Caitlin Moran has written a lot about women in her bestselling books How to Be a Woman and More than a Woman. These became important introductory texts for a lot of people during the social-media-enabled fourth wave of feminism, but it always bothered Moran that at every public reading someone would ask, “What about men?”
For years she dismissed the question as reactionary whataboutery but, more recently, after conversations with her daughters and their friends, she realised that young men were troubled and alienated from the feminist revolution. And then she asked “what about men?” herself and set to writing this book.
Analysing the crisis of masculinity in a feminist context is not a new idea. In 1999 Susan Faludi followed up her Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist text Backlash with an exploration of wounded, deindustrialised masculinity in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. In 2004 bell hooks wrote The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, about the ways in which men are socially programmed to numb their feelings and flee intimacy. Moran assumes you haven’t heard of those books and so she tells us, as though we’re hearing it for the first time, the ways in which gendered expectations hurt men.
What about Men? is, on the surface, a wide-ranging text. It covers the childhood, clothing, sexual behaviour, genitalia, pornography, friendships, illness, parenthood and ageing of men. In the process she shows a lot of empathy for the gender which has caused her own a lot of hardship. The problem is the narrow scope of her research. Her main sources are people she knows. She asks her husband, friends and children of friends about their experience of masculinity, they respond with touching candour and then she riffs on their answers. She never ventures beyond her own circle except on the few occasions she asks a question on Twitter and then she is, by definition, communicating with the kind of people who follow Caitlin Moran on Twitter.
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The problem with this is, I also know men. I’m sure you do too. And I’d bet that the men I know are different from the men Caitlin Moran knows and that they’re different again from the men you know. So not everything Moran confidently proclaims about the male gender rings true to me. The male friends she speaks to go to the pub for hours with their mates and discuss football or record-buying but rarely their lives or feelings. But this feels like just one kind of man.
As a reporter, I talk to strangers all the time, and while there’s some truth to the stoical, taciturn stereotype, I have also spoken to many open, emotionally intelligent men in all sorts of scenarios: prisons, schools, youth centres, protests, farms, factories. Moran’s women friends are, in contrast to her male friends, so healthily open about sex, pregnancy, genitalia and feelings that she imagines it was “a piece of piss” for women to invent feminism. Suffragettes might disagree.
[ Caitlin Moran: ‘In middle age you lose the amount of f**ks you give’Opens in new window ]
Moran is a reliably funny writer. She riffs exuberantly on the differences between men and women when it comes to clothes or friendship or genitalia. But though I laugh frequently, her jokes have a sort of distancing effect. They are reactive and detached. They don’t emerge organically from her interactions and instead flatten complex feelings into amusing metaphors. I know she’s joking when, as she enumerates masculine virtues, she quotes someone saying, “Men are basically dogs”, but it still hangs in the air for a while, getting in the way.
Something else is missing from this book. In her excellent polemic What White People Can Do Next, Emma Dabiri talks about how race and identity issues need to be in a conversation with a broader, left-wing critique of power or the whole endeavour gets reduced to shibboleths about personal responsibility and lifestyle choice. Dabiri situates her own analysis of white supremacy in a Marxist critique of western capitalism and a wider continuum of social justice. Moran lacks such a metanarrative. If she has a wider ideology, it’s columnism rather than communism. She moves with easy wit from one topic to the next but not in a way that points to a consistent argument.
This is partly because of her research methodology. Because she rarely veers from her immediate circle she presents a very thin understanding of how or why the dysfunctional gender dynamics she describes are constructed. It means she can’t really talk about how those dynamics might be deconstructed. She seems to have little interest in looking beyond a binary male/women model of identity. She doesn’t acknowledge that beyond her homespun generalisations (and, in fairness, she frequently caveats that they are generalisations) other factors have a huge influence on how masculinity and femininity are expressed.
Gay people and trans people don’t get much of a look-in in this book even though they are active pioneers when it comes to changing gender norms. Race, class and geography are barely mentioned. Men from marginalised communities, who often suffer at the hardest edge of masculinity, are barely mentioned. Women without children are barely mentioned. At one point Moran argues that the fact women can bear children “allows us to bond with any woman in the world” which feels dubious to me, like the sort of thing aristocrats would say while their servants roll their eyes.
She flourishes when she has something substantial to write about. The best chapter is one in which she talks to the son of a friend about his dysfunctional porn use. This admirably open young man paints a distressing picture of a digitally addicted generation that have been abandoned to technology. It feels viscerally sad and worthy of more exploration. There’s another chapter where, after comically discussing men’s inability to go to the doctor, she veers into a tender section about a health scare experienced by her husband. Male fear is constantly bubbling away beneath the surface of this book and I think she could have let it surface more.
Less successful are the bits where she writes about overexposed controversialists such as reformed pick-up artist Neil Strauss, self-help carnivore Jordan Peterson and allegedly criminal misogynist Andrew Tate (three men who are not shy about talking about their lives and feelings). There’s little new here. She writes, as many have done before her, about how young men are drawn to these people in the absence of other tech-savvy role models. Except, I’m not sure there really is an absence of role models for men. There are loads – writers, musicians, politicians, actors, sports folk.
“There are no books called 101 Inspiring Boys from History,” Moran writes at one point, even though thousands of history books glory in the exploits of “great men”. In another moment she laments the lack of empowering masculinist pop songs to counter Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls). But the point of such anthems of women's empowerment is that they exist because girls do not, in the main, run the world at all.
[ Caitlin Moran: ‘My brother says it’s easier to be a woman – I can see his point’Opens in new window ]
In fact, there’s something deeply fascinating about how young men can feel so helpless when their gender still holds most of the levers of power. On one level it’s straightforward – teenage boys are vulnerable and it’s not their fault that so many of their fathers and grandfathers were such dicks. But I’d guess that their helplessness also has something to do with the ways in which profit-extracting technologies commodify, displace and alienate people. In that context, old-fashioned misogynistic hierarchies might look like a comforting refuge for frightened young men. Indeed, in Stiffed, Susan Faludi argued something similar when she observed that “the gender battle was only a surface manifestation of other struggles.”
However, to delve into that mess of zero-sum capitalism, toxic tradition and teenage hurt, Moran would have to talk to more teenagers, youth workers, social scientists and psychologists, rather than simply chatting with people she knows and relying on her own intuition.
Moran always writes well. She’s funny and empathetic and her heart is in the right place. She is right that men should be encouraged to talk more about their problems and that they have much to learn from women, but the narrowness of her focus risks essentialising the stereotypes she describes. Towards the end of the book, she suggests that she is just trying to start a conversation (notwithstanding the people who started this conversation before). It is a conversation worth having and I’m glad she’s interested in having it. I just wish she’d done a bit of old-school reporting and spoken to a wider variety of men.
Further reading
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (HarperCollins, 1999) by Susan Faludi Faludi’s deep feminist analysis of how globalisation and deindustrialisation (not feminism) were leaving men feeling unmoored and alone now seems two decades before it’s time.
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love (Atria Books, 2004) by bell hooks hooks explains in moving depth how men should reconnect to the emotions and ethics traditionally associated with women.
Let’s Talk (Gill Books, 2022) by Richie Sadlier An open and honest book for teenagers about sex, relationships, consent and porn.
