants actual blokes to be more like stereotypical women: talkative, empathetic, friendly: “What would feminism for men be?” Moran asks, proposing that a new men’s movement be founded. It’s easier in some ways, she suggests, to be a woman today than to be a man. The section of What About Men? that convinces the most is when she tells men to go to the doctor. This is a genuine problem: as studies have repeatedly shown, men are substantially less likely than women to do so.
Moran’s husband, the journalist Peter Paphides, put off such a trip for a decade. It turned out that his blood pressure was through the roof, and he was at risk of a stroke or heart attack; now, due to medical intervention, he’s much better. “It saved his life,” Moran emphasises. If What About Men? should persuade men (and women) on any point, it’ll be this one: don’t die for no reason. Life is silly enough as it is.
What About Men? is published by Ebury at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
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