These authors draw on a rich literary tradition of women venting about parenthood and marriage.  This tradition includes such texts as Dana Spiotta’s 2021 novel, Wayward, the autobiographical work of Deborah Levy, and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, published in 2012, which Gould calls “the go-to literary divorce bible.” 

Few if any of these women claim to be suffering from evil or abusive husbands, or to be burdened by particularly egregious domestic toil. The sick-of-my-family genre is about having the bravery to blow up a normal domestic life in the name of the woman wanting something different for herself: mental independence and space to think, with time to focus on professional goals. 

Why, then, do we hear so little from struggling fathers on this question? Most of the well-known male authors one might cite — Knausgård, Updike — were unfaithful, divorced, or both. What about the fed-up fathers who are still hanging on? Can we express the anxieties and downsides of fatherhood, the ways in which it crowds out our independence and creativity, instead of blowing up our families for novelistic material? 

The answer is no, as I learned to my chagrin this month, when a chorus of disapprobation greeted a reflection I posted on the X app (formerly Twitter) about just this issue.

It began with my 4-year-old son asking me to play catch in the street. I was drinking my coffee, still waking up, but I said sure. I also posted to social media: “Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience.” But I wasn’t enjoying it, as I confessed in my post. I wanted to be drinking my coffee in peace. The truth, I said, is that I just don’t like being around my two little kids, alone, for very long. I asked the internet whether I was a monster, or whether my feeling was within a certain range of normality. 

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The post garnered more than 19 million impressions. Men, many of whom granted that my feeling was normal, accused me of being weak and unmanly for complaining in public. Women said I was pathetic: mothers spend so much more time with children, and yet I could barely endure 10 minutes before needing to complain. I hit back that contemporary mothers have no idea what it is like being a father today, and was called a misogynist. Both genders agreed that I was selfish and immature, focused on petty and short-sighted matters like having my coffee in peace or getting back to my work.

The truth is that fatherly pain is exceptionally taboo for a good reason. Contemporary fatherhood is a much darker place than mothers, maidens, and bachelors are ever supposed to know. And one of its proper responsibilities is keeping everyone else in the dark about male suffering. Despite the modern rhetoric about gender equality, women still require men to be strong and silent, as my social-media firebombing shows. Many fathers are so strong and so silent, I suspect, that women are unaware that they’re enjoying the benefits of the man’s protection, or that they require it in the first place. 

How can this be, in a world in which men and women are supposed to be equals? According to a contemporary ideal, men should be able to speak to women frankly, and shouldn’t need to protect them. But what we have in reality is a very unequal equality: men are expected to help out with domestic work and hands-on childcare to the best of their ability, while they are also expected to maintain all of the traditionally male responsibilities — not least, the responsibility to keep those responsibilities secret.

Consider time spent with children. Studies confirm it has increased dramatically: American fathers spent seven hours per week on childcare, up from about two and a half hours in 1965. Another study found that over the same period, fathers’ average daily childcare time rose to nearly an hour, up from about 16 minutes. That won’t sound like much to women. But given that there hasn’t been any corresponding relaxation of the exclusively male responsibilities, it’s nearly a full work day a week — a significant expansion. 

There’s also the question of what this childcare time is for. Biologically, men are not evolved to care for small children, and historically, men were rarely expected to be around for them. The argument that it’s for ethical reasons or child-development reasons seems a bit too conveniently correlated with women’s entry into the workforce. I find the amorphous nature of the rationale behind the demand especially frustrating, because it presents me with no way of knowing how much time is optimal, or even enough. The requirement becomes uncapped, all-consuming, and impossible to fulfill. 

But haven’t other male responsibilities been relaxed in our equal-rights modernity? We tell anxious fathers to worry less about money and focus on quality time with kids. But surveys find that in more than 50% of dual-income households (and in 90% of the wealthiest), husbands are regarded as the family’s “financial expert.” And even when wives earn more, men still carry the moral weight of ultimate financial responsibility. If creeping destitution or spiraling debt were to conquer, for instance, nobody would have any doubt about which of the two parents is most guilty. 

Thus, in many crucial ways, the “dual-income household” is a myth and doesn’t solve the economic anxieties of men; indeed, it makes them worse. Many women earn little more than the cost of childcare, which makes the woman’s work mostly for her personal edification or satisfaction. The man enjoys no such luxury. He’s also, whether his wife earns a lot or little, always calculating, behind the scenes, what he is going to do if and when she wants to stop working. Even if she said, before parenthood, that she planned to work until retirement, the husband knows it will fall to him to keep the family fiscally whole if she changes her mind. 

If I don’t prepare for that, I live every day at risk of disgrace. If I’m preparing, however, it might seem I don’t believe in my wife, or I might seem “not present” with my kids. Not to mention, if a man’s wife earns as much as he does, she may become accustomed to a standard of living that may not be sustainable once she taps out — but how can he say any of these things? This makes the burden of fatherhood much more difficult than it used to be, psychologically and  practically.  

Breadwinning, also, has become complicated in ways that have hardly been noticed, let alone understood. 

In terms of bringing in the money, most legacy institutions have declined in standards and vitality. Jobs don’t look the same as they once did, and they’re less secure. Many fathers today must become entrepreneurs, either by necessity because they can’t get stable employment; or to maintain standards or integrity in their vocation; or to protect themselves economically as a side hustle, in case their legacy institution goes sideways next year. We’re working more — much more — but getting less credit for it, and the childcare demands have increased, too. 

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On a deeper level, securing an honorable vocation that does justice to a man’s gifts has always been a major requirement of a successful male life. The structures that made this possible have been so liquidated by modernity that it barely sounds like a reasonable aspiration anymore  — but we still yearn for it and hold ourselves to the standard. 

How much money is enough to have conducted yourself with distinction? We have no idea. Just recently, the writer Michael Green published an article arguing that $100,000 a year should now be considered the real poverty line, or perhaps it was even $140,000, once you update the old methodology for today’s costs. The argument was flawed, but it went viral, suggesting that  people really no longer know the difference between rich and poor. I might read up and form an accurate model of the economy, but if my mother, wife, father-in-law, and peer group aren’t reading the same material, then I can’t know whether I earn or possess enough money to be content. You can say that a father should use his own judgment, but for a good father, the only judgment is: I would kill myself to do right by my family, so if there is no shared standard, then I’ll just kill myself trying, just to make sure.

It was once the case that people from different classes and situations would settle into different occupations. Before capitalism, the options were more or less fixed: the cobbler’s son became a cobbler; the duke’s first son a duke. Today, there are no longer shared standards around meaningful work, vocation, or station (except for whatever money and internet clout measure). If you are a professor, does that mean you are a smart, thoughtful anchor of your community? It’s no longer clear. If you have a million followers on TikTok, does that mean you are successful or impressive? You could very well be a working prostitute, the canonically low-status occupation, and be very high-status indeed, depending on how you manage it. 

Under these conditions, the contemporary father can never “arrive.” No matter how successful he is in terms of money or clout, the father must bear the terror that perhaps he did not do justice to his gifts, or that he did not do justice to his family’s name. Whether his mother tells him that she’s “proud” of him means nothing; he judges himself in the agora. Now add to this bundle of anxieties, both material and psychological, the expectation to be ever more present at playtime. It’s maddening. And crushing.

There is another, deeper burden that is rarely spoken. For the man, having children is not itself a source of immediate joy or meaning in the same way that it can be for women. I chose to have children, and I have no regrets. And yet no man ever thinks to himself, “I would love to have two toddlers in the house because the presence of these two creatures would increase my own happiness.” Whereas for the mother, as the Bible, Nietzsche, and Freud alike taught, children are much more immediately meaningful. A man is more motivated by a larger sense of responsibility: to procreate, to give the world a little bit more life than he took from it, and to give his beloved wife something that is significant and meaningful to her. 

There is a meme about how a man, left to his own devices, will default to sleeping on the floor and eating canned beans every day in an unfurnished, one-room apartment. The image is typically invoked to roast the male sex for its barbarous nature, implying how much men need women to organize and beautify their lives. I’ve always thought this to be an outrageous misunderstanding. Instead, consider how much heroic effort the average father expends to provide his wife with things he does not need or desire himself. 

Those who find these observations outrageous, cowardly, selfish, or unrepresentative only display how little  can fathom the darkness of fatherhood today.

If a wife could see or feel her husband’s terror, she would hardly be able to function, let alone be a good wife or mother. We hide it out of love but not purely out of love: for a father to bear his responsibilities every day, he needs his wife to be happy, in part because he needs her to stay calm and be functional. If she falters under her own heavy responsibilities, he could quickly lose control of everything. “Happy wife, happy life” is a laughably sweet euphemism for the infernal fact that if your wife is not happy, there is no reason left to live. 

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This might seem extreme, but when a man builds a family, he voluntarily sets his own happiness to the side, which means the wife’s happiness is the only reliable daily indicator of success and reliable daily reward. So if the wife is unhappy, none of it makes any sense and nothing feels worth doing. As I write this, stoic silence is the only thing keeping millions of families on the right side of the precipice.

Before I got married and had children, I was horrified by the prevalence of fathers who walk out on their families. Today, I am no longer confused by the phenomenon. My own household challenges have thankfully never been so severe, but it is now obvious to me how even the normal challenges of the ordinary husband could lead a man’s life to spiral so far out of control that he breaks and leaves. The gap between my perplexity over this issue as a young man and my current knowledge is a reasonable index of how much darkness fathers hide from the world.

I spend many days and nights churning through these issues in mortal terror. My wife probably has a decent sense of how dark and lonely life sometimes feels for me, but that’s because I’m a little weak and I tell her too much, too often. And then I feel terrible about that, terrified that I might break her happiness and lose everything for the both of us. It is part of my job to protect her from all of this, and I can handle that, most of the time.

Most men do not want sympathy, and I certainly do not. There is no appeal, to my mind, in “rights for men” or any kind of ridiculous “men’s movement.” I only submit for the public record, once again and without fear, that if contemporary fatherhood continues to feel as impossible as it feels to me, it is better for a man to occasionally snap in a small way, rather than snap in the big and silent ways that husbands have too often snapped in the past. And perhaps the weaker, average fathers, such as myself, will take a few hits — or 19 million of them — for the team, so that the really great fathers can carry on, dutifully, in silence.

I would rather be scorned for revealing my weaknesses honestly, while holding myself and my family together, than be applauded for making art out of its destruction. Buzzy celebration simply for snapping is another one of the rewards fathers must be prepared to forgo.

Alibi, a bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, recently made the news for banning solo patrons after 9pm. But it’s worth noting what else the landlord frowns upon — or rather, who else. “No sportswear/trackies,” wrote the landlord, Carl Peters. “No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed jeans. No baseball caps. No roadman vibes.”

Roadman? To the uninitiated, the term generally refers to a young, working-class black Londoner wearing a black puffer jacket, a dark tracksuit, black Nike Air Maxes. The look fuses the casual with the athletic. He might be carrying a manbag and wearing a face covering of some sort. He mostly listens to grime and drill music and he speaks a kind of Multicultural London English (MLE), often sneered at as “roadman English”. Yes, that guy.

In the 2000s, the roadman had a negligible presence in the mainstream. He was very much associated with grime culture (Run the Road, a seminal early grime compilation, was released in 2005). Since the 2010s, however, the figure has stepped into the mainstream, thanks to films and TV shows like Anuvahood and Top Boy, and the rise to prominence of drill music. Michael Dappah’s caricature of a roadman in his satirical 2017 song “Mans Not Hot” was a turning point. It turned the figure of the roadman into a meme, made him loveable even, pushing many signature phrases into everyday speech and opening the door to TikTok trends like the “roadman parliament” and “roadman translation“. Luxury fashion brands, always keen to make money from black-originated trends, have put out streetwear inspired by roadman chic. So what was once a niche, underground, street identity and sub-culture associated with inner-city black youth has morphed into a mainstreamed, commercialized aesthetic and memeified trope.

Take, for instance, Stormzy’s McDonald’s advert from earlier this year. The advert encouraged people to “order like Stormzy”: to march up to the counter and use his distinct roadman English lingo: “mandem”, “ting”, “fam” and so on. The joke, of course, was that white English people, especially those who don’t live in London, don’t talk like that, perhaps even aren’t supposed to. I wonder how it would go down if Harriet from Oxfordshire strolled into her local McDonald’s and tried speaking like this.

But the roadman — or as British-Nigerian comedian Nabil Abdulrashid’s referred to him in a skit, “the gentleman of the road” — is an authentic British figure, part of a subculture that grew within a much wider multicultural urban milieu. The term derives from Jamaican patois — to “run di road” is to be in control of a particular area — signifying its origins within black Caribbean culture. His ancestors are the “rudeboy” and the Yardie, who were for a time the bogeymen of black criminality in British society. The rudeboy, forged in the street-gang-infested shanty towns of Kingston, symbolized the rebellious culture of Jamaica’s post-independence youth, who crossed the Atlantic into Britain in the Sixties and Seventies through the post-Windrush immigration wave. Known for their sharp suits and pork-pie hats, and immortalized in the ska and rocksteady music of the era, the rudeboy archetype soon became at the center of sensationalized discourse around mugging. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Yardie, likewise a product of the Jamaican diaspora, became the evolution of the stereotype, encapsulating all the fears white British society harbored about black British youth. For the writer Jeffrey Boakye, the Yardies were seen as “ostentatious gunmen obsessed with cars and jewelry, speaking in broken English from a former colony and completely unconcerned with the safety of the majority white public.”

More specifically, and as its etymology implies, to be a roadman is to be someone who is “on road” — the British equivalent of being “hood”. This means that the roadman operates in the mean streets of the post-industrial urban metropolis. To “do road” may mean to sell drugs, to be involved in petty street crime, to play drill music loudly in public, and to keep an eye out for the “opps” — gangs of rival roadmen. The roadman’s calling is not a glamorous one. “Doing road” means struggling and hustling to survive in an unforgiving world by any means necessary, which will take its toll. The rapper Berna, who was raised in an East London council estate, put it this way: “And the gang do crimes cause crime pay / Can’t wait for the day we don’t have to / But if one don’t die it’s a nice day / So I always gotta watch how I move”. The roadman knows his life is a vulnerable one, that he always has to look over his shoulder: but he knows he cannot admit weakness.

In this sense, being a roadman is both an accusation and an achievement. Yet he is also a figure of parody, derision and pity. The roadman exists within a hierarchy within the criminal underworld — alas, for him, he is at the bottom of it. He is just entry level. A few echelons above him in his social ecology is the badman, who lives by his own code. Being called a badman is an accolade. The badman is tough, fearless and dangerous. His reputation for violence and dominance earns him respect on the road. He is discreet, but everyone knows not to mess with him. It’s like being an alpha: something you can call someone else, but never yourself.

Plenty of roadmen talk a good game and think they’re a badman; that is until they meet a real badman. In Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, there’s a scene where one of the main protagonists, played by Charlie Hunnam, confronts a bunch of machete-wielding roadmen who have a phone containing crucial information. They refuse to give Raymond back the phone, even as he offers money for it. With some bravado, they warn him to go away or they’ll cut him up — until he pulls out a compact sub-machine gun to demonstrate who really is the apex predator. The scene has spawned a small internet subgenre of “roadmen meet real gangsters” compilations.

Still, due to social media and general cultural commodification, the roadman “look” and the roadman lifestyle have somewhat become divorced from each other. Many young people, and not just in the main cities, adopt the roadman aesthetic, speak a multicultural English dialect, and listen to grime and drill without being a part of that life.

And if London was the social laboratory where the roadman was born, the phenomenon is no longer contained to the capital.  The roadmen of Birmingham will speak “Multicultural Birmingham English” (MBE); similar to its London equivalent but adapted to a Brummie context. The chav subculture of the 2000s (racially coded as white and out of London) has largely been subsumed by roadmanism. You even have white poshos from the Home Counties who cosplay as roadmen to appear more “authentic”. Indeed, the racial imagination has always been fascinated with blackness as a source of Dionysian vitality: from minstrel performers to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G. To connect with “blackness” is supposedly to connect with one’s elemental impulses — a momentary means of escape and rebellion from a repressed white, Protestant, bourgeois mode of existence.

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It’s tempting to reassess the roadman in this light. Given that “integration” is a consistent if vexed topic in our national discourse, it has been argued that roadman-ism might be one of the few (sub-) cultures within Britain that can easily integrate, or rather assimilate, newcomers. For one, it has a low barrier of entry. It’s genuinely inclusive and open to new influences. To be a roadman doesn’t mean assimilating into blackness. It is really a pan-ethnic subculture, in many ways the default youth culture of the super-diverse cities that immigrants and their children encounter. For second- and third-generation immigrants who are alienated from both the mainstream national culture and the native culture of their parents, being a roadman offers an identity, a surrogate tribe (a mandem), something to “belong” to. Perhaps, then, roadmanism is the closest thing there is to a British melting pot.

But I’m not sure this is a model of integration that should be championed. The roadman is also a champion of ignorance, parochialism and shallow machismo. Newly minted roadmen who plunge deeper into that life will aspire to be a badman, often laboring under the delusion that doing “badness” is how you express just how masculine you are — and that you become “someone” through inflicting damage on the “opps”. That inevitably will lead to bloodshed and devastate communities. Crime and urban violence is a young man’s game and it is young men who are its biggest loser: 83% of teen victims of homicide were killed by stabbing in 2024; young men (aged 18-24) were eight times more likely to be killed by stabbing compared to young women.

The function of roadmanism, as Mark Fisher once wrote of hip-hop, is to operate as an “anti-mythical myth”. The Weltanschauung of the roadman has no room for sentimental idealism. It reveals life for what it supposedly really is: a social Darwinist struggle where only the fittest survive. Why was Henry Hill so enthralled by the gangster life in Goodfellas? It wasn’t just the money and flashy goods. It was a sense of freedom and excitement — of no longer being a non-player character in a dead-beat job.

And so the roadman “vibes” have transcended their working class black British origins to become the cosmopolitanism of the lumpenproletariat. The best remedy for it is a dynamic civil society that inspires young people to reject this nihilism. To translate their talent and graft into society’s gain. To realize that they can be free in society rather than acting against it. To discover meaning and purpose. Until such a thing exists, the roadman life will be the life that purposeless young men fall into. White middle-class people may laugh at the memes — but out on the road, baleful consequences will follow.

These are not excerpts from an ill-advised Church of England youth outreach programme. These are some of the 250-odd “Lad Commandments”, upon which the blokey media empire LadBible was founded in 2011. Lad culture had passed out of its Nineties pomp by then, but it remained potent. The Sun was still publishing topless models on Page 3. The Inbetweeners had shoved words like “clunge” and “minge” into the public consciousness. “Proper Moist”, a comedy song about girls “walking like Robocop” after a night of lovemaking, reached number 15 on the UK singles chart in 2014.

It was a time when Facebook was filled with teenagers rather than pensioners. I was one of them, sharing the now-antiquated memes — “one does not simply walk into Mordor” — that Elon Musk still finds funny. LadBible’s Facebook posts, which mainly concerned hot women, were ubiquitous. The last item of 2011 is a poll of words for breasts: “melons”, “jugs”, “fun bags”, “barrys”, “tats”, “boobs” and “chebs”. In 2012, one post asks: “What do you think of Miley Cyrus’ Side boob lads?” (Side boobs, being titillating but non-pornographic, were a major preoccupation.) Other features included the self-explanatory “Bumday Mondays” and “Cleavage Thursdays”.

Browsing through those early Facebook posts today is akin to wading through hastily shredded documents in an abandoned embassy. The images don’t load properly; the links direct to a page on its website which reads: “Sorry, this content isn’t available right now.” Around 2015, LadBible cleaned up its act. Co-founder Alexander “Solly” Solomou redefined the lad as “someone who spots a grandma crossing the road with heavy shopping, someone with manners, who is polite, who can be a hero”. He didn’t regret the earlier material but described it as a “learning curve”. Misogyny had become a commercial drag: “We realised that certain things needed to change if we wanted to compete with those guys in the States.”

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This proved to be correct. In December 2021, the controlling LadBible Group floated on the second tier of London’s stock market at £360 million. It now has multiple brands and boasts of “a global audience approaching 1 billion”, of which 40% is female. The focus is on less controversial, more easily monetised content: “Man goes on Antiques Roadshow with Ark of the Covenant from Indiana Jones”; “Seven signs you have a work husband or wife”; a video of a guy trying, and failing, to jump across a canal.

The chauvinistic weekend warrior was not just a limited audience but a shrinking one. After MeToo, lad culture lost its virility. The original lads grew up and settled down. Now they prefer weightlifting to binge drinking, and their wives tick them off if their banter goes too far. Gen Zs use second-hand drag slang — “it’s giving”; “throwing shade” ­— rather than patter like “reem” or “mint”. Lads thought girls were “gagging for it”, but today’s male contestants of Love Island handle the sexual agency of women with Clausewitzian levels of strategic delicacy. Modern footballers are upstanding, campaigning public figures rather than vodka-chugging louts (Jack Grealish the honourable exception). There is, of course, still plenty of grim sexism about, but misogyny no longer has a winking cultural ambassador to egg it on.

In truth, LadBible was driven by a different, more durable male archetype: the hardscrabble Thatcherite entrepreneur. Consider Solomou, a Stockport grammar-school boy who traded clothes on eBay in his early teens. In 2012, while studying business at Leeds University, he came across the embryonic LadBible and bought it from its creator, Oxford Brookes student Alex Partridge, for a reported £300. Arian Kalantari, Solomou’s childhood friend, came on board, and the duo’s knack for clickable content drove a breakneck expansion of the brand’s social media presence.

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In 2018, they took over their competitor Unilad in a distinctly sober bit of manoeuvring. Unilad — a similar proposition to LadBible — was founded by Partridge, too, but he was forced out by his partners, leading to a lengthy legal battle after which the company was ordered to pay him £5 million. As Unilad struggled with debt and tax issues, the pair acquired the £5 million liability from Partridge, helping them swallow their rival outright. (Solomou is now the last man standing: last month, Kalantari left the company to pursue “new challenges and new adventures”.)

Similar commercial realism has spurred LadBible’s high-profile good works. In 2016, it launched a men’s mental health campaign called UOKM8?, which it reprised in 2018 and 2019. (It’s currently involved in Sadiq Khan’s “Maaate” campaign against sexual harassment.) And in 2019, Unilad set up an “illegal” blood bank for gay and bisexual men to protest a now-abolished law banning them from donating unless they refrained from sex. This, from a brand which temporarily shut down in 2012 after a piece remarked: “85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.”

Whatever their industry, blue-chip firms are far more likely to work with media organisations that say men should open up than those that make rape jokes. And a smartened-up LadBible has built a prolific sponsored content operation: it leverages its audience for branded campaigns with the likes of McDonald’s chicken nuggets, John Lewis, Nando’s, Google and Durex (who “came to us to kick start the conversation” around different condom fits).

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Yet it is LadBible’s zeitgeisty mental health drive that is most revealing of its evolution. Brands that sell stuff to men — such as Nivea, Lynx and Gymshark — are now very interested in how those men are feeling. You can even buy a £795 jacket from Frahm which has “don’t keep it buttoned” stitched into the lining. (“Could this jacket help prevent depression?” asked the FT.) For his part, Alex Partridge, who presumably had some role writing or publishing the Lad Commandments, now posts on LinkedIn about his ADHD and #neurodiversity.

Many companies have gone on a similar journey to LadBible. Lynx, for example, used to make adverts about how its deodorant was irresistible to women, a quality touched upon in one particular Lad Commandment: “Thou shall always wear Lynx deodorant, as it is the deodorant which rakes in the pussy.” But as lad culture started crumbling, they enthusiastically began assembling their new ideal consumer: a soft, sensitive geezer who finds it okay to say he’s not okay.

This is a convenient customer to have. For one thing, he is happy to blame his problems on himself. The corporate vision of mental health is distinctly individualist: you’re sad because your brain isn’t quite right, so exercise consumer choice and get online therapy with BetterHelp. The alternative vision — that being miserable might have a lot to do with external things, such as economic rot and a loss of status in a post-patriarchal world — points to collective political action, and maybe higher taxes on those firms that seem so concerned about us. This scenario is clearly less appealing.

Yet while the lad has had his day, something worse might have taken his place. The popularity of Andrew Tate has proved that misogyny, though mostly cleared from the public sphere, is still widespread in young men. The vacuum left by the original LadBible was ripe to be filled. But while Tate is a sexist, he is not a lad — he is an individualist, with a lonely, materialistic vision of alphadom that offers a warped counterpart to the cuddly mental health discourse about working on yourself.

Perhaps the only redeeming feature of lad culture was its camaraderie. What is “bros before hoes” if not an uncouth expression of male bonding? Lads are surrounded by their mates. Tate is surrounded by his Bugattis. Lads bunk off work. Tate sees wealth as the making of the man. How ironic, then, that as it has transformed its brand in the name of profit, LadBible has hemmed far closer to Tate’s view of the world than that of its one-time audience. Behind the beer goggles was always a cold, dead-eyed stare.

Called AITA for short, this enormously popular sub-Reddit — which celebrates its 10th anniversary this summer and now has more than nine million subscribers — describes itself as a “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us” and a “platform for moral judgement”. Its stated purpose is “to assign blame”. Anonymous posters describe the tortuous ins and outs of disputes with loved ones, friends or co-workers, soliciting judgement from strangers. Readers gleefully weigh in with “YTA” (you’re the asshole), “NTA” (not the asshole), “NAH” (no assholes here), or “ESH” (everyone sucks here). Those browsing are encouraged to upvote responses they like. As is probably obvious, the site is based in the US.

Most of the conflicts described on AITA are no less ferocious for being deeply trivial. As I write this, the stories at the top of the page include a man who told his wife on their wedding day that her make-up looked weird; someone who refuses to eat any food his cousin makes for him because she once tricked him into eating cottage cheese; and a husband who unfolded all the clothes his wife had just folded for him, because she hadn’t rolled them the way he likes it. (At the moment, the dominant verdicts are YTA, YTA, and YTA respectively.)

The site is sometimes touted as a tool for “conflict resolution”, partly on the basis that those who receive a YTA judgement sometimes come back to explain how much they have supposedly learnt from the process. As a profile of the site from 2020 put it: “It’s a place where accountability actually exists… It’s also a place for growth.” It’s really not, though. It’s a place where people get to feel good about themselves by judging and scolding others. It’s great fun, but nobody here is going to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

As with the current vogue for podcasts and programmes about relationship counselling, one motive for browsing AITA is the enjoyable glimpses it provides into the fantastic dysfunction and pettiness of other people’s relationships. Where else could you read about a woman being passive-aggressive because her sister refused to get the “family tattoo”? Or about a man intentionally ruining his wife’s favourite Garth Brooks’s song because she didn’t like his preferred rap music (“I pointed out that the song That Summer is about an old woman taking advantage of a 19-year-old virgin”)? Or how about a woman telling her future sister-in-law that the she had inadvertently chosen a song about genocide as her first wedding dance (“Carrie was livid, screaming that the whole family would think she was a white supremacist”)?

A lot of the commentators seem intent on getting revenge for their own past emotional scars by castigating anyone who vaguely resembles a real-life foe of theirs. Whether the majority verdict on a post is YTA, NTA, or ESH, there is always an asshole around somewhere, upon which to project one’s situation and so get cathartically self-righteous. Harassed wives queue up to snark at hopeless-sounding husbands with just a little bit too much enthusiasm. Those who must secretly think of themselves as perpetual doormats respond to tales of freeloading friends with DIATRIBES IN CAPS. People with mummy issues take the side of daddy, and vice versa. “No Assholes Here” is everyone’s least favourite and most anti-climactic verdict.

And as for the motives of those offering up their own behaviour to scrutiny — for many of them, it’s apparently a desire for vindication rather than for self-improvement or reconciliation. (One imagines many a fight escalating rapidly with the fateful words “I asked Reddit who the asshole is, and they said it’s you!”) Skilful authors know how to craft innocent-sounding narratives putting their antagonists firmly in the wrong. The outcome is resounding validation from commentators, to whom the thought of unreliable or partial narration hardly seems to occur. Less adept and more hapless posters can seem almost masochistic in their inability to tell a sympathetic story about themselves, and get treated brutally as a result. (Ironically, these are probably the more honest and reliable contributors, though they receive no credit for it.)

Villainous stereotypes change from era to era. We used to have cads, bounders and knaves, and now we have assholes. But what exactly is the difference? Looking at AITA on its own, it’s tricky to pin down a systematic profile for the modern-day asshole. The term seems to be used there as a generalised synonym for wrongdoing. Males and females alike are dismissed with a YTA, and for no particularly distinctive reason that I can discern.

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Away from the site, though, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the stereotype of an asshole is a mostly male-associated one. These days, society always seems to be finding new ways for men, in particular, to be assholes — whether it’s by mansplaining, manspreading, staring at women on the tube, or bantering in an off-colour way. (Indeed, the founder of AITA, Marc Beaulac, has said he started the site as a way to work out whether he was mansplaining to some female coworkers.)

Philosopher Aaron James, author of the improbably titled book Assholes: A Theory, agrees: “assholes are mainly men”, he says, and are “overwhelmingly distributed among only one-half of the human population”. He defines an asshole, somewhat over-technically, as a person who “(1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; (2) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and (3) is immunised by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people”. (This is not, we are told, the same as being “a jerk, a boor, a cad, a schmuck, or a mere ass” — though these too all sound distinctly male-coded).

James’s explanation of why more men than women are assholes, in his sense, is that our culture is “gendered” — by which he means that men but not women tend to be encouraged by society to act in overly entitled obnoxious ways. This is a familiar enough feminist complaint, aimed not at combatting seriously anti-social or violent male behaviour, but at policing relatively small-scale behavioural infractions, or at least perceived ones. The implication, often taken on board by cue-responsive liberal men like James, is that men could do better if they tried. I’m not so sure it’s that simple, though.

An alternative explanation is that — to put it bluntly — the whole thing is a bit of a set-up. The bar for what counts as pro-social, non-assholish behaviour is now placed at a point where more men are more likely to fail than women, for reasons they can’t particularly help. To take just a few examples: from one perspective, mansplaining is the favouring of knowledge-driven, fact-filled conversations, which many men tend to do in single-sex company anyway. Manspreading is accommodating the shape of the male pelvis, and avoiding crushing your testicles when sitting down. Staring at women on the tube is, at least sometimes, a harmless attempt to flirt with the opposite sex — which, moreover, we had better hope young men don’t stop doing altogether, if only to save our pensions. Acting “out of an entrenched sense of entitlement”, as James might put it, is — at least sometimes  — confidently owning and prioritising your own projects and decisions, defending them from criticism, and not collapsing in a gibbering wreck of self-flagellation and apologies, as per the present feminised ideal.

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, bounders and cads — that is, lower-class social climbers — could exist as comprehensible social types, only because the default moral ideal was the well-bred “gentleman”. With the welcome loss of the gentleman as an archetype also came the loss of cads and bounders as social possibilities for men. Such categories make no real sense in the modern world any more, unless they are characters being played on-screen by Hugh Grant.

Analogously, my suspicion is that, when “being an asshole” isn’t just being used as a generalised shorthand for irritating behaviour, it gets its particular male-associated flavour because the opposing moral ideal is feminine, understood in a particularly boring, passive, and self-abnegating way. The suffocating wave of “kindness” and “inclusivity” that has washed over many institutions in the past decade has left many ordinary male behaviours stranded on the shore.

If I’m right, then this is bad news for men. But actually, it’s bad news for everyone. Excessive passivity and self-abnegation are not particularly good for women either. There’s a sense in which it is totally healthy to think your personal projects and decisions are more important than other people’s — they are yours, after all. Thinking this way doesn’t automatically make you a solipsistic asshole. It would be a strange and self-defeating attitude to constantly treat everyone else’s interests as exactly equal to yours, and nobody should do it, male or female.

What counts as “entitled” behaviour, then, perhaps ought to be recalibrated back to something more obviously dysfunctional. Maybe we could even allow both men and women, if they so wish, to mansplain, manspread, and stare at each other on the Tube. In life if not on Reddit, sometimes it’s ok to aim for YTA.

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.

The Times last week reported that steroid use in the UK has increased tenfold over the past decade, while recent studies have shown that 2% of Canadians, and between three and four million Americans, have used steroids in their lifetimes — with roughly a quarter of those users reporting “psychological dependence” on the otherwise-non addictive drugs.

I have been on the periphery of the strength and fitness culture for my entire adult life, and steroids have always been part of the athletic game: if you want to win, not just at bodybuilding and powerlifting but at any sport, you take performance-enhancing drugs. Initially, I had primarily positive views about the drugs: steroids, I thought, were merely a means to an end, a way of getting stronger and increasing functional capacity, something reams of academic and anecdotal research have confirmed they do. However, I gradually learned that the individuals using them in this way are few and far between.

That small pool of people largely consists of pro athletes, driven by financial incentives or competitive instincts to pursue every conceivable advantage. But recreational users have always outnumbered professional users, whose livelihoods depend on athletic performance. And that gap has only widened as these drugs have become available everywhere from internet forums to legally operating testosterone clinics. Their pull is irresistible: a relative of mine who never played sports or even took to the bodybuilding stage was arrested for felony possession of steroids in 2014. 

These recreational users are trying to win a different kind of game. When I started investigating steroids, an increasing number of users were following in the footsteps of Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, a Russian-born Australian who built a following on YouTube at the end of the Noughties. One of the first notable influencers to emerge on the now ubiquitous site, Zyzz preached a gospel of “aesthetics”, relying on steroids consumed in conjunction with exercise to develop a physique similar enough to his idol Frank Zane’s that it would win him the undying admiration of his followers.

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The key difference, of course, was that Frank Zane — whom I interviewed a year ago — was a professional athlete, training his body to win bodybuilding pageants, and Zyzz was merely someone who wanted to look the part. Zane detested selfies and self-recorded footage, believing it to be deceptive and no substitute for up-close, objective inspection of another person’s body; Zyzz relied on these methods to project a particular self-image. Taking steroids arguably made him weaker and sicker, not stronger. Zyzz died after a cardiac arrest aged 22, the victim of a congenital heart defect and cardiomegaly — an enlarged heart — worsened by the drug use that, like many fitness influencers including the recently disgraced Brian “Liver King” Johnson, he had spent the majority of his career denying he used. (Zyzz’s deception was exposed a month before his fatal heart attack, when his brother Said was arrested for possession of anabolic steroids.)

Zyzz’s early death should have made him a cautionary tale. Instead, he became a “muscle martyr” beloved by other fitness posters. People like my felonious relative saw him and wanted to be him, while emerging social media platforms provided convenient playgrounds for their carefully-curated exercises in brand-building narcissism. I’ve now interviewed hundreds of users, and the reasons for their use all arise out of some sense of absence, some internal emptiness. A gay user whose steroid-abetted transformation I profiled explained to me that he wanted to transition from being a chubby, schlubby teen to a “hyper-masculine” man. Others said they added mass in the hope of “becoming someone”; all that hypertrophied flesh would obscure an essential lack of self. Several steroid users who were attending bodybuilding pageants merely as spectators told me how eager they were to be mistaken for competitors, that passing for one would constitute the highlight of their year. 

“The first casualty of steroid use is the truth,” the fitness journalist and bodybuilding competition coach Anthony Roberts has told me repeatedly. Even if steroids are obtained with a perfectly valid prescription, there is still a cultural taboo that prevents most users from admitting to using them. As Roberts tells it, lying is the oldest and most effective performance enhancer of all: lying about what you take, how much you take, what else you take — because steroid use, for many, is but a small part of a drug-filled lifestyle. Certain fitness influencers, in addition to denying or at least staying silent about steroid use, have gone even further, inflating their on-screen workouts with the use of fake weight plates and exaggerated claims about their performance.

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Meanwhile, they are risking their health. Heavy steroid users are already uniquely susceptible to cardiovascular problems — and so many influencers are using steroids in excess of what a physician would prescribe for therapeutic use. Those with pre-existing heart problems, like Zyzz, are uniquely vulnerable, particularly in recent times. During the pandemic, each widely-publicised bodybuilder death was met with waves of accusation: at first, it was the evil virus that did them in, then it was the “clot shot”. Never mind that most of these so-called “recreational users” are teetering on death’s doorstep at all times, aware that even a common cold could stop their engorged hearts.

Bodybuilding prodigy Dallas McCarver, for example, died in 2017 with organs so enlarged that they strained credulity, and a recorded testosterone level of 55,000 nanograms per deciliter (the normal range for a male falls between 300 and 1,000 ng/dl, and the highest recorded testosterone level captured in a failed Olympic drug test was 20,000 ng/dl). So, as they near peak muscularity, and fame, these bodybuilders are also nearing the end of their lives. Their spectacular bodies serve as both temple and tomb. 

Hours of conversations with men like these have led me to believe that their behaviour is, in part, a response to the socioeconomic situation in which we find ourselves. Since the early Eighties, in the West, deindustrialisation has proceeded apace and the world of finance has become dominant. To people coming of age, it might appear as if nothing is made anymore but money. Farmers and manual labourers, such as the steamfitter captured in Lewis Hine’s famous 1921 photograph, sometimes exhibit a high degree of muscular development related to their jobs. By contrast, middle-class workers, performing increasingly less strenuous work for more than a century, have to actively cultivate muscular physiques to project power for which there might be little purpose — beyond showing that they aren’t subject to the degenerating tendencies of their age. In the absence of any tangible construction projects, the only thing that you can gain approval for building is your body — a body that is both an “aesthetic” calling card and a prison for your enlarging viscera and solipsistic thoughts.

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In more recent years, there has been much commentary on declining male testosterone levels. Blame is assigned to everything from poisoned food to sedentary lifestyles. Some pundits, such as manosphere influencer Mike Cernovich, have urged men to set aside $80-100 a month for testosterone replacement therapy. Whereas Cernovich’s cohorts would most probably deride the prescription of SSRIs for depression, or oestrogen for transgender-identifying individuals, they accept a pharmaceutical solution for the crisis of masculinity. At least testosterone administered in a clinic is accompanied by regular blood tests that can detect cholesterol issues and other problems before they become dangerous. But it is still another of modernity’s many panaceas: here is a weekly or biweekly needle to the thigh or buttocks that will make you feel and perhaps even look like someone you are not, but feel entitled to be — or at least appear to be, on social media.

The overdiagnosis of SSRIs, the superfluity of steroids, and the legions of men killing themselves to look strong are tragedies. They are disordered responses to a kind of existential emptiness, a world in which our identities are all we have left to display and sell. And we know, deep down in our hearts, that such a meretricious product is worth nothing at all. 

A report published last weekend sheds light: the female drift away from conservatism is  structural and is a worldwide trend. The authors offer some speculation as to why, such as the need for state-subsidised childcare since we entered the workplace. But this is to see things backwards. It’s not so much that women are becoming more progressive, as that progress is leaving men behind.

If the Unabomber declared in the manifesto he sent to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”, we’re now some decades out of the industrial era and into the “information age” — a much more asymmetrical disaster, whose principal weight has been borne by working-class men. Meanwhile, the Left that once stood up for those men has been colonised by a female-heavy new class of knowledge worker, that wields progressivism as a means of legitimating its interests. And the implications of this change reach well beyond the Tories’ electoral prospects with female voters.

In the smoking rubble of the Second World War’s aftermath, a new dream took hold: cleaner, safer and more modern than the industrial one. Post-industrial “knowledge societies” would be governed by rules-based internationalism; manufacturing could happen anywhere, and what mattered was ideas and innovation. In 1963, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the country that a new Britain was rising, and would prosper in the “white heat” of scientific revolution. Wilson wrote later that his speech’s aim had been to “replace the cloth cap [with] the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British labour”.

This post-war push from an industrial to a knowledge base created new opportunities for women. For while men are, on average, considerably physically stronger than women, and as such more likely to be able to perform heavy industrial work, an economy that’s more geared toward desk-based work places no such constraints on the sex of employees.

And this, in turn, reshaped the Left. As a movement born out of 19th-century trade unionism, and premised on the power of working-class people to exact better pay and conditions from their bosses through collective action, the industrial Left’s relation to women was historically ambivalent. Speaking in 1875, for example, TUC secretary Henry Broadhurst declared that the aim of trade unionism was a situation “where wives and daughters would be in their proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world”. Even in 1906, many within the Labour Party argued that including women in the demand for universal suffrage would weaken their cause.

But de-industrialisation levelled the employment playing-field between men and women. From the mid-century onward, these changes combined with a flood of new consumer technologies that eased the previously arduous work of housekeeping, and medical ones that meant women could enjoy an active sex life with minimal risk of pregnancy. Thus liberated by technology, women demanded the right to seize those opportunities on the same terms as men — and second-wave feminism was born.

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Between 1964 and 1970 women accounted for 70% of new trade union members; today, women make up a majority of trade unionists. This then accelerated with deliberate de-industrialisation under Thatcher, aimed at breaking the power of the unions. Wakefield, site of one of tomorrow’s by-elections, illustrates this shift: once the home of the physically arduous and thus male-dominated mining industry, the city’s biggest single field of employment is now health, which makes no such physical demands.

Women also flocked to the universities: the proportion of female undergraduates increased sharply over the same decade, and by 1979 women outstripped men in the US as a proportion of undergraduates. It took until 2010 for women to outnumber men at university in the UK, but similar trends hold in most developed-world economies.

And with women making up a growing proportion of academia, it’s hardly surprising that the political interests of an increasingly female-heavy class of knowledge worker should begin to make their presence felt there too. It was in the Sixties that the New Left began to shift the focus of progressive politics away from labour issues in the industrial sense, toward civil rights, environmentalism, feminism and gay rights. This, too, represented a turn away from the “cloth cap” as an emblem of the industrial worker. But the New Left’s direction of travel was less toward lab coats than mortarboards and black polo-necks: a colonisation of the academy and commanding heights of culture, characterised in the Sixties by the German activist Rudi Dutschke as “the long march through the institutions”.

So it’s not so much that women became more Left-wing. Rather, material conditions made sex less salient for participation in public life, and women responded accordingly — all the while framing these changes as “progress” in an absolute sense.

But so what? Why shouldn’t women participate in public life when technology opens those opportunities? Here I am, after all. Well, the other side of this picture is the concurrent relative decline in prospects for men. ONS data shows that the past 40 years have seen rising employment for women and falling employment for men: in 1971, 53% of women were in work, compared with 72% today, while the percentage for men has fallen from 92% to 76%.

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And these downsides have not been evenly distributed. Men still dominate the highest-paid professions, giving elite knowledge-class women plenty to grumble about. It’s easy to get fixated on “gender pay gaps” and the paucity of female CEOs (just 8% in the FTSE100). But if we’re only looking at the top of the food chain, it’s easy to forget that the picture is more complicated further down.

House of Commons research shows that manufacturing’s share of the UK economy declined from 27% in 1970 to around 10% by 2018, and that the value of this share has stayed the same over that period. But the number of employees in the sector has fallen dramatically, thanks to greater automation and other increases in productivity. That is: in absolute terms the number of (physically arduous, traditionally male) manufacturing jobs has declined dramatically.

The same picture is replicated across UK employment: sectors such as agriculture, forestry, construction and logistics have declined or grown only slowly in the past 25 years. Meanwhile, other less physically demanding working-class employment sectors such as public administration, education and health grew significantly. The three biggest UK employers are now supermarkets (where some 800,000 women work as sales assistants, compared with 500,000 men), hospitals (where 77% of NHS staff are women), and charities (where 70% of employees are women). In other words, the high-tech dwindling of brute strength as a desirable characteristic in employees maps onto a concurrent rise in female economic and political power.

The impact of this shift in the balance of power is not evenly distributed — and where it lands, it can be severe. Working-class men are at 44% higher risk of suicide than other demographics, and talk of the “crisis in masculinity” is everywhere in journalism and academia.

So is this all women’s fault? No: the decline in opportunities for working-class men isn’t a malign feminist conspiracy, but rather an effect of technological developments. It makes little sense to blame women as a sex for structural material changes that have disadvantaged working-class men. But it makes a great deal of sense to point the finger at knowledge-workers as a class for their efforts to wave away externalities, via a self-righteous ideology that often flies under the banner of feminism.

In the UK, only seven current Labour Party MPs of either sex have working-class backgrounds. And despite its historic origins in the labour movement, there seem to be no overt Labour Party measures, such as candidate shortlists, seeking to address this — for example by prioritising working-class people, let alone working-class men. Labour does, however, have all-women shortlists.

And where there’s a conflict of interest between the two groups, progressive arguments often seem to end up legitimating the interests of women. Think about the progressive argument for remaining in the EU (heavily endorsed by almost all in the Labour Party). Then think about who benefited materially from EU free movement, and who lost out: knowledge-class women could employ au pairs, while skilled tradesmen (a sector that’s over 90% male) got cut-throat competition.

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We may already be seeing a male-inflected backlash to this unhappy dynamic in the USA. In 2016, sex politics and class politics seemed to converge: men, people without degrees, and those for whom the modern economy wasn’t delivering skewed sharply for Trump. It’s possible that these demographics also skewed sharply against that quintessence of knowledge-class progressivism, Hillary Clinton.

A long way from its roots in the labour movement, progressivism has become a story knowledge-class women tell about why their material interests are good in an absolute moral sense. And once you believe that, you can say with perfect conviction that anyone opposing my class interests is an enemy of progress, and thus is by definition a fascist. And faced with this accusation, we may have difficulty persuading working-class men not to turn their ire, frustration and resentment on women — especially while economic shifts that feel like disastrous decline continue to be narrated by the progressive Left as feminist progress.

And having been so resoundingly abandoned by Labour, working-class men are sorely in need of political representation. So, too, are those women who don’t see their interests reflected in elite progressivism. It’s difficult to imagine the Tories filling this gap — but a party (any party) that worried less about how to court elite knowledge workers and set out to defend the interests of labourers, tradesmen and other dealers in matter rather than knowledge would be welcome news to many voters. This is the tack now being adopted by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley in the US, a vision of “levelling up” explicitly directed at defending working-class men against those who would class their priorities and perspectives as “deplorable”.

Hawley’s suggestions include re-shoring industries, financial support for marriage and families and cracking down on university-driven talk of “toxic masculinity”. Whether that would make enough (or any) meaningful difference is moot; I can only imagine the outrage it would occasion (as it did in America), particularly from progressive women. But I doubt I’m the only woman who would rather this than an escalating militant, macho, jack-booted backlash, powered by working-class rage and served with a side-order of embittered misogyny.

War, the subject of Hemingway’s two most famous books, is perhaps the quintessential subject of such manly writing. From the Mahabharata to the Iliad, it’s the central theme in the ancient world’s most immortal works. But something has happened to war-lit: first, the industrialisation of fighting, which Hemingway himself lived through and documented; then, the development of war technologies so terrible that battle itself came to seem unthinkable.

The world that has emerged since is in many ways (or at least in many places) a safer and more peaceful one. But what has become of those men who actually like danger, and for whom warfare has always been a proving-ground?

Some are still running into danger. There was a surreal echo of Hemingway’s love of danger in a recent wave of young Americans joining a conflict overseas, and then (albeit with less positive consequences) documenting it.

Hemingway was among the thousands who travelled to Spain between 1936 and 1938, to support the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In February, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy issued a formal call to foreigners to join an “international brigade” fighting for the Ukrainian side against Putin’s invasion. At least according to Ukrainian reports, an estimated 20,000 have signed up to help — and many view what they’re doing as fightback against “a 21st-century version of fascism”.

More from this author

Incels could become the new Vikings

By Mary Harrington

You would think the Weird Online Right, the contemporary subculture most concerned with masculinity would approve of this risk-taking. A recurring theme in such spaces is the perceived subjection of manliness to the shrunken, heroism-free horizons of modern life and the culture of “bugmen” it has produced. Perhaps the most influential sacred text of this subculture is Bronze Age Mindset, an unclassifiable “exhortation” written in 2018 and now immensely influential among disaffected young men.

Written by the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, it blames modern comforts and the undue influence of women for the stifling and emasculating nature of modern life: “In fact everything that you hate about modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison … represents a return of the endless sallow night of matriarchy.” BAP extols the virtues of pre-Christian heroes of antiquity, and predicts that “Leviathan will not be able to hold itself together” whereupon “the age of high piracy will return”, enabling the men capable of it to develop “their ability to wage war”.

But instead of lauding their bravery, the Very Online Right tends to dismiss Zelenskyy’s resistance as a “fight to the death for globalist oligarchs like Soros and Kolomoisky” and mock any evidence of fear, regret or incompetence displayed by the young foreigners flocking to help. This so-called “Reddit Battalion” has been widely mocked for having reportedly compromised operational security on the battlefield by continuing to post from their phones while in a warzone: their compulsion to document their experience emitting signals allowing their location to be pinpointed and shelled.

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What men get wrong about masculinity

By Sarah Ditum

What’s going on here? One response might be that simply proving oneself as a man isn’t the only consideration in battle, and if you are there in service of a despised political agenda, you’re still not one of the good guys. But there’s something deeper at work, too: an ambivalence about the idea of masculinity and writing as such that runs through the conflicted contemporary debates about men, warfare, heroism and propaganda that now orbit the conflict in Ukraine.

For while Hemingway is long since a byword for “masculine” writing, there’s also a tragic sense in which his work traces the Twentieth-century demise of an older, more warlike form of masculinity, at the hands not of the “endless sallow night of matriarchy” but of technology itself.

War literature prior to the Twentieth century is often unabashedly heroic, even as it documents horrors. Tennyson’s 1855 Charge of the Light Brigade describes an 1854 battlefield in the Crimea in terms both terrible and stirring, then asks:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality,” Hemingway wrote in 1942, of his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I when he was just 19. “Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion.” The war that deprived Hemingway of his illusions about immortality also stripped many of confidence in military glory full stop.

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, published 1921, draws a contrast between the heroic motto about dying for one’s country, and the reality of dying of poison gas in the trenches. In 1935, Hemingway expressed the same sentiment in an Esquire essay, where he stated that “in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason”.

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The rise of the literary noble savage

By Alex Perez

Even so, to Hemingway the Spanish Civil War was a clear-cut moral issue: a battle between good and evil, man and machine, via the horrifying industrial technologies of Twentieth-century total war. And if, as some historians argue, this conflict was in fact the true start of the Second World War, what started as a battle between man and machine ended with the machine’s victory, in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A whole generation, slightly older than I am, grew up in the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction: the fear that either (or both) sides in the Cold War might at any moment launch unstoppable nuclear-powered death through the air, obliterating millions in seconds.

Over the same period, conflict between nuclear powers avoided direct confrontation. Armies have shrunk, nationalism has been widely deprecated, and the world (unless you’re unlucky enough to live in a theatre of one of America’s or Russia’s proxy wars) is generally more peaceful than in Hemingway’s youth.

And while that has many upsides, it has also, paradoxically, created disaffected young men. For when national identity is infra dig, and open warfare is discouraged lest it set off nuclear Armageddon, what’s left for young men who thirst for danger and intensity?

Some find it anyway; some, too, also write about it, including my UnHerd colleague Aris Roussinos. As he said in 2014 of his experiences in Syria: “The hidden awful truth about war is how much fun it is.” But for those in the developed West, this is the exception rather than the rule. Most men remain in the “Iron Prison”. Many chafe at it, and seek to reclaim some form of masculinity, but few seem very certain as to how this might be done in practice.

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Lessons from a war zone

By Aris Roussinos

Some, too, write about the stultifying nature of the world in which they remain. Two realist writers emerging from the disaffected online Right are the short story writers “Delicious Tacos” and “Bad Billy Pratt”, both of whom document the nihilistic landscape of contemporary sex relations in an aggressively unsentimental style. And it’s hardly surprising that writers committed to (as Pratt put it to me) “the unfiltered truth” should focus on the sexual anomie of self-absorbed protagonists.

After all, modern life has become — in BAP’s words — “an economic zone arranged much like a work camp”, a regimented place “of incredible ugliness” and “hateful to the raising of boys”. It’s easy to see how, as Pratt himself might conclude, “the only fiction worth writing is incel fiction”. What, in that context, is left but the self, and the sexual warzone?

And with heroism, action or drama in short supply in everyday life, those hungry for intensity must resort to the world of computer gaming — or fantasy writers such as Mike Ma, described as “Chaotic 21st century pastiche of Hemingway, Kierkegaard, Kaczynski, and the guy in your econ class who wears combat boots”; or else the neo-reactionary sci-fi writer “Zero HP Lovecraft”, a “horrorist” whose self-published short story collection sold out in less than 24 hours.

Hemingway began his life in the shadow of Tennyson’s Light Brigade, and finished it in the shadow of Hiroshima. Over the same period, the raw, elemental struggles between man and man, or man and nature, so characteristic of Hemingway’s work, grew more attenuated. His literary career was both as a “masculine” writer, but also as an elegy for a world where the conventionally masculine virtues of courage, risk-taking, stoicism and heroism were easily celebrated and widely accepted as culturally essential.

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The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussain

Since his time, the world has retreated steadily from conflict, toward mechanised and then mediated life; a process culminating in the radical safetyism and dematerialised common life of Covid lockdowns, and the online-first social life the pandemic ushered in. And now that we have virtualised social life to the point where any physical violence is foreclosed, even most arguments about masculinity now inevitably take place in the feminine key.

Young men, already restive, are growing mutinous under this regime. The lurid and angry literature emerging captures these men’s ambivalence: sickened by, but also usually still implicated in, the banality and perceived effeminacy of a modern world denuded of both danger and opportunity. We can only speculate on what may happen if (or when) such men leave behind the neutered disaffection off the internet, and start searching en masse for danger and heroism beyond the screen.

Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, you’re doing it.

When immersed in a fiction, your direct aim isn’t to recognise and respond to the world as it actually is. To borrow a phrase from philosophy, your thoughts and behaviour aren’t directly “truth-tracking”. That’s usually ok, because fictions are supposed to be harmless bits of fun, or interesting encounters with possible-but-not-actual scenarios. But what they are not supposed to be are accurate reports of reality as you personally find it now. When immersed, it’s as if many of your thoughts are flying parallel to earth without touching it.

As a trans person, there are different possible motives for immersing yourself in fictions of changing or escaping your sex, such as strong feelings of dysphoria. If you’re highly uncomfortable about the sexed aspects of your body — say, because they fail to fit prevalent bodily norms, or you think they do — you might experience relief to act as if you are of the opposite sex, or of no-sex.

It’s reasonable to analyse the worryingly high rise of girls and young women in this position in the context of the invention of the smartphone, the related spread of social media and pornography, and the over-sexualisation and objectification of young women in our culture generally. A less well-known motive for immersion, specific to some but not all within the male trans demographic and also likely to be influenced by pornography, is the presence of a fetish known as autogynephilia (or “AGP”).

In plain language: AGP is a sexual turn-on for some males to enter into the fiction of being a woman. There’s a huge effort made by trans activists to deny this. And it seems particularly hard for people without much experience of the adult world of sexuality — idealistic young people, say, or university lecturers — to believe it. But numerous sources attest to it, and it’s important we recognise it clearly when it comes to discussing incursions into women’s rights.

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By Joan Smith

See, for instance, this Vice article from 2016, published before progressive media started to pretend autogynephilia could never happen, that frankly describes a club night where men cross-dress as women for sexual pleasure, sometimes also role-playing that they are being “forced” into “feminisation” by a dominatrix. Residual doubters should also read Deirdre McCloskey’s transition memoir Crossing, where the sexual element is cheerfully admitted. Or just look closely at this picture of a transwoman addressing the New York State Democratic Party.

When it comes to people who aren’t trans, the typical motivations for immersion in trans activism’s foundational fictions seem of four main sorts. First, there’s a desire to be kind to trans people, without a lot of further thought about what that might look like. Second, there’s those who want to seem kind because of the social capital it brings these days. Third, there’s a desire to avoid ostracisation, since you know you will be socially punished if you don’t. And fourth, there’s a desire to undo human sexed categories with the power of words, because you heard from some whackjob academic that this was a coherent and politically desirable thing to aim for.

Now many of the fictions in which we immerse ourselves are harmless. But that isn’t the case with trans fictions, when disseminated at industrial scale and coercively maintained by the progressive establishment. At the other end of this particular story arc are unhappily infertile young adults; women prisoners made to share facilities with male rapists; sportswomen crowded out of competition by men they can’t hope to beat; young lesbians guilted into dating males; wives being coerced into participation in the cross-dressing fantasies of their husbands; and trans people with wholly inadequate healthcare relative to their well-being.

Horrific as those plot twists are, though, I want to take a more oblique look at the story leading up to them. For it seems to me that trans activism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead. Maybe all movements pursue fiction some of the time, but few have truth-denial so firmly built into their foundational axioms. So here are four instructive features.

1) Providing a convincing back story 

What does a fiction need in order to seem vivid and realistic — to grip your attention and draw you in emotionally? Partly, it needs background detail that looks compelling to the average reader, and is distracting enough that she doesn’t question any plot holes. And what more convincing-looking detail could you find than that supplied by people whose day job it is to be clever and to know things? On this basis, parts of academia have been enlisted, enthusiastically, to furnish surrounding details for the foundational fictions of the trans industry.

A just-published article by philosopher Dan Williams describes a related phenomenon. In today’s world, he argues, “pundits and opinion-producers” provide apparently supportive arguments and other justifications for conclusions that people were already motivated to believe anyway — and they do so “in exchange for money and social rewards”. A marketplace for the rationalisations of desired beliefs has developed, he suggests.

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My fight with the Rebel Dykes

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In the domain of trans activism, I think that the rationalisations offered by academics tend to support immersion in fiction rather than full-blooded belief. After all, when deciding who to bully first, the trans activists still seem to know who the women and who the men are. But otherwise the process is similar to that described by Williams.

The game for some academics is to provide convincing-looking backgrounds for predetermined fictional conclusions such as “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”. Since the system currently rewards them for doing this, I think their unconscious motive is often career advancement and social recognition from peers, though it’s inevitably dressed up as something moral.

In the area I’m most familiar with, academic Philosophy, a dedicated band of thinkers seeks to provide complex and technical post-hoc rationalisations for mantras first expressed by adolescents on Tumblr in 2011. The fact that truth in its traditional sense is not their object of inquiry could not be made plainer. See, for instance, philosopher Katharine Jenkins, who starts her 2016 article on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journal Ethics, by declaring: “The proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid — that trans women are women and trans men are men — is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.” (It’s telling that “valid” is used here in the Tumblr sense of identities being validated like passports or parking tickets, and not in the sense of logical validity more traditional for academic philosophy). The conclusion of Jenkins’s paper, not enormously surprisingly under the circumstances, is that we should use the term “woman” to refer to all and only people who have a female gender identity, whether they are actually female or male.

Another example of this peculiar genre is a 2020 article by Elizabeth Barnes, who like Jenkins, makes explicit that her reasoning has been constrained in advance by a desire to fit with the conclusion that anyone who wants to be classified as a woman should be counted as a woman, and anyone who doesn’t want to be classified as a woman should not be. Barnes then advances a hilariously tortured rationalisation for claims like “transwomen are women”, arguing that there aren’t any “deep, language-independent facts about which people are women, which people are genderqueer, etc”.

She justifies this partly by making an extremely involved analogy with metaphysical discussions of tables. In a nutshell: she argues that in metaphysical terms, there aren’t any tables, strictly speaking, though perhaps there are “simples arranged table-wise”. Nonetheless we can still utter the true sentence “there are tables”. Similarly, though for somewhat different reasons, the metaphysical facts about womanhood and other “gendered” groups come apart from the truth conditions of sentences involving … oh I give up, I don’t have to pretend to take this stuff seriously anymore. (I confess, though, that I remain disappointed Barnes didn’t try to argue that women are “simples arranged woman-wise”.)

In the social sciences, meanwhile, things don’t seem much better. Here the aim of research often seems to be to rationalise certain background beliefs. These beliefs are designed to make immersion in the original fictions appear beneficial or at least cost-free; or else to make refusal look costly in moral and social terms. For instance: “there is an extremely low prevalence of regret in transgender patients after surgery” (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is harmless); “administering cross-sex hormones to gender dysphoric adolescence lowers suicidal ideation” (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is beneficial); “questioning the ‘ontological reality’ of transgender identities leads to transphobic harassment” (i.e. as a non-trans person, refusing to immerse yourself in the fictions of trans people causes trans people to be harassed); “non-suicidal self-injury is common in trans youth and emphasises the need for interventions that reduce transphobia” (i.e. as a non-trans person, refusing to immerse yourself in the fictions of trans people causes trans youth to self-harm); and so on.

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The heretics will not be silenced

By Jess De Wahls

The main point of such articles seems to be to operate as a giant guilt-trip for the reader. As with the philosophers earlier, the ultimate aim here isn’t a relatively neutral pursuit of truth but rather a simulacrum of academic discourse which will bring the reader to accept certain predetermined conclusions. This is suggested, partly by the fact that many of the people who produce these sorts of articles seem to have vested interests, economic or personal, for keeping the whole fiction on the road; but also partly because what they produce is so often full of sloppy mistakes, and failures to observe even basic methodological norms. Others are more qualified to illustrate these flaws but, with respect to the research articles I linked to just now, this piece, this one, this one, this one, and this one seem revealing.

A charitable explanation of this unusual level of incompetence is that the goal was never truth in the first place. If motivating others to become immersed in fictions is your aim, then the actual use of reliable truth-tracking methodologies is bound to be less important than the superficially convincing appearance of their use.

2) Exploring a parallel universe

A compelling fiction can give us a snapshot of what life might be like if our starting point was different to the world we know: what else might be true, say, if British people lived under a totalitarian dictatorship with powers of mass surveillance (1984); or if there was a species of otherwise human-like beings that had no fixed sex (The Left Hand of Darkness); or if Germany and Japan had won WWII (The Man in the High Castle), and so on. Filling in the fictional consequences of an initial made-up scenario is another way that authors make certain stories vivid and interesting.

Kids immersed in make-believe stories do something more basic but still similar, using toys and other household props they have around them. So for instance, a kid’s make-believe game might go: if this doll is a “explorer”, and this chair is an “elephant”, then, if I put the doll on top of the chair, “an explorer is riding an elephant”.

So too does trans activism, with the help of the media and the academy, work to fill in the consequences of the original fiction that transwomen are “women”. Partly this is a matter of working out what would follow logically, given the way the concepts “woman” and “man” usually work. For instance, if transwomen are “women”, then transwomen are a sub-set of women generally, so we also need a special word for the sub-set of women that aren’t trans: “cis women”. If transwomen are “women”, then, since women before the age of sexual maturity are “girls”, transwomen before the age of sexual maturity are “girls” too. Since women who have children are “mothers”, transwomen with children are also “mothers”. Since women exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians”, transwomen exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians” as well (and so on and so on).

And then there’s the practice of extending the entitlements and resources of women to transwomen, because transwomen are “women”, so they are imagined to share precisely those entitlements and need exactly those resources too. As we now know to women’s cost, being immersed in the fiction that transwomen are “women” has led to the dismantling of single-sex services and resources built painstakingly over years, largely in the pursuit of aesthetic verisimilitude for males.

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Why I became trans

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Meanwhile, if transwomen are “women”, and certain events and experiences characteristically happen to women, then the logic of the fiction dictates that transwomen must undergo these too. So for instance, transwomen are supposed to suffer from “misogyny”, because women suffer from misogyny (a fiction given further oomph by the fact that experiencing misogyny or even sexual violence is a common sexual fantasy of autogynephilic males). Transwomen have period symptoms, menopause symptoms, and so on.

This working out of fictional consequences goes on at the particular as well as the general level. Martine Rothblatt is a transwoman, and transwomen are female; Martine Rothblatt is paid more than any woman CEO in America; so this makes Rothblatt the “the highest paid female executive in America” according to New York magazine. Lia Thomas is a transwoman, and transwomen are women; Lia Thomas is a faster swimmer than any woman at the University of Pennsylvania; this means Lia Thomas has broken “women’s records” for swimming. Novelist Torrey Peters is a transwoman, and transwomen are women: this means Peters’ novel Detransition Baby is eligible for longlisting in the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.

In this story-world, women’s achievements are gradually reduced, to be replaced with altogether grimmer kinds of headline involving “women” engaged in characteristically male crimes such as paedophilia, violent assault, and indecent exposure. Last week, the Scottish Daily Record reported that Shay Sims, “a female” in court who had “pleaded guilty to three charges of assault by beating, criminal damage and outraging public decency”, had “raised her dress up and lowered her pants to reveal a penis and continued to walk 40 feet with the penis exposed”. And last Wednesday, the New York Times reported that an “83-year-old woman”, already guilty of killing two other women, had been discovered carrying the torso of a dismembered woman out of an apartment building.

What, meanwhile, of the consequences of the original fictions that transmen are “men”? In the contrasting case of the fiction that transmen are “men”, given the centrality of the concept “man” to so many discourses, in theory there should be ample material for campaigners to get stuck into. To some extent they have: for instance, in the ongoing campaign in the UK to have a transman registered as a legal “father” on a birth certificate. But curiously, in most other areas men’s spaces, resources, entitlements, and achievements are being left untouched.

3) Retconning the past

Some story-makers engage in “retconning” — making new stories continuous with old ones by changing elements of the old one retrospectively. Famously — at least, for people my age and older — in the soap opera Dallas, the character Bobby, previously killed off, was brought back a whole series later, alive, with the explanation that it had all been a dream while he was in the shower.

In trans activism, a form of retconning takes place all the time, as a further means of producing convincing back stories for current fictions. So much of the trans activist story-world depends on trans people having been a permanent feature of human life throughout history, no matter what the surrounding cultural or historical context. And so we find the retrospective fictional transing of notable sex-non-conforming figures from history: for instance, Marsha P. Johnson; Ewan Forbes; James Barry; Joan of Arc; Queen Hatshepsut; Kurt Cobain. We also get the creative reinterpretation of other cultural traditions, with the Hijra, Fa’afafine, Fakaleitī, and Kathoey people all anomalously represented under the essentially Western, relatively modern concept of “trans”.

And then, of course, we also get the fiction of the “trans” child — the most audacious retcon of them all. Transwomen who are “women” must once have been “girls”, and transmen who are “men” must once have been “boys” — which, by extrapolation, means that there must be “girls” in the population of male children, and “boys” in the population of female children, right now. “Trans” children (so often female, but never mind about that) “know who they are”, and should have the “freedom to be themselves”, we are told. Yet this “freedom” may well involve a child’s taking drugs that will make her infertile; or give her premature osteoporosis; or bring about the surgical removal of her breasts, ovaries, and womb before she’s had any chance to reflect on the implications.

Thousands of children and teens worldwide have been encouraged by adults to thoroughly immerse themselves in this fiction – indeed, to start believing in it, full stop — instead of treating it as one make-believe game among many, as part of a healthy development. Children’s bodies are being used as props in adult dramas they have no way of properly understanding until it’s too late for them.

4) Remembering to turn off your phone

When you go to the cinema, you’re sometimes reminded to switch off your phone. Annoying ringtones can grab the attention of someone immersed in a fiction and return them unpleasantly to consciousness of the real world.

Reminders of reality are also lurking out there, ready to distract those currently immersed in trans activist fictions. There’s the annoying fact that biological sex in humans is immutable. Remembering this can be a real buzzkill when you’re trying to persuade yourself that Lia Thomas is just an ordinary woman unusually good at swimming. This, I think, is why trans activists systematically object to statements that biological sex in humans can’t be transcended.

In a recent case, several student editors of the academic journal Law and Contemporary Problems publicly resigned when they found out their journal would be publishing an article of mine entitled: “The Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Language”. (Please do read it to annoy them.) There are several precedents for this, of course — most obviously, the anomalously severe treatment of Lisa Littman’s paper on rapid onset gender dysphoria a few years back.

A fear of breaking the fourth wall is also, I think, what makes trans activists panic so much about J.K. Rowling’s forthright interventions on the harms of modern trans activism to women and girls. Rowling has the courage to describe the reality of male behaviours that harm women and girls, regardless of the identities of either. Perhaps precisely because she understands so well the difference between fiction and reality, the creator of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” is both willing and able to name things that others dare not. She also has the communicative power and cultural clout to get her message out to millions. To those emotionally or indeed financially invested in trans fictions, and who desire others to remain immersed too, this must be terrifying.

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And then there’s the Detrans Subreddit. It has 27K members, mostly young, and many of whom talk frankly about the harms to their bodies and minds caused by premature transition. Some of those who post on this subreddit are desperate for help, and their testimonies are truly shocking. You might well wonder: why don’t those in the progressive media report on the phenomenon more unambiguously? For this is a medical scandal unfolding in plain sight.

The answer is that the existence of detransitioners reminds people that psychological identifications can be temporary, especially in adolescence, and that there’s no inevitability about transitioning on the basis of feelings of dysphoria. The idea that someone is “born trans” or has no choice but to transition, given “who they really are inside”, is a myth. Detransitioners establish this. Now, not all trans people are committed to ignoring this fact — far from it. But many do seem to be, as do large numbers of self-styled trans allies. And collectively they seem motivated to exert pressure on others to ignore it too, no matter what the public cost.

Even more painfully, perhaps, the phenomenon of detransitioners reminds parents of transitioned children that they might well be making a terrible mistake in allowing their child to be medicated — a mistake that may later cause grave and irrevocable problems for their child’s well-being. I hear that some of the prominent figures publicly engaged in trying to shut down balanced discussion about the welfare of trans children in the UK are privately in this position, and often wonder how it can be that such vested interests go undeclared.

These people remind me of Christof, the Creator-character in The Truman Show — desperate to stop their child from reaching the artificial horizon of the little world that has, unbeknown, been shaped just for them.

This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.

The novel may be a release from a major press (Little, Brown), but its author isn’t famous; nor is his offering — a fragmented piece of autofiction about a 30-year-old named Sean Thor Conroe writing a book called Fuccboi — particularly mass-market. So why the histrionics? Well, Conroe received a six-figure advance for this first novel.

Yet while such a sum will always raise eyebrows, especially envious ones, Conroe has been subjected to levels of vitriol unusual even for the literary “community”. The dope on Conroe circulating among the disgruntled (no six-figure advance) is as follows: Conroe is nothing less than a privileged, wealthy, white-passing impostor, who, Barry Lyndon-style, has passed himself off as a dejected, pitiable, impoverished victim of white supremacy (he’s half Japanese) and capitalism (he’s a former delivery boy). That is to say, he is the kind of wretch who passes as a literary idol for the publishing world’s exacting commissars.

For a time, the indie winds were in Conroe’s favour, and praise was doled out. But since that cheque — some wager, because of it — the tides have turned. In a post entitled “Fuck, Boy!”, Sam Pink, a writer and painter of working-class extraction, put his allegations bluntly: “[I’ve had] my entire work stolen from me.” To wit, Pink accused Conroe of swiping his telegraphic, slangy style — a blend of Soundcloud rap (“side bae”, “ex bae”, “editor bae”, “peripheral bae”, “autonomous bae”) and leaden Instagram self-care argot (“This sharing permitted, even encouraged, me to consider my own patterns./To even recognize, in the first place, that patterns were created by tangible actions”). Pink is disgusted by this “offensively appropriated” “fake slang from an ivy league kid.”

Conroe, predictably, claims to be speaking in his real voice. In his acknowledgments, Conroe writes:

Ty ty ty to Giancarlo DiTrapano for not only letting me write how I talk, but encouraging me to. 
            That shit there.
            Man.
            I can’t even.

For what it’s worth, Conroe does talk like that. I briefly met him when he attended a reading at my apartment, though he seemed uncomfortable and often stepped outside to smoke in the cold. As I later learned, two other guests were the respective publisher and author of an essay accusing Conroe of, basically, slumming it. The battle, as always, is about stolen victimhood, and the writers, as always, respond by punching up their “trauma” and playing down their “privilege” to stake a claim to what is, after all, an unimpressive and even grating style.

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Authenticity aside, when Hanson O’Haver, in Gawker, dumps on Conroe’s use of “laundered rap slang” and Jonah Bromwich’s New York Times review includes a pro forma condemnation of the same as “cringeworthy”, one wonders: where have they been? Do they remember the Beatniks? Elvis? Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”? White and white-passing Americans appropriating African American slang is nothing new; what is new is skittishness to publish writing that does so. Surely, then, however unappealing you might find this hyper-contemporary style, his publisher deserves credit for taking on the political risk accompanying its use by a man not immediately identifiable as an oppressed racial minority (Conroe is, again, half Japanese).

Similarly, Fuccboi is admirably daring in its gestures toward political relevance: it’s easy to see why a publishing house would have thought this book relevant to today’s crisis of liberal masculinity. As our narrator puts it, “How tf was I privileged./I couldn’t do shit. Not only that, no one allowed me to show/admit I couldn’t.” He yearns to be “one of the good ones”; to seem “so woke and self-aware and self-deprecating about how dumb ideas of alpha-beta masculinity were”. Yet given the intense censoriousness of his “woke” circle, who accuse him of “getting lost in the men’s rights tunnel”, writing is his only “way to start tackling repression and shame” — to avoid becoming like a school shooter, or even Hitler.

Despite the title, he seems to be a pretty good guy (and pretty continent, too: only one act of fornication, in over 350 pages!). The worst things he does are listen to Joe Rogan, watch some “low-key red-pill videos”, very noncommittally question the reality of the gender pay gap, and equally casually say “bros over hoes”. The only slightly developed conservative thought is one regarding his relationship with his “ex bae”, where he reflects on her abortion: could anti-natalism perhaps be nihilistic? Could neoliberal feminism perhaps be careerist? Well, yeah. Ultimately, the “anti-woke” side of this book is so anodyne that one wonders whether Fuccboi, like the narrator’s pre-Fuccboi manuscript, may not have been a bit too edited-for-acceptability.

And yet I think this book is earnest. If anything, its issue is not a lack of authenticity, but a surfeit thereof. It will be obvious to those who finish it that Fuccboi is the genuine stream of consciousness of the author, spilled with little self-censorship onto the page. All of this is presented with what one hopes is an at least slightly satirical sense of self-important militancy, as when the narrator explodes to a perfectly polite stranger: “I’m tryna write for people who don’t read. Who don’t give a shit about books.”

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The problem, then, isn’t that Conroe’s parents were rich (which I have no cause to believe is the case), or that he didn’t, as Pink claims, “earn” his audience by publishing online before getting the big deal. The problem is that this book, like so many others in its milieu, values “authenticity” and “realness” over more venerable criteria of literary value (depth, characterisation, plot). Fuccboi does accurately represent the cretinous depravity of the Millennial generation, as well as the self-aggrandising cult of martyrdom — increasingly by self-diagnosed mental or physical illness — with which my generation shirks the responsibilities historically incumbent upon the civilised mind. But though Fuccboi is playful and lively, often funny and sometimes moving, and certainly of its time, it does not fully succeed as a work of art.

The current crop of young writers is less ambitious and less accomplished even than the minimalists and dirty realists — Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel — they are (likely unknowingly) imitating. In that earlier generation’s writing, the chaotic hedonism of the everyday attains emotional depth and significance; characters are complex and differentiated, and struggling to form complex and differentiated relationships with each other. They have more than names, characteristics, and the occasional impulse; they have feelings, thoughts, and sometimes, even, ideas.

But where there once was narrative that made life seem complicated, moving, and significant, indie literature today primarily comprises trite, essentially ecological descriptions of an already familiar scene, devoid of any coherence or meaning. Men write “stories” about men with their demographic characteristics doing cocaine/Adderall and displaying traits of narcissistic personality disorder; women write “stories” about women with their demographic characteristics doing ketamine/Klonopin and displaying traits of borderline personality disorder.

Both contingents write in a mode of blasé detachment that has become achingly stale. They are averse to or incapable of subjectivity and depth. What little allowance is made for human feeling is exclusively of pharmaceutical origin. These are not works of art; they are simply unremarkable descriptions of unremarkable lives.

In the glib generational determinism so popular today, one excuses this shallowness of character and failure to depict any interpersonal conflict as a “real” and “relatable” mirror of the “autism” of the young generation (indeed, this self-serving self-ID is so common that forums for the autistic and their caretakers use the acronym AA for “actually autistic”). However, these writers, and the thinly disguised stand-ins that populate their autofiction, are not autistic. They are merely permanent adolescents, incapable of empathising with any experience outside of their own and comfortably withdrawn into a profound egotism.

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Similarly, one excuses their unambitious and unintelligible style by reference to the influence of “online” life on young minds. However, the more accurate explanation for this monotonous sea of uninspired cliché is that these writers do not read anyone except their friends, nor do they aspire to much readership beyond them. And that’s probably for the best: readers deserve better than for 20-somethings functionally addicted to psychotropics to describe their existence in turgid, unorganised prose. The generalised inability to execute the most basic fundamentals of modern narrative is not a product of an autistic or digital zeitgeist; it is a product of lazy and illiterate writers.

Does Fuccboi fall under this umbrella? For all its flaws, Conroe resists the suicidal renunciation of many of his peers. Perhaps this, in part, is why his coevals have so passionately denounced his novel as cringe: Conroe unapologetically does care about literature, in his own guileless and heartwarming way. Perhaps it sounds silly for him to talk about “That Art Life”; perhaps it feels awkward and uninformative to read his emails with Sheila Heti. But at least, unlike so many today, he believes that writing could serve a function beyond identity work or courtship, and at least expresses interest in authors outside of his immediate coterie.

In that sense, he is the exception. Of course, this nihilism is reflective of the current mood of the world. But its consequences are more severe: if our authors are as distracted and superficial as anybody else, and our literature as unnourishing as TikToks or memes or tweets, why on earth would anyone read? Much like the humanities’ wan retreat to the “digital humanities”, this attempt to stay relevant — I’m not a normal book, I’m a cool book! — will only doom the medium to total obsolescence.

Men are slipping, by just about every marker of measurement. Deaths of despair are on the rise, suicide and homicide rates are up, and more men are delaying marriage and the establishment of a family. Twice as many men have addiction disorders as women. As Missouri Senator Josh Hawley declared at the National Conservatism Conference last month: “American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.”

According to Hawley, bad things are happening to men because bad things have happened to masculinity. “Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?” In his mind, it is not stagnant wages that cause men to feel demotivated at work. It’s not crippling student debt that convinces young men to drop out of university. It’s not the legacy of Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin fuelling their addictions. Taking his lead, perhaps, from popular masculinity influencers like Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, Hawley blames men’s problems on the fact that nobody respects manliness anymore. It’s the feminism, stupid.

Josh Hawley’s constituents in Missouri are among those hardest hit by these issues. The state has, for example, a raging meth problem that’s largely overlooked by the mainstream media. Hawley is responsible for many men like those I grew up with. He should be interested in their complex realities. But, like the self-help gurus he emulates, the senator mystifies. He might be able to accurately describe the state of affairs, but he misdirects men on both its roots — vaguely blaming “the liberal left” — and what to do about it. He wants a “a revival of strong and healthy manhood in America”, but isn’t clear about what that actually that means.

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Hawley’s tactics makes sense for the guru — after all, if they were able to solve your problems, you’d have less reason to buy their next book or listen to their next podcast. Some feminist grifters similarly tell women that their problems stem solely from “the patriarchy” or “misogyny” while also shrugging about what exactly to do about it. But this approach is particularly objectionable coming from a politician, especially a United States senator. Hawley is in the position to materially improve the lives of the men he is supposedly so concerned about, but he would rather obfuscate.

Hawley suggests, for example, that men are not marrying because, “The Left is telling America and its men, you’re evil.” But the real issue is class. In surveys of single people, the reasons given for delaying marriage (or partnership, for people whose goal is simply co-habitation) and childbearing are almost always economic. Marriage has become an elite institution, with highest rates among the people who are already best off — the white, the able-bodied, the most educated, the most financially prosperous.

In search of maximum support, Hawley always stays quiet about which “social issues” he’s blaming for the “deconstruction” of the traditional family. But reading between the lines, his finger is pointing at feminism and gay rights. Both criticise the concept of the nuclear family, for the way it makes the rights granted to couples and parents exclusive to those legally married. Hawley’s is a misdirection I recognise. He’s appealing to people like my uncle, who had difficulty finding stable work due to his lack of a formal education. His wife was a nurse, a traditionally underpaid, strenuous job. They blamed feminism for all social ills.

They played Rush Limbaugh almost continually; I remember first hearing the word “feminazi,” as a kid, in their house. They didn’t see feminism as a movement that fought for her rights as a working woman — which, given that by the Nineties the movement’s focus was more on lifestyle than class concerns, was as much feminism’s fault as their own. People in my town saw women and gays demanding the right to organise their own families in the ways they saw fit, and interpreted it as a threat to the integrity of their families.

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In the past that Hawley is harking back to, the man earned a living wage outside the home and the women raised children. You can see why he’s able to blame feminism for the end of an era. Women, the story goes, were radicalised by feminist thinkers who urged them to seek fulfilment through career and financial independence. This flood of new workers, competing with men for jobs, drove wages down — undermining the male breadwinner.

But the truth is, it was the inflation of the Seventies, and the danger of poverty it brought with it, that drove wages down and therefore women to work. Many mothers got jobs out of necessity, not choice, because their partners’ salaries were no longer enough to support a family. Perhaps the men who lost their breadwinner positions felt attacked, but the alternative was usually debt and destitution. And feminism was the result of this change, not its cause: entering the workforce, women found they had to advocate for fair pay and for the removal of obstacles to advancement.

Hawley ignores present-day economic conditions, too. The stresses that families have experienced during the pandemic — from the struggles of balancing working from home with parenting, to difficulties in getting adequate healthcare — don’t get a mention in his speeches. It’s the same tactic conservatives have often used: arguing for traditional family structures — and even incentivising them, through coercions like tax breaks and public condemnation — while refusing to listen to the practical reasons people are unable or unwilling to participate.

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The other institution that used to support masculinity until, according to Hawley, it was subject to “liberal attacks” is the military. In a 2019 speech, he condemned the progressive criticism of American military intervention, saying, “it also regarded America unilateral action as something to be avoided, even a danger,” as if this were a completely misguided belief.

It’s easier for the Right to romanticise the so-called manly virtues instilled by service — discipline, solidarity, and courage — than it is to admit that serving in wars has left thousands of men traumatised. And that many of those men have been abandoned by their governments to deal with that trauma on their own. More than one of my high school classmates has come out of the military only to find himself too damaged to work full time. Their patriotism and sense of duty — fine things, yes — have been manipulated so that they die not for their country, but for oil and capital.

Gays in the military, the feminist critique of male aggression, leftist anxieties about imperialism: all of these have been blamed for the marginalisation of military service as an integral part of the masculine identity. But the truth lies elsewhere. America’s failure to unflaggingly support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t a comment on the terrible lack of patriotism in our nation. It’s not a sign that our armed forces are going “soft,” as figures like Representative Dan Crenshaw have suggested in their statements railing against a “woke” military. It’s happened because we’ve seen through propaganda, and have stopped believing that young men should die because the Republican party created illegitimate allegations of atrocity and invaded a nation under false pretences.

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Blaming progressivism for men’s problems, then, is an attempt by the Right to let itself off the hook. But it won’t do much good. Ideas about masculinity change because what helps a person thrive in one era is going to hurt him in another. If women hadn’t entered the workforce, men and their children would have starved; if soldiers continued to be seen as a masculine ideal, there would’ve been continued support for forever wars.

But masculinity influencers are fixated on the past, on “tradition”. While Hawley mostly just waffles on about the old, more sensible ways of doing something, his one proposed real-world solution to the crisis in masculinity was to bring back manufacturing jobs. Every politician since the Eighties has promised and failed to bring back well-paid manufacturing work. Hawley must know it isn’t going to work. Globalisation makes it impossible. The world has moved on. We can’t go backwards, but the political Right has failed to find a way forwards.

And so it fixates on the “manliness” of men, as many politicians have in times of crisis. Hawley speaks like a YouTube influencer, but he’s part of a long tradition that includes everyone from President Roosevelt to, well, Benito Mussolini. The trouble is that, because masculinity is something that is defined and measured by action, there’s always a sense that the men are simply not doing enough. You can always do one more rep at the gym, kill one more enemy on the battlefield, work one more hour before you end your day. No wonder men are feeling overwhelmed.

Men should be allowed to set aside the burden of ruling the world, for the sake of everyone. Instead of fixating on turning men back into some patriarchal stereotype, the Right should be helping them get jobs and quit drugs. When I think of the limited or derailed lives of the men I was raised with, I don’t just want them to regress into the structures and lifestyles that drove their fathers and grandfathers to drink, or hit their kids, or work so much they were never around. I want something better for them.

But until recently, it seemed like we were all meant to aspire to the own-nothing-and-be-happy life. It’s a vision in which travel is easy, possessions are minimal (and delivered by drone), work happens remotely on a laptop, and different geographies aren’t homes so much as flavours to sample on a tasting menu.

Perhaps no voice expresses this more elegantly than the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, who this week wrote a plaintive defence of the frictionless life: “The myth of the man-child”.

The childless bachelor male, Ganesh claims, isn’t a perpetual adolescent. Far from it: this figure is cultivated, high-minded, “austere” and well-travelled, with “a decorum, almost a formality, born of aversion to the smells, stains and general boisterousness of a kid-filled home”. The most adult conversations, Ganesh reports, “are with the childless”.

This isn’t the first defence of the frictionless life he’s written. Shortly before the pandemic hit in earnest, he made “The climate case for childlessness”, in which he acknowledged that it’s not really about climate at all, but a desire to stay unencumbered. It’s about “a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony”. He and others like him did not, he says, “hate to ‘bring a child into this world’ […] so much as into our diaries”.

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And this is driven, he claims, by a desire for “maximum control” over life: “I know with some precision the list of cities in which I want to pass the rest of this decade, and in what sequence” — a plan that, he acknowledges, wouldn’t be workable with a spouse and children in tow. Ganesh realises this makes him selfish. But he sees this as “a bid for a more, not a less serious life”.

There was a time I would have nodded energetically along with this idea. I wanted, I would say, joy rather than contentment. (I’m pretty sure I recall claiming that the latter emotion merely ‘bovine’.) I spent my twenties living light, travelling lots, and resisting the accumulation of permanent possessions or obligations.

I could have bought a flat in London back when it was affordable; but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want a long-term relationship. I didn’t feel stable or coherent enough to tolerate the sheer consistency of commitment to just one other person.

As for the most serious such commitment there is — children — the prospect gave me recurring nightmares. In this I was an early adopter of a now-mainstream Western trend: to remain “child-free”. Many frame this in ecological terms, as in the recent COP26 protest by Population Matters aimed at encouraging people to breed less to save the earth. But a recent Pew poll reported the most common reason given by childless Americans for their decision is simply “I just don’t want to”.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Ganesh, who is thoughtful and clearly aware of the inverse correlation between freedom and intimacy. “Our horizons widen as our commitments narrow,” he observes in his defence of the ‘man-child’. Or, as he puts it differently in a column mourning the decline of expat city-states: “shallowness can be emancipating”.

Even as he defends the atomised hyper-liberal lifestyle, Ganesh is not insensible to what can be lost. He comments, for example, on the way pets “fill a hole” for many millennials in a way allotments, or religion, or volunteering might once have done: “Their dog or cat is the only endothermic mammal that some outwardly successful peers can count on for affection, or don’t have to walk on eggshells around.”

And in any case, even he is uncomfortably aware that his preferred way of life as a “middle class world citizen” may be on borrowed time. Climate anxiety, political instability, middle-class wage stagnation and, more recently, pandemic restrictions all militate against the democratic opening-up of the world to mass frictionlessness.

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But here’s the rub: swapping emancipation for shallowness is less enjoyable when you can’t afford the consumerist upside of minimal ties. One of the first columns I ever wrote here discussed the growing demographic who have embraced liberal atomisation, only to find changing economic conditions have denied them the disposable income that makes being unencumbered fun.

It’s all very well rejecting loyalties and obligations, if your earnings open the full range of upscale world-citizenship for your delectation. But Ganesh has little to offer those who lose this abundance. His best suggestion is that if you own nothing, having spent your twenties acquiring memories, you can always be happy by marrying into money in your thirties. It scarcely needs saying that while this might at a pinch be plausible advice for the kind of 20-something who reads the Financial Times, it’s unlikely to be of use more generally.

For the bottom tier of the new knowledge class is materially increasingly difficult to distinguish from gig-economy proles: both groups own nothing, and neither seems especially happy. Political unrest is rising and, as I’ve argued, the principal distinction between the Left-wing version of this discontent — antifa — and its alt-Right counterpart is cultural.

Some have belatedly realised they traded deep commitments for horizons that aren’t wide at all but shrinking rapidly. Happily not all of these disappointed would-be world citizens have responded by setting cities on fire. And it’s far from a foregone conclusion that the unlucky also-rans who got the atomisation but not the spending-money are all doomed to a future eating mealworm slurry in tiny one-person ‘pod’ homes.

Many are responding in far more constructive ways. For every doomer meme or creepy WEF video, subcultures are emerging in which people raised to be maximally individualist are trying to work out how to live together. In its most mundane form, this looks like a backlash against waiting till your thirties to have kids, or young parents writing about how to rebuild local community. In its more Bay Area-esque form, the social organiser Richard Bartlett is working on strategies for making ‘decentralised’ communities more capable of long-term interpersonal commitment, and thus less vulnerable to the well-documented tendency utopias have of imploding.

Or further out on the apocalyptic spectrum lie green land-based projects such as the Rizoma Field School, which is one of a growing network of families and groups attempting what adherents call ‘Doomer Optimism’: an approach to life based on the idea that things will probably get a lot worse, but that all is not lost if we can find ‘regenerative paths forward’. It seeks to develop sustainable forms of farming and community life, and also teach them to others. Many of these are a long way from the egalitarian ideals of the hippie commune era, and often explicitly opposed to the progressive and hyper-individualist ideas that drove such utopian ventures.

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Will any of this work? ‘Doomer optimist’, smallholder and sustainability academic Jason Snyder is acutely aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by the first generations after Peak Frictionlessness. “An uprooted generation will suffer all sorts of embarrassing contradictions as they try to relocalise,” he observed earlier this year. “They should do it anyway”.

I won’t bore you with how I came to reconsider my commitment to the frictionless life, beyond saying I’m glad I did so just about young enough to form a family before I got too old for that option to be open. But Snyder is right: adjusting to a life organised around the commitments I always feared hasn’t always been easy. It’s not uncommon for family members to get exasperated with me when I do something that implies I still think of myself as a solitary atom-self rather than a member of the team.

I don’t think I’m the only voluntary adopter of a more encumbered life to wrestle with this. The Bay Area technologist Venkatesh Rao captured something of the resulting ambivalence recently. In an increasingly politically unstable world, Rao acknowledged, the frictionless life may be less prudent than stockpiling supplies and working for a durable, secure home. Even so, he doesn’t seem wholly thrilled, tweeting nostalgically: “Remember when the ideal was a backpack, phone, passport, credit card?”. In contrast: “Owning lots of shit and supplies is a PITA [pain in the arse]”.

But what else can we do? Ganesh is right that narrower commitments mean wider horizons. But that’s assuming you can afford to enjoy those wider horizons. And for the rest, when emancipation is unaffordable, all you get is the shallowness.

In response, growing numbers are struggling, however clumsily, to rebuild all those commitments we were raised to discard. It might not work, but I refuse to be cynical towards anyone who’s trying. After all, some loves are worth sacrificing a measure of freedom for. And as the world grows stranger and more unstable, perhaps these are all we’ll be able to rely on.

It had been announced that Freddie was HIV positive — a sombre moment. The next day, I was curled up with a blanket watching the television. The news came on; Freddie was dead. Bohemian Rhapsody started to play. I’ve never been quite certain whether I cried so much because I had a fever of 102 degrees, or whether the floods would have come anyway. It meant a lot.

In 1991, HIV/AIDS had been part of our lives for 10 years. There had been plenty of deaths. Many of those deaths had happened in groups of people less likely to make themselves known to us — it was cutting a terrible swathe through Africa, for instance. Haemophiliacs and intravenous drug users who contracted HIV remained, for the most part, as statistics. The public face of the disease in the West — the individual and conspicuous cases — were gay men, and in particular those gay men who were already in the public eye.

Denholm Elliott, Ian Charleson, Tony Richardson. Kenny Everett, Derek Jarman, Sylvester, John Curry, Bruce Chatwin — the list of British deaths alone is long and sobering. It was Freddie’s, though, that made the biggest impact. He seemed so embedded in British life, from the unprecedented impact of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 to the unforgettable turn at the first Live Aid in 1985.

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He had achieved this status, too, despite being very unusual: unmistakably gay, Parsi, with a musical persona marrying debauched lechery, sustained tragic grandeur (Barcelona!) and extreme silliness. Everyone loved him. To us as gay men, he might have indicated that you didn’t need to fit in. You could be whatever you were, and that would make perfect sense. Perhaps that was an illusion. After all, Freddie never exactly came out.

Thirty years on, I start to wonder just how much HIV/AIDS shaped the lives of people like me. I was relatively lucky; by the time I was becoming sexually active, we knew about safe sex. Lucky, too, to live in a country where the advice from quite early on was to use condoms, rather than to adjust your morality or to attempt monogamy. Gay men born five or 10 years before me saw most of their friends die; I lost perhaps a dozen, no more.

All the same, we lived in a world where a fundamental truth was influencing all our actions, and it was this: You might die soon. Not many generations of people live through their twenties and thirties with this somewhere near the front of their minds. It has an inevitable effect on what you do. In recent years, friends in their twenties and thirties have sometimes asked me whether I ever thought of having children. It never crossed my mind as a reasonable possibility. It wasn’t until the late Nineties that I even gave way to a long temptation, and got a dog — I mean, dogs can easily live 15 years. It might turn out not to be fair.

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Looking back, there might have been other consequences to this looming terror. One of them might have been a general state of mind that can only be summed up as “Fuck it”. You might as well do what you had in mind. Shame more or less disappeared as a state of mind. I knew a lot of straight literary people who anguished and writhed and wasted time over the question of whether they should or should not write a novel, taking it for granted that they’d live another 60 years. Fuck it. I wrote one, then another, then another. People younger than me were dying of the virus, after all.

There were other consequences of that fuck-it mentality. Gay society took on a dangerous and reckless flavour, with the first all-night clubs like Trade — there was one point in the Nineties where we worked out that you could go to one dance club after another without a break between 10pm on a Friday to lunchtime on Monday. Some queens really did it. The mood of outrageous bad taste was universal. One of Derek Jarman’s last paintings was called Arse-Injected Death Syndrome. “Bad news,” a dear friend said to me once. “I’ve got the fucking Death Clap.” And burst out laughing.

Maybe, too, the sense that you might be dead in five years brought people together, to disagree and argue and yell, but with a sense that your different opinions were all in the same bundle. A lot of my generation find it pretty weird that speakers for what is now called the LGBTQI community seem obsessed with determining who can be admitted to their ranks, or excluded. It wouldn’t have seemed a very pressing question in the Eighties and Nineties, and we haven’t forgotten how important the support of lesbians was to gay men during the crisis. It went a long way towards unifying a community.

By the turn of the century, things were changing. The new century went on; we started to hear the words “living with HIV” as an accurate description, and not as a hopeful euphemism. The habit of hedonism remained; the urgency of protest receded. Gay Pride renamed itself as Mardi Gras; it turned into a parade of LGBT-supporting businesses, anybody gay and lesbian without an official wristband confined behind barriers.

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We might, after all, live as long as anyone else, and people started to marry, to adopt children, to stay in boring jobs, to talk about pensions and property. I got married to my boyfriend; I paid off my mortgage; we got a small Schnauzer called Greta, who is still going to be here in 2035, as I hope to be. The friend of mine who told me he had “the fucking Death Clap” is, for all purposes, perfectly healthy.

Freddie goes on, not as a martyr, but as a marvellous, unique presence who did something never seen before and never really attempted since. Quite a lot of him has since been toned down; when the jukebox musical We Will Rock You opened, it was striking that it turned Freddie’s music into the backdrop to a straight romance between a couple of kids. Freddie was outrageous in a way that might not be permitted now; a six-minute pop song with casual incorporations of the Islamic imprecation “Bismillah”; the Tom of Finland image with moustache and crotch-clinging trousers; the Live Aid performance, including the borderline sexual harassment, live, of the onstage cameraman.

His outrageousness was extinguished by a disease, but the presence of that disease fed and spread something of the same outrageousness: that desire to say “Fuck it” from time to time. I think any gay person who lived through the ten years between the discovery of HIV/Aids and Freddie Mercury’s death — lived though it as a sexual being — will always have been shaped by it. Maybe always set slightly apart from what followed, too. If they lived.

The progressive world has a long and ignoble history of downplaying sexual misconduct for the sake of “the cause”. One such incident nearly tore the Socialist Workers’ Party apart in 2013, long before #MeToo, when a senior party member was accused of rape.

The female accuser didn’t go to the police, because she believed that the party’s hostility to the thin blue line meant involving them would result in her expulsion from the party. Instead, the SWP handled the matter internally — and she was told the accused was suspended from the party and told him to read up on feminism.

A glance at the track record of prominent male feminists, though, suggests that this may not have helped. Being an outspoken male supporter of gender equality is no shield against accusations of improper behaviour.

Take, for example, former GQ political editor Rupert Myers, who berated men’s rights activists as “cave-dwelling idiots” for denying the existence of “rape culture”. Being a self-styled feminist was no defence against a social media mobbing, though. When allegations circulated online at the height of #MeToo about Myers’s sexual behaviour, prompting a Twitter pile-on, Myers ended up being fired by the magazine.

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Nor is he the only one: other male feminist journalists who faced #MeToo allegations included Sam Kriss and Vice’s Michael Hafford. Even the Ground Zero of #MeToo himself, Harvey Weinstein, complained in 2019 about how the accusations against him have “eviscerated” his pioneering work in gender equality.

This isn’t a purely #MeToo phenomenon either. During the GamerGate controversy of 2014, a number of male journalists spoke out in defence of women — more than 15 of whom have since been accused of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment and rape to consuming child pornography.

My aim here isn’t to re-litigate the rights and wrongs of every alleged misplaced hand, or ill-judged joke, so much as to wonder at this startling volume of “male feminists” at least alleged to be on the pervy side. Surely a commitment to feminism would have the opposite effect. Why, then, so many self-identified male feminists dogged by rumours of sexual misconduct?

Men’s rights activists might argue that in a climate where calls to “believe women” come thick and fast, even the most ambiguous situation can easily be weaponised to destroy a man’s career. Men accused of impropriety have claimed that the real motivation was politics — or simply a bad breakup.

To this the feminists might retort, following Mandy Rice-Davies, that they would say that, wouldn’t they. Everyone wants to believe the best about themselves, something that leads to what social psychology calls “moral licensing”. This concept argues that people justify ethically dodgy behaviour by referring to a past track record of virtue.

For example, one Stanford study showed that people who loudly proclaim anti-racist views are often, in practice, more racist than average. Are men who identify as feminist more prone to sexual misbehaviour because they imagine their political beliefs put them beyond reproach?

A radical feminist might reply, though, that imagining it’s merely self-deception is to misunderstand what feminism is. In this view, since patriarchy arranges men hierarchically over women, it’s impossible by definition for a male to be a feminist. Regardless of a man’s intentions, as long as patriarchy exists he’ll always be an oppressor; he will inevitably end up imposing his own patriarchal presumptions — and sometimes sexual attentions — when they’re not wanted.

But part of the difficulty is precisely in determining where sexual attentions might be wanted. There are, of course, clear-cut and inexcusable cases of rape and sexual assault. But some of the cases above provoked intense controversy precisely because the circumstances of the accusation were highly subject to (inevitably partisan) interpretation.

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And one under-discussed fact that complicates these controversies is that women do not, under every single circumstance, categorically hate men being sexually forward. In ‘BDSM’ circles, for example, numerous studies have shown that women are significantly more likely than men to fantasise about being dominated.

And enjoying male assertiveness isn’t just a kink among the whips-and-chains brigade. One study showed that 93% of women prefer to be asked out, rather than asking. Once in a relationship, too, a lack of male sexual initiative often makes women unhappy. Clinical psychologist Marianne Brandon, for example, describes how frequently female patients express frustration with male sexual partners who have learned that “to show respect to their female partners” they must “avoid at all costs any behaviour in the bedroom that may be regarded as aggressive or dominant”. In other words, male sexual initiative is often quite popular with women.

But not always. The same action might come across as deliciously confident in one context, but repulsively creepy in another. And the sheer volume of #MeToo accusations suggests something has gone very wrong how men and women assess which is which.

The institutional takeaway from #MeToo seems to have been that the solution to such unhappy encounters is more feminism, more consent and more bureaucracy for punishing people who get the context wrong. But if in fact women quite like at least a measure of male sexual initiative, provided it’s in the right context, then we may need not less aggression but better guidelines on context.

And here we face the troubling possibility that all these handsy male feminists weren’t overly forward because they were doing liberal feminism wrong, but because they took its lessons too literally.

For core among these lessons is the idea that men and women are basically the same apart from our dangly bits. As the quintessential liberal pop-feminist (and UN feminist advocate) actress Emma Watson put it: feminism is “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” It is, Watson tells us, “about giving women choice […] It’s about freedom. It’s about liberation. It’s about equality.”

And yet however loudly we bang the drum for equality, there remain some clear and well-documented differences between the sexes. Perhaps, as this UN Women training booklet does, this is a consequence of sexist male socialisation. But a simpler explanation is that humans are, while capable of rationality, also evolved animals — and that this translates to some normative differences in attitude and behaviour. For example, males commit 90% of all sexual assaults, and almost all violent crime.

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Of course, suggesting male aggression (including sexual aggression) may have some basis in evolution isn’t to argue it’s always good. But it is to argue that education is unlikely to get rid of it entirely. And if this is true, the core reason there are so many male feminist sex pests may simply be because they’re male. No amount of feminist “education” will alter this basic fact — even if women wanted to, which (at least according to Dr Marianne Brandon) is by no means universally the case.

If anything, sending a lechy male feminist off to read liberal feminism, like the SWP did, may make matters worse — for doing so will entrench the belief that differences between the sexes are pure social constructs. And a man who’s signed up to this worldview has no reason to imagine his sexual desires differ in any way from those of a woman he finds attractive. We are, he might point out, totally over the sexist stereotypes of women as pure vestal virgins — aren’t we?

This belief that men and women are essentially the same leaves both sexes chronically at risk of misunderstanding human sexuality. A measure of male sexual aggression is neither entirely a social construct nor wholly curable via education. It has a biological substrate. And it’s not even undesirable to women, provided it’s in the right context. But managing it takes a measure of realism, compromise and — sometimes — a willingness to adopt social norms that treat the sexes differently.

This is anathema to the liberal feminist doctrine of sameness, a worldview so committed to ignoring any biological element to sex differences it’s bound to leave men ill-equipped to recognise and restrain their own sexual aggression. And on the other side, this doctrine of sameness leaves women shorn of social strategies for evading that aggression, leading to the (anecdotally common) phenomenon of women consenting to unwanted sex largely out of politeness. And it’s somewhere in this murky territory, I suspect, that many of the most controversial accusations of impropriety occur.

Then both sexes, wounded and perplexed as to what has gone wrong on the battlefield of intimacy, turn to supposedly neutral but in fact highly politicised procedures and pseudo-legal means of redress, in the hope that someone can adjudicate on who was right and who wrong. No one ever stops to wonder if part of the problem is that everyone is working off faulty assumptions.

What is to be done? At least if internet gossip is to be believed, teaching men to be feminists isn’t doing the trick. But contra received opinion, we may not help matters either by trying to demolish sexist stereotypes about male and female sexuality. Instead, if we’re to navigate our differences honestly in the interests of intimacy, we may need a feminist project to resurrect them.

Since signing on with a mainstream publisher in 2012, she’s sold over 150 million copies of her books worldwide. Last week, she released Freed, the final part of a retelling of the original Fifty Shades novels from the male love interest’s perspective. Again, James is following Meyer here, whose Midnight Sun (leaked in 2008 though not officially published until 2020) is the masculine take on the Twilight story.

Following, and, as usual, going further. Where Meyer contented herself with one volume of perspective-shifting, James has gone for a do-over on all three of hers; and where Meyer’s books sustained an atmosphere of age-appropriate repression and Mormon-appropriate sexual repulsion (Meyer is LDS), James went the whole hog-tied way into BDSM. James took the characters and relationships from Twilight, and rewrote the story to suit herself. “All my fantasies in there, and that’s it,” she said in 2012.

Edward Cullen still met Bella Swan, only now he wasn’t a 103-year-old vampire, and she wasn’t a depressed high-school virgin with a maddening tendency to bleed. He became an emotionally repressed (and very handsome) billionaire; she became a shy, klutzy (but beautiful!) student. In Twilight, Bella’s love helps Edward learn to control his instinct to suck her like a Capri-Sun; in Master of the Universe, Bella teaches Edward that there’s more to sex than trussing a woman up with cable ties and lovelessly banging her senseless.

Eventually Edward was renamed “Christian Grey” and Bella turned into “Anastasia Steele”; the whole thing was reworked and presented as an original fiction, and the cultural phenomenon we all know and masturbate to/hold in contempt was born. And there is so much contempt for James. Deriding her is as much of a compulsion for large chunks of the public as paddling Ana’s pert behind is for Christian. Feminists said she glorified abuse; BDSM-ers said she made BDSM look bad; conservatives said she was corrupting public decency; the sneery tag “mommy porn” was invented to describe her work.

And everyone, but everyone, said she couldn’t write. “In fact, if I were a member of the Christian Right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena… is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level,” wrote Katie Roiphe in a 2012 article for Newsweek asking why the collective female libido seemed to have achieved a consensus around submission.

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Part of the strangeness of the reaction to Fifty Shades — both the passion of its fans, and the dismay of its detractors — is that it’s nothing very new, and nor would James ever pretend it was. As much as it owes to Twilight, and to the collaborative inventions of fanfiction, it’s also part of the grand tradition of the bonkbuster, which dates back to the 1970s. And the bonkbuster has always loved a bad boy: the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black, of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, would make no better of a boyfriend than Christian Grey.

But bonkbusters also tended to celebrate variety and adventure for their heroines, not only sexually but professionally. Anastasia Steele is a retreat from that: a one-man woman whose eventual career is a gift of her wealthy husband (he buys a publisher for her run) and who gives up her surname when she marries him. After all the benefits of second-wave feminism, it seemed like what straight women really wanted was not to have it all but to give it all up; and they wanted it enough to buy James’s fantasies not just once but twice over.

Retelling might, in fact, be too strong a word for what James has done in her Christian-narrated novels. Comparisons of Master of the Universe and Fifty Shades suggest the shift from one to the other was not that extensive after all (Master of the Universe has been almost totally erased from the internet now); similarly, when you look at the original trilogy and the new one side-by-side, there’s often very little difference to detect.

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For example, the first time Christian gets Ana off, he does it by playing with her breasts in a “slow, sensual assault”. This continues until her “whole body sings with sweet agony”, at which point she tells us: “He kisses me, deeply, his tongue in my mouth absorbing my cries.” From his perspective, this is a “lascivious assault”, which ends when “I move quickly to kiss her, capturing her cries in my mouth.”

Where we do get new information from the Grey version, it’s mostly reassuring confirmation that he was always secretly concerned about Anastasia’s consent (take that, feminists worried about BDSM/BDSMers worried about being confused with rapists!), and childhood memories of his mother that help to explain his emotional remoteness. It’s not exactly Rashomon, but then, being Rashomon would be very much against the spirit of Fifty Shades. Nobody came here for the fracturing of reality into multiple perspectives, thank you very much.

The grand fantasy of Fifty Shades isn’t really the spanking or the restraints or any of the other delightful perversions that Christian introduces Ana to. It’s that a woman could know a (billionaire, handsome) man completely and, by loving him, redeem him. Through all the business in the Red Room of Pain, Ana achieves the ultimate in vanilla: straight, monogamous intimacy. To that end, nothing could be hotter than the revelation that Christian and Ana were having almost the exact same subjective experiences all along.

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I don’t share a lot of the moral concerns about Fifty Shades. Yes, much of what occurs between Christian and Ana would be deeply alarming if it happened in a real relationship, but prissy fussing about how it misrepresents consent overlooks the fact that this is happening in a fiction. People who enjoy submission are also enjoying a fiction: it’s necessary to believe in your own resistance in order to extract the pleasure of being possessed.

So however careless Christian appears to be about Ana’s boundaries, readers know that she ultimately wants to be totally his; and they know also that her surrender becomes a way of mastering him. Even writing as infelicitous as James’s has a huge advantage over visual pornography when it comes to sex, in that it can show us its characters from the inside, and fulfil the part of the fantasy which is about feeling rather than simply doing (or being done to). If there’s danger in Fifty Shades, it’s not the sex so much as the romance.

To love someone is always to be slightly at the mercy of the unknowability of the other. Ana is able to overcome that with what the rewrite trilogy now confirms is perfect understanding. But in the real world, there is much that women are never going to comprehend about the men they love, however much they prostrate themselves in the effort — and much that men never make any effort to understand about the women who love them. More than horsewhips and hemp ropes, it’s that gulf of sympathy that leaves real-life people hurt.

Obviously, you don’t think this is the only problem in the world, and you don’t think that all of humanity’s resources and ingenuity should be dedicated to finding ways of getting lynx and wolves released into north-west Scotland; we should still worry about carbon emissions and so on. But you think some of humanity’s resources and ingenuity should be devoted to it. Say you think that 0.01% of society’s time and effort should be spent thinking about lynx, instead of none at all.

But you’re only one person, representing one 70-millionth of the British population. Shifting society’s behaviour even by that small amount means convincing thousands of people to agree with you. You would need to dedicate all of your time, all of your effort, if you are to have any chance whatsoever of moving the dial even a little bit. 

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So you end up looking obsessive and weird – “why are you shouting about lynx all the time? Don’t you know there are other problems in the world?” – even if you’re completely right that the lynx-shortage is a bad thing. Scott Alexander calls this the “fallacy of reversed moderation”. The lynx-advocate might even be tempted to overstate the scale of the problem and the efficacy of the solution: “Deer overpopulation is causing children’s brains to shrink; only introducing lynx can restore normal-sized cortices to our nation’s young!”

This is, I think, part of what is going on in Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperilling the Future of the Human Race, by Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino.

In 2017, Swan, along with other scientists, published a meta-analysis, an aggregation of existing research. It said that since 1973, the average sperm count among men in Western countries had fallen by 59%, and by somewhat less in the developing world. It seems to have been a well-carried-out study, and it caused quite a stir.

The question, of course, is what caused (or is causing?) this decline. Swan and her co-authors suggested that it is, in large part, the modern chemical industry, and in particular a family of products called “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” (EDCs), which interfere with hormonal processes in the body, especially those involved with development and reproduction. One group of EDCs found in plastics, known as phthalates, are the particular enemy. They get into the water system, they’re in our takeaway containers, they’re in our cosmetics, and they’re damaging our precious bodily fluids. 

Count Down is essentially the book of that study. It expands on the problem, to talk about fertility in general, not just sperm counts; it talks about other causes, like smoking and obesity; and it offers individual advice and policy recommendations for how to ameliorate it. 

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All of which probably sounds pretty sensible. Swan thinks we have a growing fertility problem; she thinks she has identified the main cause; and she wants to help solve it.

But the book does not seem sensible. Because for Swan, everything causes fertility problems, not just phthalates. Sugar, beef, cycling, stress, watching TV, doing too much exercise, doing too little, eating the wrong diet; you can barely get out of bed in the morning without sabotaging your chance of having a baby. Undergoing stress and trauma will not only make you less fertile, they’ll affect your children’s fertility (should you remain capable of having them). You ought to “ban plastic from your microwave” and throw out your non-stick pans because they’re killing your sperm. I half expected her to say we ought to wear ray-shielded underpants.

And phthalates and other EDCs don’t just damage your chance of having a baby – they seem to be the cause of everything wrong in the world. Declining bird and fish populations. Abnormal development in alligators and sea snails. Reproductive failure in dolphins and grey seals. The apparent worldwide decline in insect populations is, for Swan, the fault of chemical pollution. She even suggests that the growth in intersex conditions and perhaps the rise of gender dysphoria, and even changes in gender identity, could be because of EDCs (and taking paracetamol in pregnancy!). She does say, in what feels a bit like an act of arse-covering, that it has led us to become more open-minded towards gender expression, which is a “silver lining”.

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What’s more, she hints, it’s causing the worldwide slowdown in human reproduction. The world’s “fertility rate” has dropped, she says; halved, in fact. And “the average twenty-something Danish woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at thirty-five”.

And — and this is the big one — this could literally drive humans extinct. Our sperm could wither and die; we will become unable to have children. She refers several times to Children of Men and The Handmaid’s Tale, even saying that modern gestational surrogacy is a “consensual version of the [Handmaid] scenario”. (I feel like the non-consensual nature of the Handmaid scenario was fairly central to the story, whatever your opinions about surrogacy, but that’s by the bye.)

I can’t confirm all these different claims[1. Not least because there aren’t any footnotes, just a list of references for each chapter, which makes it bloody hard to check. Authors, please use footnotes, they don’t “break up the flow” or anything and it means pedants like me can have a look at your sources.], and perhaps many of them are entirely true; it is hardly as though chemical pollution hasn’t caused many environmental catastrophes in the past. Leaded petrol and asbestos are two obvious candidates that took decades to be fixed. And a few quick glances do suggest that there is something real here: EDCs seem to be implicated in the collapse of bald eagle populations, and in an apparent rise in intersex conditions, for instance.

But some parts seem on shakier ground. As it happens I’ve been speaking to entomologists recently for some other work. They thought that insect populations probably were declining (although the data was shaky), some much more than others; and they thought that pesticide pollution was probably a driver, and many pesticides are indeed EDCs. But they also mentioned climate change, eutrophication, light pollution, invasive species, habitat loss. Swan doesn’t outright say that EDCs are the main cause of insect loss (or of declining seabird populations), but she certainly implies it.

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There’s also the fact that, as she says, smoking in pregnancy seems to be a huge cause of infertility in male offspring, but expectant mothers smoke much less now than they did even 15 years ago and that is dropping all the time. You’d hope that would go a long way to offsetting environmental influences.

And her take on the human fertility issue just seems entirely backwards to me. The Danish woman being less fertile than her grandmother sounds dreadful, until you realise that fertility is literally measured by how many children you have. The Danish study found that 20-somethings in the 2000s have fewer children than 35-year-olds in the early 1900s. But that’s because Danish women, like women almost everywhere in the world and especially the developed West, are just having fewer children and having them later. The study had nothing to say about whether these women (or their partners) were less capable of having children.

In fact, the decline in total fertility rate – that is, the number of children born per woman — has indeed been going down worldwide; from more than five in 1950 to less than 2.5 last year. But usually I see that portrayed as a good thing. As Swan acknowledges, it correlates with, and is normally said to be partly driven by, female education: the more years of schooling women get in a country, the fewer children the average woman has. 

Fertility also correlates with child mortality: as the number of children dying in childhood goes down, so does the number of children born. There’s also the fact that women still tend to have more, rather than fewer, children than they would ideally like (although I should admit that the data all comes from poorer countries, which have more children and which are less affected by sperm-count decline). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a fertility problem, but it does suggest it’s hardly time to start making comparisons with Children of Men.

Swan says that this reduction in global birth rates will lead to a “demographic crisis”, and she’s probably right: having lots of old people and fewer young, working people will make it harder to support pension schemes, raise taxes, and so on. But unless you want to keep growing the population forever, you’re going to have to go through it at some point. More important, whether it’s good or bad, I don’t think you can reasonably blame it on phthalates or EDCs. You could easily convince me that there is a growing problem of infertility in the developed world, but I doubt it’s the main cause of declining family size, or that it’s mainly caused by EDCs, given the tendency to have children later.

Most important, though, it seems bizarre to suggest that this is going to lead to human extinction. This isn’t me over-interpreting Swan: she really drums it home. Scientists suggest, she says, that fertility decline “could threaten the survival of the human race”; she quotes a researcher saying it is “possible” it could lead to “extinction of the human species”. Her last chapter ends with the phrase “we and other species could end up marching toward the brink of extinction”.

And she says that humanity should be considered an “endangered species”, by the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s definition of the term: “Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered, only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three.” (Those three criteria are destruction of habitat, inadequate regulatory mechanisms, and man-made factors affecting our existence.)

But there are at least 7.7 billion of us. Our population has increased by more than 10% in the 10 years since I wrote this. You can argue about whether or not we’re damaging our habitat or inadequately regulating ourselves, but surely the key criterion for whether a species is endangered must be that there aren’t very many of them.

Sure, Swan might reply, but the main reason the population is still going up is because we’re living longer. If the world fertility rate drops below replacement, then the population will decline, and eventually we’ll run out of people.

But that is, still, obviously nonsense. We’ve all learned about R in the last year. Of a virus, it’s the average number of new infections that one infected person will cause. If R>1, exponential growth and epidemic; if R<1, disease dies away. But it can apply to anything that reproduces itself: yawns, computer viruses, internet memes. Or humans.

A fertility rate of 2 would be an R of 1 (two people creating two new people), if we ignore deaths in childhood for now. So if the world’s fertility rate dropped below 2, the population of the world will indeed decline, just as the virus does.

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But there are different strains of the virus, some of them more infectious — with a higher R — than others. They spread more easily. So the more infectious ones become more common in the population, and even if the “average” virus has an R below 1, it only takes one strain with an R above 1 to eventually become the dominant version and then cause a new wave of the epidemic.

Similarly, there are different fertility rates around the world. Even if R is below one, on average, worldwide, some countries will have higher rates of reproduction. Unless the phthalates are literally rendering us all infertile, which so far they don’t seem to be doing, then humans will continue to reproduce, and those human groups which have the most children will end up being the most common. The future is Amish!

(Plus, if we really do get a Children of Men situation, total global infertility, then efforts to create viable gametes from somatic cells will be increased pretty damn quick; they’re almost there now. We may go extinct some day, but it won’t be fertility loss that does it.)

This hyperventilating about human extinction, and rolling everything bad into a ball labelled “fertility and phthalates”, makes no sense if you think Swan (a respected epidemiologist) is trying to give a dispassionate assessment of fertility issues. But she’s not. This is a polemic. Swan thinks the world doesn’t pay enough attention to the problems of EDC-influenced fertility loss and environmental damage: so she’s upping the stakes as much as she can, making it as big a deal as she can, trying to shift the dial a little bit. The fallacy of reversed moderation declares that you can only do so by dedicating your whole being to the problem (and perhaps overstating it here and there) and looking like a crank.

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In a way, I hope she’s right, and that phthalates and other EDCs really are as big a problem as she says. If they are, then — just as we did with leaded petrol, asbestos and CFCs — it is possible that we could simply ban them, find some non-harmful replacement, and watch our alligator, dolphin and sperm populations spring back (although she does point out that the chemical industry, when some harmful chemical is banned, often replaces it with some not-banned but equally harmful equivalent). If all these problems are actually caused a huge, interwoven web of habitat loss, overfishing, air pollution, climate change, diet, and EDCs, then while getting rid of EDCs will help, we’ll still be staring at a severely depleted, damaged world with a lot of complicated problems to fix.

And in one important sense, her book is a success. I’m not going to follow all the advice in her book and replace my shower curtain or my pans — the convenience of non-stick pans seem to me to be worth it for a presumably small risk of reduced fertility (if it weren’t small, we’d have noticed it).

But I am going to turn the little dial in my head, the one labelled “Importance of endocrine-disrupting chemicals”. She has convinced me that they may be a real problem, and I hope someone more dispassionate and less polemical takes a long look at the risks (and benefits) to humanity of using them, and decides whether and where they are worth it. I’m still going to use Tupperware in the microwave, though. 

But masculinity takes its toll on men. Most glaringly, there’s the suicide rate. In his new book You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed to Be: Into the Chaos of Modern Masculinity, author Martin Robinson describes this as “an orange flare in the night sky, illuminating a heaving ocean of self-harm, addiction, eating disorders, violence and anti-social behaviour”. In England and Wales, three quarters of those who died by suicide in 2019 were male — a trend which has been consistent since the mid-1990s. That’s a horrifying 4,303 men, in just one year.

And there’s more. Robinson lists the stats: “95% of prisoners are male, 86% of homeless people, 73% of deaths from drug misuse.” Some of these figures are not quite as clear cut as suggested, thanks to a data gap that consistently under-measures women (female homelessness, for example, is often hidden in official figures). But nevertheless it’s true that some men pay a hell of a price for masculinity.

Yet the informal man code requires that men accept this suffering without complaint. Robert Webb put the predicament vividly in his own memoir-slash-dissection-of-manhood, How Not to Be a Boy: “if you want a vision of masculinity,” he wrote, “imagine Dr Frankenstein being constantly bum-raped by his own monster while shouting, ‘I’m fine, everyone! I’m absolutely fine!’”

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Robinson is neither imprisoned, nor homeless, nor addicted (although he does make a point of mentioning just how many of his encounters over the course of reporting this book took place drunk, wasted or straight-up pissed; the use of booze as a solvent for male reticence is one trope of masculinity that isn’t getting reassessed here). He lives with his partner and their two children, and until 2016, he was a magazine journalist; in 2018, he launched the website The Book of Man, with a self-defined brief to “open up the possibilities by questioning masculinity”. You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed To Be is the book-form version of that mission.

Whose benefit is all this questioning for, though? Robinson notes that the audience at one of his many “events encouraging men to talk” is “as ever” made up of almost completely women. Most reviewers of Webb’s book were female, and here I am, female also, writing about Robinson’s. Women, it seems, feel compelled to understand men — to do the emotional picking-up. And while there is certainly a male market for introspection, the success of Jordan Peterson shows that there’s an even bigger one for hearing that maleness has been cruelly traduced.

Peterson tells men that their problems lie, not with masculinity itself, but with a society that fails to value masculinity properly. For Robinson, masculinity is the problem. He sets up the ideal of manhood in his chapter headings — “in control”, “one of the lads”, “hard”, “ripped”, “straight”, “the breadwinner” — and then tries to understand why aspiring to this role hasn’t made him happy. His explorations take him to men’s groups, to a cage fight and to a drag queen who paints him up in full femme mode (Robinson is disappointed to discover that this does not unleash an inner reservoir of campy wit).

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Robinson is interested in how gender stereotypes make men unhappy. He is less curious about what they do to women. We’re halfway through the book before he mentions the problem of male violence against women, and three quarters before the wage gap comes up. A discussion of domestic abuse focuses on men and boys as unrecognised sufferers, but elides the fact that, while female perpetrators do exist, most perpetrators are men whatever the sex of their victims.

One of feminism’s perpetual battles is the insistence that to address violence, we must “name the agent”. That means rejecting passive constructions like “woman killed”, which suggest some inevitable and impersonal force at play, and instead use formulations such as “man kills woman”, identifying both the human source of the violence and the fact that committing it is a voluntary act. When Robinson baulks at naming the agent, it’s hard to resist the suspicion that his interest is less in solving the problems masculinity causes, and more in repositioning men as an afflicted class deserving of sympathy.

It’s right to sympathise with men, as it’s right to sympathise with anyone, but doing so is not a radical reframing of gender politics. It is usual for male subjectivity to take centre stage (the philosopher Kate Manne calls this phenomenon “himpathy”). The flow of feeling from women to men is one of the mass transfers of resources ensured by men’s social dominance, and if Robinson had read much feminism, he would perhaps have come across that concept.

In fact, he seems hardly to have engaged with feminism at all — there are cursory mentions of de Beauvoir and Butler, but that’s as far as it goes. And this is very strange, because masculinity and femininity exist in relation to each other. When feminists address the state of women, they write about men because it would be impossible not to. Yet women barely figure in Robinson’s book, which suggests he is less willing to leave the strictures of masculinity than might be hoped.

When it comes to the vexed issue of gender identity which has lately ripped feminism in two, he has a splendid obliviousness to the detail that I can only envy. At one excruciating point he announces that “the trans community should be worshipped as the ultimate humans, for showing the rest of us how it’s done”. This is embarrassing for everyone, including trans people, who surely do not want the burden of sainthood.

The most curious thing about gender is that while its outward forms can be flexible, its function rarely is. There have been many versions of being a man, ranging across history and geography; but however masculinities differ, they share the property of dominance over femininity, and that dominance ensures the flow of goods (power, property, reproductive labour, sex, compassion) from women to men.

Suggested reading

How toxic masculinity is tied to terrorism

By Joan Smith

If men want to stop the Frankenstein of masculinity from committing its daily violations, they need to start by admitting that this monster was made for a reason. In 1980, philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards put the matter with perfect clarity in her book The Sceptical Feminist:

“What, for instance, must be happening if an employer passes over a competent woman in favour of a less competent man? It means that the job will be less well done, and therefore (to put it schematically) that he will be losing money by appointing the man. Why should he do that? He is actually willing to pay for something or other, and it is hard to see what it could possibly be other than the simple cause of male supremacy.”

Some men are paying a hell of a price for masculinity. That price is the cost of dominance. (Of course, the class system and racism help to ensure those prices aren’t borne evenly.) Robinson says towards the end that men must “cede power for parity with others”, and deserves credit for that; he’d deserve more credit if he outlined exactly how that might happen.

Advocates for women’s rights have always known that attaining justice for their sex meant giving up the illusory securities of feminine subordination. Men who want to break the constraints of masculinity similarly have to embrace the losses, as well as the gains. Books like Robinson’s will be half-hearted so long as they are only seeking a version of masculinity with the sharp edges worn off. Men can have their new version of manhood: it starts, not with a glorious expression of pent-up emotion, but with cleaning their own bathrooms.

Surely that’s enough information. But, no. “Would you like to try our new Guatemalan blend?” I decline, signalling growing irritation. “Would you like a pastry with that…” A list of various croissants and muffins follows. My mood darkens further. All I want is a bloody coffee.

Choice is the bane of modern life. “Existence precedes essence”, preached the existentialists. What they meant was that who we are is not given at birth, but is constructed by the series of choices we make about who we want to be. “Become who you are”, said Nietzsche some decades before.

From this perspective, life is a never ending succession of choices, a constant work-in-progress of self-definition. We are the authors of our own identity. Mini gods of self-creation. Sartre liked to sit in coffee houses, musing on the meaning of life. But surely even he could not have reckoned with the ubiquity of choice in a consumerist society. I fancy that he, too, would have been broken by the ever-present demand to decide for oneself. As I sip my coffee, a semblance of calm begins to return. Existentialism is too heavy a burden. No more questions, please. I can’t take it any more. I don’t want to be endlessly responsible for me. I want someone else to shoulder the burden on my behalf.

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How Africa is converting China

By Christopher Rhodes

I was wrestling with this as I read the Children’s Commissioner’s comments about the mental health of our children. There has been a sharp rise recently in the number of children self-harming. There has also been a significant rise over the past few years in the number of children seeking help from psychiatrists. Why are our kids so unhappy? Various answers have been touted. The use of social media is an obvious one. So, too, is the collapse of community life. Both of these are important.

But I also suspect that the way we have come to treat children as mini-consumers, little choice-centres, also has something to do with it as well. For nowhere is this choice-inducing anxiety more toxic than in childhood. It used to be that childhood operated under instruction. For the child, life was a series of givens. And this functioned as a sort of emotional security. But now that we are inducting our children into this culture of choice at an ever-earlier age, we deprive them of the necessary scaffolding of care, love and support.

It’s a big claim, I know. But it is worth reminding ourselves of an important aspect of our culture of choice: that it absolves people of a responsibility of care towards others. To put it another way, our culture of choice contains this message: I am not responsible for you because you are responsible for you. Are you fat? That’s your choice. Smoke? Your choice. In debt? Your decisions have got you into trouble. It’s all on you.

It is one thing to take this attitude towards adults. But our culture is so saturated with this culture of choice that it has come to apply even to children. I am ashamed to admit that my two year old could operate a remote control almost before he could walk. And instead of presenting him with his tea, I now ask him what he wants. It’s almost as if the poor boy has a menu in hand before he can even read it. Choose, we demand. “What do you want?”

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Where in Britain does 'do God'?

By Giles Fraser

The truth is, he doesn’t really know. And choice is bewildering. Frightening even. Especially if you are asked to bear responsibility for the consequences of the choices that you have made. “You said you wanted sausages, so now you must eat them.” To make children constantly choose is to abdicate one’s responsibility for being a parent. To put it bluntly and provocatively: respecting the decision-making autonomy of a child is tantamount to a refusal of love.

The reductio ad absurdum of this overblown culture of choice is the case of a man who is currently taking his parents to court because he didn’t choose to be born. Yes, it’s true. A businessman from Mumbai, Raphael Samuel, 27, is suing his parents because he didn’t ask to be born. Apparently, by conceiving him without his consent, they were infringing his ‘right’ to choose.

I know his is hardly a serious case, but it does highlight this nonsense of thinking that we can generate ourselves through a succession of our own choices. No, we begin life as if we are already “thrown” (to use a word favoured by Heidegger) into a place and time, with parents and grandparents, within a particular language and culture. Our circumstances precede who we are. They are a necessary given.

The word they use in theological college about the process of “becoming who you are” is formation. In this context, formation is achieved by acclimatising oneself to a tradition that stands over and against one’s individual choices. Indeed, it is only by recognising that one is situated within a given set of values that precede who we are that we are enabled to make the very choices that have come to define adult responsibility. The unchosen is a precondition of the very possibility of choice. No one makes choices in a vacuum. That makes as much sense as putting your hands on your own waist and trying to lift yourself up.

For the last 30 or so years – at least since Thatcherism – choice has become a sort of cuckoo value, pushing out all other values in the nest. And choice places all the burden of responsibility on the individual chooser. In parallel to this development, paternalist politics is now deemed a terrible imposition upon our freedom. Unfortunately, we have begun to think the same way about paternalistic parenting. That’s crazy. For paternalistic is exactly what parenting should be.

Surely that’s enough information. But, no. “Would you like to try our new Guatemalan blend?” I decline, signalling growing irritation. “Would you like a pastry with that…” A list of various croissants and muffins follows. My mood darkens further. All I want is a bloody coffee.

Choice is the bane of modern life. “Existence preceeds essence”, preached the existentialists. What they meant was that who we are is not given at birth, but is constructed by the series of choices we make about who we want to be. “Become who you are”, said Nietzsche some decades before.

From this perspective, life is a never ending succession of choices, a constant work-in-progress of self-definition. We are the authors of our own identity. Mini gods of self-creation. Sartre liked to sit in coffee houses, musing on the meaning of life. But surely even he could not have reckoned with the ubiquity of choice in a consumerist society. I fancy that he, too, would have been broken by the ever-present demand to decide for oneself. As I sip my coffee, a semblance of calm begins to return. Existentialism is too heavy a burden. No more questions, please. I can’t take it any more. I don’t want to be endlessly responsible for me. I want someone else to shoulder the burden on my behalf.

Suggested reading

Do we really have a 'suicidal generation'?

By Tom Chivers

I was wrestling with this as I read the Children’s Commissioner’s comments about the mental health of our children. There has been a sharp rise recently in the number of children self-harming. There has also been a significant rise over the past few years in the number of children seeking help from psychiatrists. Why are our kids so unhappy? Various answers have been touted. The use of social media is an obvious one. So, too, is the collapse of community life. Both of these are important.

But I also suspect that the way we have come to treat children as mini-consumers, little choice-centres, also has something to do with it as well. For nowhere is this choice-inducing anxiety more toxic than in childhood. It used to be that childhood operated under instruction. For the child, life was a series of givens. And this functioned as a sort of emotional security. But now that we are inducting our children into this culture of choice at an ever earlier age, we deprive them of the necessary scaffolding of care, love and support.

It’s a big claim, I know. But it is worth reminding ourselves of an important aspect of our culture of choice: that it absolves people of a responsibility of care towards others. To put it another way, our culture of choice contains this message: I am not responsible for you because you are responsible for you. Are you fat? That’s your choice. Smoke? Your choice. In debt? Your decisions have got you into trouble. It’s all on you.

It is one thing to take this attitude towards adults. But our culture is so saturated with this culture of choice that it has come to apply even to children. I am ashamed to admit that my two year old could operate a remote control almost before he could walk. And instead of presenting him with his tea, I now ask him what he wants. It’s almost as if the poor boy has a menu in hand before he can even read it. Choose, we demand. “What do you want?”

Suggested reading

Don't be so quick to laugh at the 'grievance study' hoax

By Tom Chivers

The truth is, he doesn’t really know. And choice is bewildering. Frightening even. Especially if you are asked to bear responsibility for the consequences of the choices that you have made. “You said you wanted sausages, so now you must eat them.” To make children constantly choose is to abdicate one’s responsibility for being a parent. To put it bluntly and provocatively: respecting the decision-making autonomy of a child is tantamount to a refusal of love.

The reductio ad absurdum of this overblown culture of choice is the case of a man who is currently taking his parents to court because he didn’t choose to be born. Yes, its true. A businessman from Mumbai, Raphael Samuel, 27, is suing his parents because he didn’t ask to be born. Apparently, by conceiving him without his consent, they were infringing his ‘right’ to choose.

I know his is hardly a serious case, but it does highlight this nonsense of thinking that we can generate ourselves though a succession of our own choices. No, we begin life as if we are already “thrown” (to use a word favoured by Heidegger) into a place and time, with parents and grandparents, within a particular language and culture. Our circumstances precede who we are. They are a necessary given.

The word they use in theological college about the process of “becoming who you are” is formation. In this context, formation is achieved by acclimatising oneself to a tradition that stands over and against one’s individual choices. Indeed, it is only by recognising that one is situated within a given set of values that precede who we are that we are enabled to make the very choices that have come to define adult responsibility. The unchosen is a precondition of the very possibility of choice. No one makes choices in a vacuum. That makes as much sense as putting your hands on your own waist and trying to lift yourself up.

For the last 30 or so years – at least since Thatcherism – choice has become a sort of cuckoo value, pushing out all other values in the nest. And choice places all the burden of responsibility on the individual chooser. In parallel to this development, paternalist politics is now deemed a terrible imposition upon our freedom. Unfortunately, we have begun to think the same way about paternalistic parenting. That’s the crazy. For paternalistic is exactly what parenting should be.

Yet, here’s the thing: in (rightly) focusing on women’s advancement, we have (wrongly) ignored men. Now, we’re facing a crisis in masculinity.

How many times have you heard the cliche ‘boys will be boys’ to justify some particularly ‘boisterous’ behaviour? Boys, after all, should be risk-takers, out-spoken, demanding of our attention. Girls on the other hand are praised for being quiet, unassuming, self-deprecating – dare I say ‘ladylike’.

Not always, not by everyone, and times are changing, but it would be head-in-sand denial to say these expectations don’t persist. Translated into adulthood it’s detrimental to both sexes – women are not programmed to ‘lean in’, and too many men retain an old-fashioned view of what it means to, well, be a man.

As Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill argued in the New York Times, the problem is that while we’ve understood the damage to women and acted, meaning “women have learned to become more like men”, we have not taught men “to become more like women.”[1. Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill, ‘Men’s Lib!’, New York Times, 14 November 2015] The consequences can be seen in men’s sliding educational and labour market outcomes, and most devastatingly in their suicide rates.

In focusing on empowering women, we have ignored a crisis among men

For decades governments in the West have sought to increase women’s participation – in education and work – and their earnings. The benefits have been huge. In the US, analysis by McKinsey shows that increased female participation in the labour market between 1970 and 2010 boosted GDP by 25%.[2. Sarah Arora et al., Women in the economy: selected exhibits, McKinsey, April 2011] And with GDP growth needing all the help it can get, this is no time to take the foot off the pedal: the IMF estimates that raising the US female participation rate to that of men would add 5% to GDP (yet it’s recently started falling).[3. Katrin Elborgh-Woytek, Monique Newiak, Kalpana Kochhar, Stefania Fabrizio, Kangni Kpodar, Philippe Wingender, Benedict Clements and Gerd Schwartz, Women, work and the economy: Macroeconomic gains from gender equity, International Monetary Fund, September 2013] Among other things, that means tackling bias; ensuring access to affordable childcare, ‘returnships’ and flexible working; and boosting low pay.

But it also means addressing those outdated social constructs – and that is as important for men as it is for women.

Over the past few decades, while we have been celebrating increases in women’s participation in the workplace, men’s participation has been declining – in the US by a worrying 8 percentage points in the past 60 years;[4. Eleanor Krause and Isabel Sawhill, What we know and don’t know about declining labor force participation: a review, Brookings Institution, May 2017] in the UK by 2.5 percentage points in the two decades to 2014.[5. Matthew Penfold & Fred Foxton, Participation rates in the UK, Office for National Statistics, 19 March 2015]

Let’s be clear, this is not a problem of vacancies, ‘new’ jobs are being created as ‘old’ ones disappear – in the US in July there were 6.2 million job openings.[6. ‘Job openings and labor turnover summary’, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12 September 2017] (Though it might become one if the robots really rise.)

It is about the changing nature of Western economies, in which service sector growth dwarfs that of manufacturing, and the future is high tech, high skill or ‘pink collar’. Which is where the outdated social constructs come into play (the unhelpful term ‘pink collar’ being exhibit A). Researchers at Brookings suggest that:[7. Eleanor Krause and Isabel Sawhill, What we know and don’t know about declining labor force participation: a review, Brookings Institute, May 2017]

“Culture might play a role deeper still in dictating the jobs that men think are worthy of taking. As the traditionally male-dominated, labor-intensive fields like manufacturing and mining diminish and are replaced by service-oriented positions in retail, healthcare, and education, men might see themselves as ill-suited for these ‘pink collar’ jobs, believing them to be ‘women’s work.’”

This is compounded by the fact that wages in these sectors may be lower than in the lost manufacturing jobs, making them doubly ‘unworthy’.

We might have seen this crisis brewing had we not, in both nations, been so busy celebrating super low unemployment. And had we seen it, we might also have been actively concerned at the ever-widening educational gap between men and women. Alongside the many initiatives to encourage girls to code and women to study STEM,[8. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] we might have implemented initiatives targeted at disadvantaged young men.

In the UK, by 2015 an 18-year old woman was 35% more likely to enter higher education than a male peer – and for the poorest (those in receipt of free school meals) that figure is a huge 51%.[9. Nick Hillman and Nicholas Robinson, Boys to Men: The underachievement of young men in higher education – and how to start tackling it, HEPI, May 2016] By 2012 in America, 61% of male recent high school graduates were enrolled in college, while women’s enrolment was a full 10 percentage points higher.[10. Mark Hugo Lopez and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, ‘Women’s college enrollment gains leave men behind’, Pew Research Center, 6 March 2014] In both countries, women’s educational attainment is generally above that of men, at all levels.

This is important because people with low qualifications are much less likely to be employed. Which gives women a double advantage over men. Not only are they better placed to take advantage of the growth in ‘pink collar’ jobs (which, incidentally, are least likely to be automated), they are also winning the labour market battle of escalating qualifications.

Perhaps the sharpest example of our failure to give the success of men equal focus to that of women, however, is in the suicide statistics. In the UK, men are around three times more likely to commit suicide than women; in the US it is three and a half times. Unmarried, middle-aged, workless and low education men are particularly high risk. Julie Phillips, a professor at New Jersey’s Rutgers university, sees challenges to traditional values of “masculinity and self-reliance” as an aggravating factor. Research by suicide prevention charity the Samaritans supports this:[11. .Men, suicide and society, Samaritans, September 2012]

“Masculinity – the way men are brought up to behave and the roles, attributes and behaviours that society expects of them – contributes to suicide in men. Men compare themselves against a masculine ‘gold standard’ which prizes power, control and invincibility… Having a job and being able to provide for your family is central to ‘being a man’, particularly for working class men.”

So yes, we must continue to push for more women on boards, in STEM, and in politics, and for equal pay and recognition, but we must also start talking about men – because in contrast to women, the data for men is stark. In proactively seeking to overturn centuries of women’s oppression, to redefine their role in society and at work, we have forgotten that the flip side of that is redefining what it means to be a man. As women are progressing, men are withdrawing, too often into a spiral of hopelessness – and that is no good for anyone.