More Irish men are choosing to embrace the feminine. They are learning to mother their children. Within secure and trusting family relationships, they are sharing their feelings in ways that their fathers never did. Some men are questioning the success ethic and searching for ways to lead more balanced lives. Men, in general, are more comfortable with homosexuality and are, in other ways, questioning the constrictions of gender.
Irish men are also in crisis. Fathers are splitting with partners and battling for relationships with their children. Reports of rape and domestic violence are increasing, according to Garda statistics. The suicide rate among young men has escalated four-fold. Macho men are fighting in the streets in vain attempts to assert their masculinity and the life of a champion hurler lies in the balance as a result.
Men are turning to the compliant female imagery of soft porn for reassurance of their masculinity. And many single men are so threatened by the challenge of equal relationships with women, that they are opting for the safety of eternal non-commitment in the form of platonic friendships and occasional one-night stands.
Many Irish men see themselves as under siege from the women's movement because they see women's advancement as the driving force behind their own distress. The more extreme commentators have blamed "feminazis" for their oppression, arguing that the feminist movement has sought to emasculate men and take away their rights as spouses and fathers.
Over the past decade in the US, a new male movement known as the Promise Keepers has attracted mass demonstrations of men who want to reassert their traditional roles as figureheads in family life. A Californian gang of teenage boys calling themselves "Spur Posse" became reviled celebrities when they did the national talkshow circuit boasting of their exploits, which involved racking up "points" by having sex with girls as young as 10.
The sex war reached a peak in the US in the 1990s when a young woman, Shannon Faulkner, dared to join the ranks of the Citadel, a southern US military college where the word "woman" was an institutionalise term of abuse. The men reacted with such cruelty and violence that Shannon lasted one week and departed a broken, humiliated, psychological wreck.
Bizarre accounts of sexual torture and male bonding at the Citadel were subsequently exposed by the US media, which saw the Citadel as a symbol of male resistance to female incursion.
Over the past six years, Susan Faludi, the journalist who set the 1990s feminist agenda with her book, Backlash, has met the Promise Keepers, the Spur Posse and the cadets of the Citadel, and thinks that these men - and the media - have chosen the wrong target. It is not feminism which has emasculated the male and taken away his role in society, she argues in her latest work, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, it is the consumerist culture.
In her analysis, the Promise Keepers were seeking a status that had been denied them in a work culture of insecurity and downsizing. The Spur Posse were conditioned by the media to believe that being celebrity was the ultimate achievement, at any cost. Much of their boasting was actually without foundation.
And the Citadel turned out to be the most confused of all, using violence and institutionalised sexual abuse as camouflage for a culture in which men rejected relationships with women in favour of intense, nurturing relationships with each other, where some played the roles of women and mothers in "marriages". They reacted so strongly to the threat of Shannon Faulkner because the presence of a woman in their ranks exposed their psychological games. These extremes of male behaviour probably have their Irish counterparts. Accounts of life in institutions run by the Christian Brothers have some similarities to the violence of life at the Citadel, for example. The Spur Posse may have bragged publicly about their exploits, but that does not mean that they did anything that young Irish men wouldn't have. Most crimes of child sexual abuse, after all, are committed by young men.
When men - and women - are sexually confused and lacking in the ability to process their emotions, they tend to act out without empathy for their victims. What is different about what is happening today, Faludi suggests, is that more men are justifying their actions by claiming to defend themselves against the female threat. But why should female equality be such a threat?
At the beginning of the century, Faludi argues, men were active doers who defined themselves by their work and place in society. Fathers could mould their sons by passing on experience, knowledge and values. Sons, in their time, inherited a place in society and a value system based on a sense of belonging to a wider community.
After the second World War, everything changed. Victorious American men returned home to a booming economy where people stopped being producers and became consumers. Men were no longer defined by their work and actions, but by their possessions and self-presentation. The US soldier was replaced with GI Joe, a 12-inch male Barbie doll whose main feature was his ability to accessorise. Media images of men became increasingly "ornamental" and feminised, climaxing with the image of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, his pumped body oiled and put on display like a passive Playboy centrefold.
"By the end of the American Century, every outlet of the consumer world - magazines, ads, movies, sports, music videos - would deliver the message that manhood had become a performance game to be won in the marketplace, not the workplace, and that male anger was now part of the show," she writes.
"An ornamental culture encouraged young men to see surliness, hostility and violence as expressions of glamour, a way to showcase themselves without being feminised before an otherwise potentially girlish mirror. But, if celebrity masculinity enshrined the pose of the `bad boy', his rebellion was largely cosmetic. There was nowhere for him to take a grievance because there was no society to take it to. In a celebrity culture, earnestness about social and political change is replaced by a pose of `irony' that is really just a sullen and helpless paralysis."
It remains to be seen how willing men in general are to accept the argument that manliness, like femininity, is a social construct that traps men just as it does women. When women, in the 1960s, formed a movement to free themselves from the gilded cage of glorified domesticity and dependence, they had a lot to gain economically. Men, on the other hand, are seeking something more ephemeral, involving identity and fulfilment. "Men and women are at a historically opportune moment where they hold the keys to each other's liberation," Faludi believes.
Are Irish men interested? Here the gilded cage in which the Celtic Tiger prowls is very new. I don't hear anyone rejecting materialism as being stifling. Despite the obvious unease which many men feel, few men are trying to change anything.
Men are not demanding that their politicians seek answers to the increasing suicide rate. They are not clamouring for family-friendly practises in the workplace. There is no mass movement of men demanding that women be allowed to equally share the burden of work.
The status quo remains whereby men have the highest status jobs and earn more for the same labour. Men are readily surrendering home duties to their female partners, often at the cost of the relationship.
On the other hand, as the Republic falls in love with consumerism and we all become economic operatives, rather than individuals, we are losing the sense of social connection that gives life meaning, just as it was lost in the US 30 years ago. Our lives are becoming increasingly superficial as we define ourselves according to our possessions rather than our actions.
Our sons are already telling us how successful our new lifestyle is. They are killing themselves in greater numbers, which should tell us something.
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, by Susan Faludi, Chatto & Windus, £15 sterling