I have not yet read Caitlin Moran’s new book, ‘What about men?’, as it has only just come out. However, its publication has been trailed by a series of articles written by the author herself, which I have read with increasing bewilderment. And I have listened to interviews on Newsnight and Women’s Hour as the publicity machine has rolled on.
Like many others, I quite enjoyed ‘How to be a Woman’ when it came out over a decade ago – although I did find some of its famously ‘frank discussion’ of female bodies a little outre for my taste, and often lacking in attention to the surrounding social context of emergent womanhood. As the kind of feminist who has focussed more on minimum wages than, er, minges, I could live and let live on that one. However, de-contextualised body talk becomes a bit more awkward when applied to men and their penises.
In an article for Esquire magazine, Caitlin Moran compiles a list of ’12 things about being a man that you need women to tell you about’. She positions ‘No-one is being honest and positive about your willies’ in the No. 1 spot and proceeds to bemoan the lack of conversations about average-sized or smaller penises, and men’s need to feel good about them. As high-profile women now frequently do stand-up routines about the nature of their vaginas (smelly, baggy, apparently) and joke about their genitalia, there is a crying need for men to do the same. She argues that a joyful, open conversation about penises shouldn’t be viewed as impossible to achieve, given that women’s new ability to talk about their vaginas would have ‘seemed equally mad and weird in 1997’.
Granted, mainstream comedy routines about women’s genitalia may be a recent innovation, but back in the 1970s, feminist consciousness-raising not infrequently involved women meeting up to look at their vaginas so as to inform and empower themselves physically, sexually, and reproductively.
The idea of ‘penis positivity’ may not be all bad, but to raise it (ha) without apparent reference to how penises are routinely portrayed, and their users ‘empowered’, seems utterly bizarre to me. If I were to identify the No. 1 thing that women can tell men about their penises and what they’d like men to think about in their stewardship of one, body positivity would definitively not be it.
In a second article for the Times, we find the amazing assertion that midlife is worse for men than for women. This is where I really started asking myself WTF? It’s a jaw-dropping example of Moran’s view that ‘women are actually doing okay at the moment’. In a country where hormone treatments for the menopause are notoriously hard to come by, where many women find it hard to reprise the careers they put on hold during the childrearing years, where issues of ageism and sexism hit women especially hard, it seems ‘brave’ to declare that ageing men have it worse. Unlike women, they are permitted to age with distinguishedness – terms like ‘silver fox‘ or ‘eminence grise’ struggle to find widely-used female equivalents, in a culture where women’s value remains intrinsically tied to youth.
According to Moran, because we women go through distinct reproductive phases – girlhood, menstruation, pregnancy, menopause – the ageing process is a bit of a cakewalk for us as we’re used to changes. Men, meanwhile, having always been strong and physically capable, have a terrible time adjusting to losing physical capacity or needing help. Women can count on the friendships they’ve nurtured throughout the years to enjoy hiking together and support each other. Or something. Men’s ‘Third Act’, by contrast, is blighted by all the time they have spent in the office living up to stereotypes of physical and professional prowess and not talking about their feelings. Or something. I mean, seriously? Never mind the gender pension gap…
One version of the ‘Third Act’ for men is to re-marry and have a second family. Moran sees this is terribly sad for men, as they come to see how little they engaged with their first families because they were always at work. Moran imbues this process with the sancity of ‘putting right what I did first time’. Where’s the analysis of why family life remains so unequal in terms of earning and caring, of how difficult it is to achieve involved fatherhood in the corporate structures of late capitalism, or of how older, divorced women might find it rather more difficult to start all over again?
These questions, to which I haven’t seen answers, bring us to what appears to be a yawning gap in this exploration of manhood. It seems that Moran has not much engaged with the civil society groups who work on men’s issues. In the Guardian, she wrote that there wasn’t a culture around fatherhood to match that of motherhood, that there are ‘no fathering memoirs; no pub discussions of being a father- how to plait hair, how to arrange a turtle-themed birthday party’. To take perhaps the least consequential of these observations, I seem to remember a group of fathers going viral describing their workshops on plaiting children’s hair, and a quick search on the BBC website produced this article, on men taking classes in plaiting. How could this have been missed? And there is a slew of groups working on active fatherhood, boys in education, male mental health and other issues that Caitlin Moran has usefully highlighted. On BBC Women’s Hour, she said that there may be academic resources in these areas but no over-arching mainstream movement that is accessible to ordinary men and boys. Again, I’m struck by the lack of analysis as to why this is – could it be that men as a whole remain the more powerful of the sexes? I’m not one of those who think there is no need to address the problems experienced by contemporary men and boys – of course there is. But without the corrective of looking at what many organisations are already doing in this space, and without recognition of the many ways in which things for women are NOT ‘okay at the moment’, I fear you might end up with bollocks. And I don’t mean that as a ‘joyful, life-affirming’ mention of men’s parts.
wonklifebalance 