A spate of new books explore the predicament of contemporary men
By A.M.
TIM SAMUELS has been on lots of dates. Near the beginning of “Who Stole My Spear?”, his investigation of 21st-century masculinity, he describes some of them: disastrous dates, comical dates, scary and baffling dates (“Why do I keep attracting fascists?”, he wonders). He is a Tinder aficionado: in five minutes on the app, he notes, “I can view more single women than my great-grandfather would have seen in his entire lifetime in his village.” Judging by these opening chapters, you might expect his book to be an amusing take on big-city single-manhood in the online age. But, while it is often very funny, it is also insightful, both independently and in the context of broader thinking about the predicament of contemporary men.
There is a mini-boom in books about males: the young ones parents raise, often with stereotypical ideas of what a boy should be, and the adult kind that women, and men themselves, get lumbered with. Another new take is “Man Up”, a powerful, thought-provoking call to arms by Rebecca Asher, author of a previous book on the troubles with modern parenting. She and Mr Samuels adduce similar woes to explain why the attention on men is necessary: their much higher involvement in violent crime, as both perpetrators and victims; boys’ higher likelihood of educational failure; untreated mental-health problems and, compared with women, vastly higher suicide rates. The recent recession led to an estimated 10,000 extra male suicides in Europe and North America, according to research Mr Samuels cites. (The financial crisis and its aftermath also led, says a Harley Street plastic surgeon he interviews, to a spike in penis augmentations.) He links his theme to big-picture issues, too, such as mass shootings in America and the rise of Islamic State. “When a young man swaps his Primark uniform in Portsmouth for military fatigues in Syria,” he surmises, “surely there’s an illusion of masculinity being chased”
In this evolving literature, one striking aspect of Mr Samuels’s outlook is its approach to feminism. For many feminists, including Ms Asher, his essentialist views on some aspects of gender, and his attribution of some behaviour to biology, especially male hormones, will seem controversial. For example, in a chapter on the challenges of monogamy, he compares the size of human testes to those of other primates, promiscuous and otherwise. He believes that “from the day they are born and bite harder on the mother’s nipple, boys are different.” He wants to renovate the concept of masculinity; Ms Asher thinks it bust beyond repair.
And yet, though he writes from a zestily male perspective, Mr Samuels is also an avowed feminist himself, raising an implicit question about the relationship between belief in sexual equality and biological determinism. “Forgive men if, at times, we are a little unsure of our footing,” Mr Samuel says of the many discombobulations men have experienced in public life, at work and at home. He is clear that women continue to have it much tougher, still, for instance, being responsible for most of the childcare and housework, and suffering the fall-out of the male pathologies he chronicles. He also knows that many of these disorienting advances should be celebrated more than lamented. (One such is the evolution of a new, more rewarding model of fatherhood, though, as Mr Samuels points out, even as some dads change more nappies, millions of children—including a third of American children—now grow up without a father in the home.)
Many of the laughs in “Who Stole My Spear?” come in his recollections of his Jewish upbringing in Manchester, England. The passage in which he describes how, as a cub reporter (literally: he was 13), he succeeded in interviewing Morrissey, who came to his house for tea is a particular delight. But some of his memoirish reflections are serious. He explores his own moods and, in a section about the consolations of religion, gives a moving account of his mother’s death when he was seven. He remembers waving goodbye to her “as she left the house in a beige overcoat to go to hospital—an image I can still see like a faded Polaroid”. And, in an ambitiously hybrid form, he bolsters these observations with reporting (he is a radio host and television journalist, who has covered immigration to Britain and America’s death row), plus research into the anthropology and history of masculinity.
He attends a pick-up bootcamp in Miami, at which he is dispatched to chat up a Russian woman (“I deploy my full repertoire—glasnost, perestroika, pogrom”). He visits the set of a porn film in Los Angeles, then towns and villages in Ghana in which he hears of porn-inspired rapes and its role in the spread of HIV; he is frank about the damage inflicted on both porn stars and to the sexual expectations of consumers. The impacts of open-plan offices, and of always-on technology, on men’s psychic well-being are among his particular bugbears. “Raised on a diet of Bond and Bourne,” he summarises, men are “set loose to hunt in a world of PowerPoint and 360-degree evaluations”.
The remedies Mr Samuels recommends are largely sensible—and, despite their very different points of origin, there is some overlap with those suggested by Ms Asher. He would like the media to promote healthier models of masculinity and for fathers to enjoy more flexible paternity leave. He is also keen on updated coming-of-age rituals and physical activity; he wants men to seek fulfilment outside work and to nurture their friendships. There is doubtless much more to say about modern manhood, but these books demonstrate conclusively that the conversation is worth having, even urgent, and that there are many different ways of conducting it.
