What do Slobodan Milosevic, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern have in common? All are MANopausal, suffering from what pop psychologist Gail Sheehy calls "a mindbody syndrome that is perfectly normal, treatable and often reversible" in Pas- sages in Men's Lives: New Directions for Men at Mid-Life, her best-selling follow-up to Passages. Think about it. Dropping levels of the male hormones testosterone and DHEA (dehydroepian-drosterone) explain it all: Bertie Ahern's extraordinary memory loss of recent weeks, Tony Blair's overemotional tendency to "perform" in relation to Kosovo, Bill Clinton's adolescent mid-life crisis followed by a NATO-sponsored tantrum of World War Three proportions, and even Slobodan Milosevic's raging bull defiance.
Slob - who at 57 years of age is nearly post-MANopausal and has a 30 per cent likelihood to be impotent - would probably be categorised as the classic RAMM (resurgent angry macho man), if Sheehy got her hands on his case history.
Obviously, pop psychology sound-bytes don't explain ethnic cleansing and evil. But Sheehy's dissection of the new man does lend some insights into the way NATO is fighting this war.
Sheehy tags Tony Blair (who celebrated his 46th birthday on Thursday, May 6th) and Bill Clinton (52, whose August 19th birthday falls one day before Slob's) as personifying the SNAG (sensitive new age guy). But these two paragons of new manliness have a problem with their newness: they got elected by coming over all soft, caring and generally wussy, but once in office, couldn't keep it up, so to speak. Under pressure, they've rediscovered their true macho inner selves. While their women run with wolves, these new men are running with warmongers and loving it.
"The fear of losing hair is the fear of losing control," declares Sheehy. Hence the spectacle of sensitive guy Tony Blair with a tear-drenched hankie in one hand and an arsenal in the other. An enthusiastic bomber who barely manages to stifle his emotions, Tony would have made John Wayne proud.
Blair's bomb 'em machismo would almost make you forget that he sold himself to the public as a liberal new man who traded in the plush limo that went with the job for a people-carrier. He's the kind of guy who would wear a baby strapped to his chest as an accessory (if only Cherie would provide) and who believes in breastfeeding, but doesn't get up at night.
Clinton's SNAG image was always fraught with contradiction: he smoked but he didn't inhale; he didn't have "sexual relations with that woman," but he did have sexual intimacy with that woman; he is a passivist who avoided the draft, yet now he wants the bombing of Kosovo to go on for two more months. With Lewinsky, he remained detached by using a cigar as a stand-in for his manhood, just as in technowar he keeps his finger on the button, while not actually firing any missiles himself.
The contradiction for Blair and Clinton is that, while they're not far away, genetically speaking, from the days when men fought and killed for survival, they also like to keep their manicured hands clean. They play at war like boys with their toys. If you can't win with tactics, then you destroy the board. The issue of ground troops wouldn't be an issue if Bill and Tony were not SNAGs. RAMMs send in the troops, no questions asked.
SNAGs shy away from the spilling of their own blood, which, if this military action is justified, must logically follow.
Sheehy makes men like Tony, Bill and our own mid-life Bertie Ahern (47) out to be heroes "forging a new masculinity ideal", but their contradictory images and behaviour belie their dangerous lack of role models - other than each other. So, in our own little political war, the Sheedy affair, we have the spectacle of Bertie modelling himself on Bill and subjecting his political spouse, long-suffering Tanaiste Mary Harney, to indignities of integrity rivalling those endured by another political spouse, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Deny, deny, deny and, at the very last minute, apologise. The SNAG knows this works on women, because the SNAG makes last-minute confession seem vulnerable and endearing, rather than manipulative. Which would you rather have? A man who humiliates you and openly apologises - or a man who humiliates you and never apologises, except you know he's really sorry deep down?
The self-deceptive spouse of a SNAG will put up with any amount of humiliation, as long as her man is transformed in the end. SNAGS like Bertie, Bill and Tony always have transformative women by their sides because without them, they will not come out of MANopause alive, Sheehy believes. Women like Hillary and Cherie, who have earned far more than their husbands, are wise because they "magnify their husbands' possibilities and help them win". Maybe Mary Harney feels the same way.
Women relish this transformative role because it makes them powerful, while also passive when they want to be. Like Hillary, who claimed shock at successive bimbogates, Mary may or may not have known what was really going on in the Sheedy scenario, but she can at least pretend to have had the wool pulled over her eyes, for dignity's sake. Mary Harney has all the power in her coalition marriage, just as Hillary seems to have carry the final veto over Bill, yet she puts up with an extraordinary amount of misbehaviour from Bertie.
This patience - along with the photograph of Mary's glowing (post stand-off with Bertie) smile in The Irish Times on Wednesday - makes one wonder about the nature of the Taoiseach's psycho-sexual impact upon her. Either that, or when the picture was taken, she was anticipating a damned good date.
SNAGs keep strong women in their lives because they would rather stand up to a woman than to a man. "A man's greatest fear is of being dominated, or humiliated, by other men," declares Sheehy (who actually had to conduct research to come up with this gem). Solution: surround yourself with women, as Tony, Bertie and Bill certainly have.
If you're fortunate enough to be the woman in the transformative role, don't drive your partner to an early grave by condemning him for being a failure or not earning enough, or by divorcing him because he bores you, Sheehy warns with utmost seriousness.
She writes from the perspective of the US, where middle-aged post-menopausal women are apparently chewing up their husbands and spitting them out. They have found their power as women, started flourishing new careers and divorced their husbands, all courtesy of their husbands' bank accounts.
Many menopausal men, meanwhile, have become the pathetic victims of their wives' ambitions and, forced into early retirement in both marriage and career, have worn a path straight to the cardiac intensive care unit.
The new man needs an equally sensitive new woman, Sheehy suggests, even advising women readers on how to argue with their husbands: "Confront him gently and often." Constantly reassure him, with the words "I am not challenging you. I respect you. Who has greater investment in you being manly than I do?"
Could that be what Mary Harney says to Bertie during their periodic showdowns? Or does she wipe the floor with him?
Men naturally feel threatened by feminine emotions, because they are conditioned to participate in society by being torn from their mothers' worlds, Sheehy argues. US research (as if such research were needed) has concluded the obvious: that when arguing with their female partners, men withdraw and shut down emotionally.
IN war (and in soccer) men are in charge and women are largely irrelevant - which is why there has been heated and irrational resistance to women joining armed forces in Western societies. War - and soccer - are male bonding experiences where, in the absence of women, grown men dare to express emotion.
"Men are driven to prove themselves perpetually, especially to other men," Sheehy writes. Honour, her male research subjects told her, is essential to male selfdefinition. But where is honour in a world of down-sizing, where your man-eating female partner is likely to earn more than you and divorce you if you can't perform? It makes sense that, while the 20th century ends in war, it also ends in an obsession with male potency, the last bastion of honour.
Sheehy claims that the male sexual life cycle goes from racing car sex (instant gratification and a fast crash) between the ages of 15 to 30, to dutiful sex (procreation and parental exhaustion) between the ages of 30 and 40, to master's tournament sex (better control and performance - if you're not impotent) between the ages of 40 and 55, and then towards a gradual downslide to impotency after that. About 40 per cent of men are potent at 70, which is another way of saying that at 70, nearly two-thirds are impotent.
At this stage in life, men play golf to prove themselves to other men. The baby boomers wouldn't be content with golf alone, so they invented Viagra.
And last week we also saw launched on the Irish market, MUSE (medicated urethral system for erection), a pellet which the female partner can insert in the male's urethra during foreplay, resulting in an erection within 10 minutes. The erection is enhanced if the male stands and "cockwalks" around the bedroom while waiting for the drug to take effect - if the female partner doesn't die laughing first, that is.
US research has shown that MUSE works for no more than 40 per cent of the male population and results in a "less than spectacular erection," according to Sheehy, but that's not the point.
The point is that, on the cusp of a new millennium, we are obsessed with men becoming erect. Instead of seeing the future as a merging of sex roles into a greater mutual understanding of what it means to be male and female, we are in the midst of an intensive retrenching through chemical machismo, played out on a European stage.
Women's sex roles are just as confused. For us, the big event of the week was Demi Moore's announcement that, like Pamela Anderson, she is planning to have her breast implants removed because "large breasts are so '80s."
I looked down at my own naturally enhanced pair and shouted, "go away, you're so '80s" but they didn't listen.