What a man's got to do

Female professional success, however, is not the source of men's second lament. Along with their success, women have also won social acceptance for their right to reject work in favour of motherhood. In other words, women can hold the briefcase, or the baby. Or they can hold both. Or they can hold the briefcase, then the baby, then the briefcase again. But at least they can choose. As one men's rights campaigner in New Zealand puts it: “A man's got to do what a man's got to do, but women can do anything.”

For men, it is contended, that choice is unavailable. This strand of complaint joins two loosely related voices. The first is that of the professional man, trapped on the one hand by the fierce social expectation of “man as provider”, and on the other by the fierce social suspicion of “man as stay-at-home father”. Fatherhood websites are overcrowded with the anguished pleas of would-be full-time fathers who have to confront the scary squads of mothers at the local park or the school gate. “If we stay home, we're outcasts, flung from our ‘natural' role as provider and alpha dog,” wrote one man for salon.com recently. “If we consider, for a moment even, my father's approach,” he continued, “we are cast, quite fairly, as Neanderthals.” America is awash with books offering working fathers consolation and tips on how to cope.

The other voice is more bitter and political. It sees men as victims of 30 years of the women's movement which blamed men for women's troubles. This group tends to view matters as a zero-sum game: the more choices available to women, the fewer available to men. Warren Farrell, the author of The Myth of Male Power, who is regarded as beyond the pale by many feminist writers, claims that the legal and social discrimination faced by men who want to be custodial fathers today is as bad as that faced by women who wanted a demanding professional career in the 1950s. This is a move to fight what is seen as a legal conspiracy to separate fathers from their children. Most family courts award custody to mothers, while men are hounded by child-support bills. As single fatherhood has grown, so the fathers'-rights industry has flourished. In 2000, there were 4.4m American single-father families, or 4.2% of all households, up from 3.4% in 1990. A quarter of all American single-parent families are now headed by men.

On the opposite flank is the conservative fatherhood movement, with its links to the religious right. Whereas the men's-rights argue that their disconnection from their children is involuntary because the divorce courts discriminate against them, the fatherhood lot argue that men should not get divorced in the first place. The National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), a conservative lobby, has blossomed in recent years. It condemns “deadbeat dads” and vigorously disapproves of divorce.

Its influence is great. Wade Horn, formerly head of the NFI, is now the assistant secretary for children and families under Tommy Thompson, President George Bush’s secretary for health and human services. Where once the political emphasis was on the irresponsibility of women, getting pregnant while young and single, the culprits now, it seems, are men. “Fatherless households” have replaced “female-headed households” as the subject of study, subtly shifting the blame. “In 1960, fewer than 10 million children did not live with their fathers”, stated the department earlier this year: Today, the number is nearly 25 million. More than one-third of these children will not see their fathers at all during the course of a year. Studies show that children who grow up without responsible fathers are significantly more likely to experience poverty, do poorly at school, engage in criminal activity, and abuse drugs and alcohol.

Men, it seems, cannot win. They are the new guilty and the new victims. Worse, increasingly beset by self-doubt, men are confronted with the breezy self-confidence of independent young women as depicted in popular culture. Take Sex and the City, a TV series about sexual conquests of single New York women, or The Simpsons, a cartoon family of feckless men and savvy women.