Big boys do cry

The third source of male angst is to do with emotion. There is nothing new in the idea that men are conditioned to suppress emotions, but a movement now exists to reclaim the right to express them. Much of this grew from the American “drumming retreats” inspired by Robert Bly, author a decade ago of Iron John, a call for men to get back in touch with the “wild man” within. Today, men-only retreats promise to achieve “emotional release” and to “use sacred space as a container wherein men can be awakened to their masculine power”. As the publicity for one recent event in California put it: “The wild and woolly raw energy of maleness via drumming, dancing and story-telling opens the door to authentic, heartfelt expression.” In recent centuries men have been taught not to show their feelings, but to sublimate them in competitive behaviour. Now this self-sacrifice is being questioned. To be fully-rounded individuals at ease with themselves, it is asserted, men need to learn to weep.

A more important emotional catalyst appears to be the death of a father. A generation of men has been brought up by women, with shadowy fathers who were either physically absent, because of divorce or long working hours, or absent in spirit, because that was how fathers behaved. The death of a father, by causing men to confront the gaps in that relationship, can make them try to improve their relations with their own sons. After talking to scores of ordinary American men, Ms Faludi found that “a broken relationship with a father almost always surfaced as the primary preoccupation underlying all others”.

The alpha male lives

Ah, detractors will reply, this self-analysis is all very well, but what about Britain's laddish culture, or Hollywood's glamorization of male aggression? Surely the self-assured alpha male is alive and well? After all, laddishness, which exploded in Britain in the 1990s with the boom in sales of magazines such as Loaded, FHM and Maxim, unapologetically celebrates heterosexual hedonism and a defiant fecklessness. Loaded, declared James Brown, its first editor, was for men who “have accepted what we are and have given up trying to improve ourselves.” Twenty years ago, Reader's Digest was the most popular monthly magazine among British men; today it is FHM, which sells more copies each month than Cosmopolitan and Vogue.

But perhaps such phenomena could also be seen as a response to all those male anxieties. “Lads’ mags are all about the denial of the real problems that men are facing,” suggests Peter Howarth, editor of British Esquire. Dr. Clare goes even further: “Men, renowned for their ability and inclination to be stoned, drunk or sexually daring, appear terrified by the prospect of revealing that they can be—and often are—depressed, dependent, in need of help.”

In the end, while many of these male grievances are heartfelt, they need to be put in context. Full-time working women in America still earn, on average, only 72% of the wages men receive. Women occupy only 14% of the seats in America's Congress. Today not a single woman runs any of the G8 governments, finance ministries or central banks.

Even the preponderance of dysfunctional men in popular culture probably says less about a masculinity crisis than about the fact that men are still largely in charge. Men can be mocked, because men are not—yet—as vulnerable as women. You never kick a man when he is down.

(http://theeconomist.com)