Nina Power - What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents

Nina Power

WHAT DO MEN WANT?

Masculinity and Its Discontents

Contents

About the Author

Nina Power is a writer and philosopher. She has written regularly for the Telegraph , Art Review and Spectator , amongst other publications. She is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0, 2009), which the New Statesman called a joy to read.

By the Same Author

One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0 Books, 2009)

Platforms (Morbid Books, 2020)

To Daniel, a good man

Introduction

Men and women exist. Occasionally, we even like each other.

We exist because of these two simple truths. We all owe our lives to the fact that it is possible at least sometimes for men and women to get along. All human life stems from the reality of, and difference between, men and women.

We live, however, in an age which is increasingly keen to pretend that sexual difference isnt important. In some respects, it isnt. The past century has seen womens mass entry into politics, culture and the labour market under the banner of equality. Men and women are becoming closer in terms of what they do, or want to do, and this has, in many ways, created a more complex and interesting world. The sexes are socially, economically, educationally, culturally and sexually more proximate in their behaviours than ever, and yet, in other ways, men and women could not seem further apart or less comprehending of each other. Chaos reigns.

The modern individual is, in many ways, a neutral, desexed being. The differences between us are papered over in most contemporary workplaces it doesnt matter if a man or a woman does the job (although men still dominate the most perilous occupations), and it doesnt matter if a consumer is male or female, except if you are trying to sell them something branded, usually unnecessarily, as masculine or feminine.

We live at once paradoxically in a sexualized culture, and a world that would like to forget about sex. Playful androgyny, a kind of knowing messing about with roles, while not denying the reality of sexual difference, belongs to a distant era think of stars from the 70s and 80s: Bowie, Prince, Grace Jones, Marc Almond, Boy George, Annie Lennox, and others. The popularity of drag indicates that there is great interest in the exaggerated stereotypical performance of femininity (and to a lesser degree, masculinity), but the undecidability of androgyny is a more delicate proposition, one which we seem to have lost in the bid to give everything a fixed name and an identity.

I think we need to return to thinking about men and women in terms of sex rather than gender, where the latter is a stand-in for how people would like to be perceived by others. Its not that how we would like to be seen doesnt matter, though it is all-too-compatible with a culture obsessed with branding, but that by ignoring sex we end up ignoring fundamental aspects of our shared reality, and remain mired in confusion about who we are and how we should understand each other.

Human beings always seem to live in one state of confusion, crisis or chaos, or another, but lately our collective relation to biological reality appears to have been shattered completely in favour of something else, a gender identity, that is to say, an inner feeling that one is a man, a woman, neither, both, sometimes one and sometimes the other, or something else entirely. And that this identity need not bear any relation to biological sex whatsoever. This is what Kathleen Stock identifies in Material Girls , as the trend in favour of gender identity and away from sex, noting that a generational divide has opened up. The battle of the sexes has become the battle over the sexes, and anyone cleaving to essentialism or to biology, that is to say upholding the commitment to the reality of sexual difference as fundamentally constitutive of all human life, runs the risk of being threatened with violence, or losing friends and work as various campaigns gear up to punish women (in particular, but not only) for defending their sex-based rights.

As one article about Stock has noted, As one of the UKs leading gender-critical feminists, who has insisted that an individual cannot change their biological sex, Professor Stock has faced relentless criticism and abuse with blogs, petitions and Twitter users regularly demanding her dismissal for her allegedly transphobic views. Stock is not alone. J. K. Rowling received violent threats after she defended Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who had her employment contract pulled after being accused of posting transphobic tweets. Forstater, having lost her initial employment tribunal, won on appeal in June 2021, with the judge stating that the belief that biological sex is real, immutable, important and not to be conflated with gender identity, is protected by law. Many other women, including myself, have had talks and shows cancelled, have been harassed and defamed for suggesting that womens concerns need to be taken seriously in the face of proposed legal changes to the meaning of the words men and women. Optimistically, one hopes that these kinds of campaigns to ruin people which more and more citizens and employers are becoming aware of, and are often described as cancel culture will have their day. That institutions will stand up for those they employ, and that, where there is a clash of rights, people will sit down together and work out the best solution for everyone. At the same time as this battle over sex has been happening, another war is being waged. This one is against men, the whole damn lot of them!

To take just one recent example, in 2020s I Hate Men , French writer Pauline Harmange states that men are violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly men beat, rape and murder us. If more than a decade ago, Rosin could pose such a question at the level of the economy, today the question of men is posed at the level of culture. Men have had it too good for too long, the cry goes up. They are responsible for the vast majority of violence. They act like they deserve good things to come to them. Their days are numbered.

In 2009, I wrote a short, polemical book, One-Dimensional Woman , about womens place in the world as I saw it then. The text focused on the ways in which women were increasingly encouraged to participate in the labour market, how they were encouraged to identify as workers, and how they were depicted in contemporary culture. It didnt have too much to say about men, but nor did it especially denigrate them. What I saw facing women in the 2000s was not blunt misogyny, but rather the opportunism of a culture that sought to sell feminism to women, and, against the backdrop of the closure of largely male-dominated industries, how workplaces were increasingly branded as female. Men and women were, as so often, being pitted against one another in the name of someone else making a profit. I think that we have moved to a new phase in this divisive process, one that plays out less at the level of work and the economy, but more at the level of how we interact. This runs alongside the decline in the interest of class as a category in favour of privileging identity. It is no longer our relation to the means of production that matters whether we are exploited for our labour but rather how we identify, and whether our identity is a good one (and therefore uncriticizable) or a bad one (therefore open to being blamed). Men as a class today most definitely fall in the latter category.