“By the time you’re 40,” Caitlin Moran tells any men who’ve made it to page 73 of this book, “your T-shirt collection is, to you, as your wife’s lovingly collated wardrobe of second-hand Chanel, designer jeans and Zara brogues is to her.” Not for the first or last time while reading this book, I wrote in the margin: “No”.
In the next paragraph, Moran tells us what that T-shirt collection looks like. “Band T-shirts, slogan T-shirts, colourful T-shirts, T-shirts with swearing on, T-shirts that you can only buy from the back pages of Viz like ‘Breast Inspector’ or ‘Fart Loading – Please Wait’.” Again I wrote “No” in the margin, wondering what this stylish-sounding woman was doing with such an obvious plum duff.
It’s hard to find any of this relatable. I have no slogan T-shirts but if I did, one would say: “I’d rather be reading Ivy Compton-Burnett, instead of whatever [imagine me holding this volume at arm’s length while reclining on a chaise] this is.”
What About Men? is the kind of will-this-do book whose last chapter actually begins: “This, then, is the last chapter of this book.” Then continues, “I will admit – a lot of my motivation for writing it was a very petty urge to be able to say, ‘Well no man has got around to writing a book like this, and so, as usual, muggins here – a middle-aged woman – has to crack on, and sort it all out.’”
It’s an ironic remark, no doubt, but captures the self-importance and presumption that suffuses the whole exercise. “I will admit” – as if Moran is being tortured rather than feeding the beast of her brand by adding to an oeuvre that, so far, has focused on women’s experience. That brand involves a literary style captured in the phrase: “When it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz.”
The germ of this book came when Moran was on a panel and a woman in the audience invited her to tell boys what they should be reading. “And I couldn’t think of anything. I couldn’t think of any book, play, TV show or movie that basically tells the story of how boy-children become men.”
That is a disappointing admission. And yet it’s one that embodies the blinkered perspective Moran brings to this book. I can think of hundreds of just such books. Here are two: The Boy With the Topknot by Sathnam Sanghera, and Toast by Nigel Slater. I mention these not just because they are excellent but both, coincidentally, were written by men from the same city in which Moran and I were born, Wolverhampton. Where’s your civic pride, Caitlin?
By contrast, women are spoiled for choice when it comes to literary advice on how to be happy and proud, Moran claims. She cites Jane Eyre. But Jane Eyre, last time I looked, is about a woman who winds up married to a controlling dick who literally imprisons his first wife in the attic and winds up a symbolically castrated invalid cared for by our heroine. If that’s a role model for women’s happiness, or for how women and men might get along, we’re more screwed than Moran supposes.
I read novels differently from the sex-specific, reductive way she suggests here, and I’ll bet Moran does too. But this is the thing: the whole project reeks of bad faith, and comes off as a moneymaking scheme pitched by a plucky intern at an editorial meeting. “Guys? How to Be a Woman, but about dudes. Can I get a kerching?”
The Times columnist spends a great deal of time, with good reason, indicting the dum-dum misogyny of men’s rights activists, incels and the manosphere’s leading thinkers, Jordan B Peterson and Andrew Tate. The former, in 12 Rules for Life, enjoins men to emulate male lobsters’ unremittingly proto-Nietzschean aggressiveness. The latter, Moran tells us, spreads what Greta Thunberg drolly called Tate’s “small dick energy” around the world from his Romanian lair where, until recently, he ran a business employing 75 women working sex cams. Moran notes the trend of Tate-corrupted, spiritually and emotionally inadequate boys writing “MMAS” at the bottom of the essays they hand to female teachers. Which stands for? Make me a sandwich. Little sods.
But What About Men? is committed, if not to the cheerlessly masculinist biological determinism of Peterson and Tate, then to a rhetorical essentialism that lucratively pigeonholes men and women even at the risk of misconstruing both. It’s an old formula, as in John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Tendentiousness, it seems, makes money.
Most of the material is culled from interviews with male mates, mates’ sons, venerable sex-based prejudices and Twitter polls. True, there is also a fine chapter on how pornography is corrupting men and making them miserable, based on a young man’s harrowing story of his addiction. But much more often, Moran’s method is to have a far from original thought – Why do men wear boring clothes? Why don’t men go to the doctor? Why won’t they talk about their problems? – and get those notions confirmed in the echo chamber of her Twitter feed. “Being intelligent was irrelevant,” one young man recalls of his school days. Well maybe at your school, or in your peer group. At my school, among my peers, being clever was more than relevant. It was the way to leap, as it is for many men unheard here, through a closing door.
Another disastrous trope involves announcing a conclusion as though without premises. “We can see it’s a fear of being called ‘gay’ that stops straight boys being positive about their bodies,” she writes. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. It’s not just homophobia that makes boys worried about showering with their coevals. Trust me.
Like the brains behind heteronormative patriarchy, Peterson, Moran enjoys issuing edicts. Her Rule Number Two, for instance, states: “The patriarchy is screwing men as hard as it’s screwing women.” “Nah,” I wrote in the margin. The patriarchy does have its downsides for men, but its most terrible consequences such as raping, underpaying, genitally mutilating, harassing both at work and on the street are overwhelmingly things that men do to women. Or is there a memo I didn’t get?
As Truman Capote wrote of something else, this isn’t writing, it’s typing. Sometimes Moran doesn’t even type. She cuts and pastes. For instance, she prints Hollywood star Mark Wahlberg’s loony daily fitness regimen. Perhaps the point here is to show how men are tyrannised by unrealistic body images, but how refreshing it would have been for Moran to cut and paste, say, Proust’s questionnaire. “My favourite occupation: Loving. My dream of happiness: I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it. What would be my greatest misfortune? Not to have known my mother or my grandmother. What I should like to be: Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.” That’s a real man with relatable experiences beyond Moran’s philosophy.
Then there are the space-filling listicles. Good things about men? Non-judgmental, trusting, up for anything, brave, joyous. “Then I realised I was basically describing dogs.” Why is it easier to be a woman than a man? Women have all the best songs (nonsense), don’t get embarrassing erections in public (true), while periods are an “absolutely failsafe excuse” (interesting take).
In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby skewered male shortcomings with a protagonist who couldn’t help but make lists about stuff. Hornby’s point there and in About a Boy was that men don’t grow up because they don’t need to. Moran writes like one of Hornby’s manbabies.
If women need men like a fish needs a bicycle, then men need this book like Andrew Tate needs another reason to shut up. Women need this book even less. But if it turns up in your Christmas stocking don’t act surprised, gents. Just put it on the pile with the Viz T-shirts.
• What About Men? by Caitlin Moran is published by Ebury (£22) . To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
