It’s time to ask: what do men want?

Two new books wrestling with the masculinity crisis – one by a woman, one by a man – are put to the test. The result is surprising

IWHAT DO

MEN WANT? by Nina Power

192pp, Allen Lane,

T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99 n front of me are two books about men, and, curiously, it’s the one by a woman that is sympathetic and the one by a man that would consign my sex to the dustbin of history. It borders on a hate crime.

Patriarchy, according to Ivan Jablonka, a French historian, is immoral and artificial – something we’ve invented over the centuries to keep men on top. The problem with that thesis, he acknowledges, is that in primitive societies, too, male dominated female. To explain why something invented is perennial and universal, Jablonka tries to distinguish between biological sex (ie cavemen were more “robust” than women, so they took the lead in hunting) vs the cultural norms of gender, which he sees as an evolved effort to institutionalise the differences between men and women.

“Patriarchy proceeds from an interpretation of bodies: it transforms female biology into destiny, subjecting women to one function,” namely reproduction, and while women are expected to pop out babies or care for them, “men are at leisure to take over other spheres: the economy, war, power, and so on”. This order was threatened by the French Revolution, which by opening the door to universal rights allowed female equality to follow behind.

Jablonka is obsessed with patriarchy the way others are with critical race theory or ancient UFOs – it explains almost everything – and in his reduction of all human experience to the battle between the sexes, the individual becomes depressingly powerless. Jane Austen’s clever female characters might know what they want, but they still want a man – “struggling within stifling gender norms” – and women who claw their way up the corporate ladder in the 21st century, by exhibiting “masculine norms” such as “leadership, competition, toughness”, become “accomplices of the patriarchy that reserves a place for them”. Women might think they’re winning, but they’re not. And when men think they’re being moral, they’re actually doubling down on the system. Jablonka divides up male strategies for dominance into four categories: we lead by “ostentation”, a display of virility; by “control” or selfdenial; by “sacrifice”, offering one’s life for a higher cause; and through the game of “ambiguity”, by integrating the feminine.

Sacrifice is “horrifying”, argues Jablonka, because it validates war and suicide. Yet critics will counter that it also encourages charity, modesty and martyrdom – just as virility can sometimes protect the weak. Indeed, if our natural state really is men clubbing each other over the head, perhaps patriarchal civilisation is a step up. It also contains a space for joyous genderbending (trans, drag, queer, etc), though Jablonka believes men who soften their masculinity with eyeliner are often reasserting that while women are “tied to their sex”, men are free to be “armed or bejewelled, tearful or insensitive”. Again, it’s impossible to win. Even Harry Styles is a tool of the system. This book is so pessimistic that it’s hard to see on what basis men and women can ever progress peacefully; for one to advance, the other must retreat.

Far more hopeful, and better written, is philosopher Nina Power’s What Do Men Want? If you proceed on the assumption that masculinity is inherently toxic, she argues, you risk implying that most men are bad – and they’re not. “Far from possessing great power, men are frequently trapped in systems of other men’s making.” To be a man nowadays is “in great part, and at the risk of sounding dramatic, to suffer” – from comparatively high rates of suicide, homelessness and murder, and stereotyping.

Patriarchy might be part of the problem, as Jablonka also argues, by compelling men to live according to masculine codes that are as repressive to them as they are unfair to women, but declaring war on masculinity will only add to men’s sense of alienation, at a moment when aspects of culture and economics have moved in women’s favour. The new economy rewards brain; brawn is out of style. “It’s more fashionable to be a woman,” Fay Weldon is quoted as saying. “Women appear to be more powerful, at least among young men.”

Nina Power suggests that, rather than dismissing the whole notion of masculinity, it might be better to recognise the reality of sex differences rooted in nature; encourage men to identify as part of a class, one that has severe problems and could do with more solidarity; and investigate those aspects of masculinity that are useful to us all, “to revisit old values and virtues” such as “honour, loyalty and courage… in the name of reconciliation”.

If Jablonka favours a Year Zero approach, Power is almost conservative, building a future upon the best of the past. The family “came to be seen by those on the left as traditional or oppressive. [But] the family can also be understood as a bastion of resistance against the outside world.” When life goes mad, mum and dad “bring you back down to earth with love and understanding”. Power deserves credit for trying to get into the heads of the men she quotes, even if boorish or chauvinist. She displays female empathy. Jablonka, more of a man than he might admit, does not.

An alternative view, alien to both writers yet held deeply by billions across the planet, is that sex is not an evolutionary accident, but designed for a purpose, and that our characteristics flow from a divine order. Male and female, according to the Bible, were meant for each other. Adam was incomplete, so God created Eve. And, yes, Eve then tempted man to eat the forbidden fruit, destroying our collective innocence, but, as the 18thcentury monk Benito Feijóo argued, the fact that Adam fell for this scam only confirms man’s intellectual and moral weaknesses. I’d wager more men have enthusiastically replied to emails from Nigerian princes than women have.

Men are flawed, often in a very funny way. By peppering her book with humour, Power rehumanises the gender debate. Jablonka, deadly serious in his academic gobbledygook, descends into a woke selfparody that sounds suspiciously like mansplaining. At the end, he writes: “While I am a man in my body, heterosexual in my choices, a professor in my career, I feel uncomfortable in the masculine. I am not inclined to become a woman, but I gladly switch genders.” This is the kind of nonsense a man typically spouts in a misguided attempt to talk a feminist into bed.

Ivan Jablonka’s woke selfparody would consign his sex to the dustbin of history

parents and his job is to sit in a “holding pool” of tutors and wait to be picked each day to help a fiveyear-old with his homework. Another parent hires him to teach a pair of twin boys who don’t need any help but “everyone in their class has a tutor”. He marvels at how trusting – or uninterested – parents seem to be in the tutor: “Apparently it was only me who found it weird that I was regularly sent to teach in my pupils’ bedrooms.”

Soon he is accompanying his pupils on skiing trips and safaris, his role in each household hovering uneasily somewhere between servant and family member. He grows so close to the family of a Russian billionaire (“How can we make place at Eton?”) that he acquires the nickname “Daddy Piggy” and sings James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful to the mother in a Moscow karoake joint called Who Is Who. In Kenya he and his pupil go baboon-watching on a quad bike.

His experiences are set against a background of his attempts to get a boyfriend, become a scriptwriter and find somewhere affordable to live. He marvels at his clients’ complacency about their wealth while at the same time being rather starstruck by their lives. The parents of nine-year-old Felix, who can usually be found eating popcorn alone in a private cinema, take Knott to a restaurant in Rome where he has to stop himself from screaming “We came here by helicopter!” to the other diners. The mother of his Russian pupil flies him from Moscow to Miami “in search of the optimum study conditions”.

Each chapter is punctuated with text messages – from friends, creative collaborators and his delightfully bemused parents, to whom he turns for teaching advice. As the book goes on, it is clear the real colour in his life comes from the world he sought to escape when he became a tutor. Although he always seems to like his tutees – despite their recalcitrance and rudeness – he becomes increasingly uneasy with “giving a leg-up to pupils who didn’t really need it” and “offsetting” his super-tutor existence with charity work does not make him feel any more comfortable with the direction his life has taken.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that Knott barely acknowledges the value of tutoring and its role in supporting pupils of all backgrounds and abilities. But this book is not an investigation of pedagogic methods and Knott is at his best when giving wide-eyed descriptions of his clients’ ridiculous lives. It is far more about the lols than the learning.

‘It was only me who found it weird that I was sent to teach in my pupils’ bedrooms’