A lot of the most vocal feminists of recent years are obsessed with helping men. In her 2018 book, self-styled Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White declares that feminism “must fight for men who are being pushed into lonely desolation by the patriarchal pressures”. And in her recently published On Our Best Behaviour, Elise Loehnen tells women to spare a thought for the boys: girls might have to suppress our feelings “to function in what otherwise might be dysfunctional relationships or a dysfunctional society”, but “at least we’re allowed to cry”.

For years, it is implied, feminists have focused on women and failed to acknowledge that patriarchy hurts men, too. And men cannot be expected to sort this out for themselves because, well, they’re just men. Rather like remembering birthdays, making doctor’s appointments or caring for elderly relatives, sorting out the patriarchy is something that women must do because women have always done it, therefore making us better at it. In her book, What About Men? — in which she argues that “we’ve neglected our boys” — Caitlin Moran writes: “The advantage women have is that we talk about the patriarchy, and we know how it disadvantages us”, whereas “men haven’t yet started the conversation.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that no one has made these particular observations before — that feminism has thus far ignored men’s inner lives. Of course, one could also argue — with some legitimacy, I’d say — that women ought to be allowed one solitary political movement just for them. But the point would be moot, because the reality is: there have always been feminists expressing concern for men’s emotional lives. The fact that this gains so little acknowledgement is symptomatic of neglect, not of men, but of female intellectual legacies.

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There is an entire PhD thesis to be written on “feminist takes on why men aren’t allowed to cry”, with a special section devoted to “why we keep forgetting this issue has already been noted”. In 1983, for instance, Andrea Dworkin made a speech at an American convention that was entitled, the National Organisation for Changing Men. There she acknowledged the shame and impotence felt by many of the ‘good’ men around her: “Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to don’t want to do but are going to anyway.”

It is a measure of the defeatism that dominates this particular strand of feminism that its early adherents were already offering a critique of its limitations. Granting men more space in which to emote might provide them with more healthy ways in which to interact, but it is not the same as transforming power relations between the sexes. As Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, “men are increasingly aware that their disorders have something to do with patriarchy. But few of them wish to resign from it.” Her suspicion that “the majority of ‘concerned’ or ‘profeminist’ men secretly hope that ‘liberation’ will give them the right to shed tears while exercising their old prerogatives” does not seem particularly off-target. Half a century on, many men might wish to cry about what unfettered access to porn has done to them; far fewer are keen to take on the industry itself.

Do men actually want to save themselves from patriarchy? Dworkin, at the National Organisation for Changing Men, talked of meeting men who would tell her, “what you’re saying about me isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.” It’s the Eighties equivalent of #NotAllMen, a phrase now so widely mocked that it feels incorrect to write it without a hashtag. Yet Dworkin’s response was not just to laugh or shame. “I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues.” She asks men to take responsibility — to challenge one another — rather than simply offering up their apologies to women.

Today’s popular feminists see men more as victims than agents. Moran blames the ascendance of Andrew Tate on teenage boys hearing phrases such as “‘Typical men!’ or, ‘Ugh, toxic patriarchy!’”. Amia Srinivasan, in 2021’s The Right to Sex, concludes that “a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better — not just fairer, but more imaginative — than men have been”. Here, the helplessness of the Lost Boy merges with a presumption of over-sensitivity and moral inferiority. I wonder if, when Moran and Srinivasan write these things, they really grasp that men can read them too. If men react badly to suggestions that they are useless as a sex, what benefit lies in finding other, albeit more benevolent, ways to say it? Men are granted no dignity, no capacity to change on their own terms. They are portrayed as weak and petty, so why should they even try?

There is also something deeply and depressingly gender-normative in the expectation that women be better than men. Again, this is something that feminists seem to have forgotten — even if their predecessors analysed its implications. Rich already pointed out in Of Woman Born that, “the women’s movement is still seen in terms of the mother-child relationship”; feminism is seen “either as punishment and abandonment of men for past bad behaviour, or as a potential healing of men’s pain by women”. Either way, it “will ease men into a more humane and sensitive life. In short … women will go on doing for men what men cannot or will not do for each other or themselves.”

Rich wanted this infantilising dynamic to change. But half a century later, Moran is insisting that men can’t be expected to act independently because, “it’s so much easier for women and girls to show love and support for each other”. We are, apparently, just better at this sort of thing, so it’s on us to help men be more human. If this is irritating for women, it is profoundly insulting to men.

Indeed, one of the great ironies of a position that dismisses earlier feminists as insufficiently sympathetic to men is that there are far more parallels between today’s fix-men feminism and genuine misandry. “To be male,” wrote Valerie Solanas in The SCUM Manifesto, perhaps the one (known) work of the Second Wave that might genuinely be said to be man-hating, “is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples”. Solanas wrote off men as beyond help; fix-men feminism takes a similarly disparaging view of half the human race, while patronisingly offering to save them. The hostile response of many men to Moran’s book shows that pity is counter-productive; men are not so emotionally illiterate that they can’t understand they are being belittled.

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This rhetoric is dangerous to women, as well as irritating. Fix-men feminism validates the excuses abusive men have used for their mistreatment of female partners — how can he be in touch with her feelings when he’s not even in touch with his own? — while providing good men with a reason to feel victimised. The reason why “I Can Fix Him” has become such a popular parody meme is because we know it isn’t true. The woman who imagines herself “fixing” the Joker is funny; the one who imagines fixing a real-life Tate acolyte is less so. It is not safe for women in toxic relationships to feel they are responsible for men’s responses, nor is it safe for men to be told that yes, if they hate women, perhaps it is because feminists have driven them to misogyny by neglecting their needs. Many men who hurt women really do feel powerless, but placing their redemption in the hands of women is hardly likely to inspire them to change.

Moran has said that her book is written in part as a response to the anxieties of mothers of sons. (She has two daughters.) I have sons, two of whom are teenagers, and the challenges they face offer a constant reminder of the way in which the myth of masculine invulnerability sells both men and women short. Men are not forced into a state of heroic independence, but there is shame, and often rage, when they are forced to acknowledge their reliance on women. I do not see how telling them they are needier than they already are can resolve this. In her 1979 essay Man Child, Audre Lorde described the importance of “teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him”. “Men who are afraid to feel,” she wrote, “must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply.” We can hardly eradicate this toxic maternal dynamic by replicating it.

The problem, then, is not that feminists do not care enough. If we respect men — if we do not see them as helpless, stupid children, dumb Ken dolls, or “a bit like dogs” — we ought to consider them up to the challenge of a feminism that does more than oscillate between mocking and pandering to them. Fix-men feminism views itself as realistic, “muggins here” taking charge because men can’t be better. In truth, it lowers expectations, restricting opportunities for growth. “He can’t change unless he wants to” might be a cliché, but it’s one that today’s feminists would do well to take on board. It may be that the best thing we can do for men is not to make our movement all about them.

But Times columnist Caitlin Moran is bolder. With her new book, What About Men?, she goes where few women have gone before. Having noticed that young men seem to be in crisis, she now attempts to get inside the mind of the modern male in order to help him out.

Early signs suggest that it’s not going down brilliantly with the Other Side; even the Times reviewer has reservations. And the Twitter commentariat is enjoying posting outraged screenshots of excerpts. “Patronising”, “shallow” and “one-dimensional”, have been some of the verdicts from men so far.

I’ve read the book, and though the intentions behind it are admirable, I agree that it has problems. Moran apparently thinks not just that masculinity is wholly cultural, but that there’s only one version of it, entirely based on her husband, his mates, and some sons of her friends. Every bloke in the world likes rock music, wears disgustingly decrepit gym gear and won’t talk to his friends about fatherhood or relationships. Equally, she seems to think that all women are exactly like she is — dorky, warm, garrulous and funny. They dish out copious tea and sympathy, enjoy avid discussions of pop culture and bodily functions, and bond over how terrible the Seventies were.

She reduces the issue of whether any behavioural differences between the sexes are partly due to biological factors, to the straw man of whether there are “massive differences between male and female brains”, ignoring the potential influence of smaller brain differences, or of pre-natal and circulating sex hormones. (And this in a section where, two pages later, she observes without any apparent sense of tension that “girls develop their fine motor skills earlier than boys”.) She flat-out denies that there are “any major differences in the language skills of boys and girls”, ignoring swathes of evidence that suggest otherwise for early childhood. I’m not saying such questions are definitively settled in either direction, but it smacks of laziness to pretend they are.

She also takes a “creative” approach to explanations of behavioural difference, as exemplified by her Just-So story of how the male conversational style developed (that is: heavy on banter and technicality; light on in-depth analyses of the couples on Love Island). Boys start school at a disadvantage to girls because they can’t hold a pen. A catastrophic chain of developmental events then unfolds, according to our author. While girls race ahead with their communication skills, boys lose confidence, start reading comic books rather than Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, and take refuge for their lack of ability to understand the social world in jokes about gay people, and descriptions of the internal combustion engine. For the unreconstructed sexist who suspects that women should steer clear of scientific explanation, Moran’s approach here is unfortunately likely to serve as further confirmation.

And then there’s the relentlessly ribald writing style. I’ve never positively wished for sensitivity readers and trigger warnings before, but there’s a first time for everything. Demystifying sex for the reader is one thing; making him grimace so hard his face seizes up, another. If, as Moran seems to think, bedroom preferences are formed by exposure to certain scenarios early on in life, hers seem to have been shaped by reading too many Viz magazines. I came away from the book mostly thinking we need to Make Sex Sexy Again as a matter of national emergency.

For instance, on women (and I apologise in advance for this), “if we’re very ‘vocal’, and loud, during sex – ‘YES! YES!’ – it might be because we’re aware we’re doing fannyfarts, and don’t want you to hear the party vag-sounds that are happening ‘down there’”. Male ejaculation is “Nature’s splendid custard-y firework display”. Whereas men allegedly never discuss their genitalia, we women “tell each other, constantly, to rejoice in our minges” (we do what?). Moran recounts how she once spent a whole afternoon, stoned, talking to her husband’s testicles and “seeing how they reacted to my varying chats”. (Spoiler: they shrivelled). If this prose is really aimed at teenage boys as it sometimes pretends to be, let’s just say that the birth rate is not likely to improve anytime soon.

Other parts are more successful. She is right that young men increasingly struggle with body image issues, that most internet pornography is violent and soul-destroying, and that false whispers about sexual misdemeanours can ruin a young man’s life. She tries hard to be sympathetic about all this, as well as to the idea that young men are beset by images of “toxic masculinity” in a way that is messing them up. And there’s even the odd hint that prevalent feminist approaches might be part of the problem — including her own in previous books.

Post #MeToo, one legacy of mainstream feminism seems to be the policy of shouting at all men about how terrible they are, in the hope that some of the generalised opprobrium sticks to the right candidates. At the same time, men’s ordinary sexual impulses — sometimes irritating, sometimes welcome — are denigrated and treated as inevitably threatening and sinister.

No finer example can be found than in a National Rail poster campaign running at the moment, which thunders: “INTRUSIVE STARING OF A SEXUAL NATURE IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND IS NOT TOLERATED.” Everyone knows which biological sex this sinister pronouncement is aimed at (hint: it’s not the one batting her eyelashes furiously at you over her free newspaper).

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The fallout from the new puritanism means that sensitive, empathic young men often feel terrible about any sexual behaviours not formally agreed with a partner in writing beforehand; while society continues to do nothing meaningful to stop the sort of hardened offenders unlikely to be influenced by poster campaigns in trains. Youthful coping strategies in response to all this undifferentiated guilt-tripping may include heading towards Andrew Tate videos or heading towards the gender clinic, but either way a different and more nuanced way of doing things would be a lot better.

And it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses. When, in the final chapter, Moran eventually gets round to the former, she makes a good stab at it — though, by her own admission, most of the things she thinks we value in men are also things we value in dogs. In fact, I would go further — they are things we value in elderly Labradors. The characteristics she celebrates — being loyal, hard-working, protective, and so on — are all very pro-social and unthreatening to women and children, and unlikely to set the imagination alight of any young man looking for his own hero’s journey.

That young males newly acquainted with massive amounts of testosterone should crave an exciting hero’s journey for themselves is another fact she tries to explain with a Just-So story about acculturation: they’ve read too many comic books about superheroes and “nothing about ordinary teenage boys, trying to learn how to become happy, normal men”. So there you have it — we can combat the allure of Andrew Tate and his ilk by enticing teenage boys to read more boring books. Speaking as a mother of sons who would consider reading comic books a chore when they could be destroying aliens onscreen instead, I’d like to know how she proposes we go about this.

Despite this chapter, throughout most of the earlier stuff, there’s still a barely suppressed sense that Team Woman — or as she has it, Team Tits — has most of the answers, and that members of Team Testicles might get there too if they try hard enough. At one point she suggests, with a characteristically liberal use of italics, that: “Everything that, culturally, is seen as ‘female’, is something anyone can have. These are all things anyone can learn. These are all things anyone can gain. Women weren’t born knowing how to be amazing friends having super-deep conversations about anxiety, and sorrow. Personally, I just learned how to do it from watching The Golden Girls.” Perhaps tellingly, though, there’s little suggestion in the book that women could learn from men about being more loyal or crying less.

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Moran is right, of course, that women aren’t born knowing how to understand the complex emotional states of others, in order to be able to listen properly and console them. They need experience, and perhaps also guidance, to activate this capacity. Some women can’t do it at all, while many men can. Still, that doesn’t mean that, across the entire female population, the enhanced capacity of women to understand social relationships isn’t somewhat biologically influenced. To treat feminine traits as a study programme that any man could get up to speed on if he tried seems to be setting men up for failure — and they don’t need more of that.

In any case, perhaps I am female-atypical, but — inviting as it sounds — I couldn’t live in Moran’s smoke-filled, gin-soaked world of warm hugs, tear-stained confidences and frank conversations about bodily fluids for more than 10 minutes at a time. Sometimes, talking about your feelings makes them worse, and sometimes responding empathically to other people’s feelings only makes them more histrionic and attention-seeking. It can be very good to talk, but it can also be very good to shut the hell up and stamp off to dig the garden. As usual, the devil is in the detail. How to Be More Like a Man would be a bold title for any feminist writer, but I’m not sure we should entirely rule it out.