MEN A Guide

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In 2017, as the world reeled from a seemingly endless series of abuse scandals involving rich and famous men, the concept of “toxic masculinity” moved from the polite byways of academic discourse into the cacophonous mainstream. There were calls for men to put their house in order, to address the fact that so many of their number saw the exercise of brute power as an essential component of their sexual identity. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in the Guardian, the solution to the whole ugly problem lay, at least partly, “in how men can discourage each other from the idea that dominating and harming women enhances their status”.

A couple of years later, it’s worth asking how that conversation between men seems to be going. Has masculinity begun the hard work of self-interrogation, or has it merely looked for ways to change the subject? Two new books – both of them addressing the relationships between men and women, and the exercise of power in domestic spaces – suggest that, where the discussion is underway, we’re not far past the throat-clearing stage.

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In Daddy Issues, Katherine Angel argues that, while “the concept of patriarchy is having a resurgence”, and there’s a new interest in scrutinizing male power across a range of contexts, the role of the father has so far been given a free pass. “Discontent with fathers has increasingly been privatised within feminist discourse”, she writes. “Daddy Issues have been relegated to the realm of personal problems.” The special status thus accorded to fatherhood – its exemption from the usual lines of feminist critique – means men can use it to whitewash masculinity. They can gain points for demonstrating the virtues of tenderness and responsibility, while still indulging in fantasies of domination:

These days, sentimental dads get a lot of cultural cachet. New fathers, misty-eyed, proclaim their feminism when they first hold their newborn baby daughter. Overnight, they are transformed into heroic defenders of women’s rights – though it’s a defence that blurs into a defence of their daughter’s purity; it relies, in other words, on an identification with a predatory masculinity that a father knows but now disavows; he sees into the dark soul of masculinity, now that he loves a creature he realises is vulnerable to its violence. And the adulation a father receives when he does the mundane, relentless work of parenting – when he “helps” with the children, or “babysits” them – reveals how ordinary acts of parental work and care add a glow of sanctity to a father, while passing unnoticed, because expected, in a mother.

The aura of “sanctity” attached to “hands-on” fathers means we allow ourselves to believe that the power they wield (“whether they like it or not, and whether they claim or disown the patriarchal role history has given them”) will be benignly deployed. But there’s no guarantee that their private face looks anything like their public one, or that either face will remain constant across diverse circumstances. As Adam Mars-Jones put it in Venus Envy (1990), his study of gender politics in the work of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan: “the persona of the father is a liberating construction … A man’s children can be his property one minute, and his virtue the next”. Angel sifts the evidence of contemporary culture – from Sarah Moss’s novel Ghost Wall (2018) to BBC Radio 4’s long-running drama series The Archers – to expose some of the ways in which our society gives fathers free rein to coerce and manipulate their children, and their daughters in particular. “If we really want to think through the perpetuation of violence towards women, and towards all those deemed inferior in the hierarchy of masculine power”, she writes, “then we … need to keep the modern, civilised father on the hook.”

There is a bit of blurring, in Daddy Issues, between abuses of patriarchal power and abuses of parental power, and between what’s bad for daughters specifically and for children more generally. But Angel is alert to violent impulses wherever they’re found: “one of the pressing tasks that our unsteady, unfolding #MeToo times ask of us is not just to confront our own status as victims of male dominance, but to reckon, too, with our own desires for retribution, revenge and punishment; with our own fantasies of truth-telling and aggression”. At one point in the book she discusses her mixed feelings about the moment when, in the course of a panel event in New York City, the English comedian John Oliver confronted Dustin Hoffman over accusations of historic sexual harassment that had been levelled against him:

It’s not clear to me that Oliver was wrong to do this, but it’s not clear to me that he was right, either … What made me uncomfortable was that this spectacle – this welcome spectacle, even – of a man holding another man to account, was subject to the same logic of punishment and humiliation as the cruelty it was ostensibly challenging. At the heart of this exchange was a display of power asserted over another, and a pleasure taken in the other’s abject position.

Angel calls Oliver’s intervention a “spectacle” and a “display”, but she could go further and say that it was agitprop theatre: a cathartic bit of drama that pitched heroic masculinity against its evil twin. “No one stands up to powerful men”, Oliver told Hoffman, but when the one doing the standing up is himself a powerful man, the rebellion has been managed with minimal disruption to the sexual status quo.

Some of Angel’s sharpest and most disturbing observations are to do with the widespread assumption in our culture “that there must be a kind of romance between father and daughter” – an assumption captured in her punning title. “But if there is a romance”, she wonders, “why are we so intent on it being the daughter’s romance?” She points out that in Hollywood comedies such as Meet the Parents and Father of the Bride, the father’s sexual possessiveness of his daughter is taken for granted. “A father’s love is revealed in his jealousy” in such films. Meanwhile, paternal admonitions about caddish young men can be seen to reveal a displaced sexual boasting: “A father warns his daughter about men’s intentions … a father thereby warns his daughter about himself, his past self, too”. Women would suffer a lot less, Angel argues, “if fathers could acknowledge their jealousy, and their projection – their annexing of their daughters’ erotic life to their own vanity”. The solution, once again, lies in men taking a full and honest account of the appetite for dominance that underpins their sense of masculinity.

A radical approach to the masculine cross-examination of masculinity is proposed by David Shields in The Trouble with Men, a book that sets out to dismantle the myth of male strength and self-sufficiency. For men to “see women as real”, Shields argues, they need to “get some distance on themselves as vectors on the grid of male sex-drive and understand that their fantasy life is inevitably underwritten by howling weakness”. To this end, he lays out both his fantasy life and his howling weakness in lurid detail. The book is unusually honest about what Shields calls “the blue movie running pretty much nonstop in every man’s mind”: it takes in, among many other such topics, his long-standing wish to indulge in anilingus, his visits to peep shows and massage parlours, and the desire stoked in him by Pippa Middleton’s backside. But it also seeks to account for his own psychopathology, tracing much of it back to his dysfunctional relationship with his mother: “a terrifying figure of Olympian hauteur and disdain” who “continually belittled me, mocked me, hit me, hated me, taught me to hate myself”. Addressing his thoughts to his wife – revealing himself more fully than he ever has before – Shields presents the book as a way “to create an intimate connection between you and me”, and implies a benefit for communication between men and women more generally.

The Trouble with Men is constructed, like much of Shields’s recent work, in collage style, with disjointed paragraphs and freestanding quotations taken from a range of sources: great books, minor books, emails from the author’s friends. He tends to use these excerpts to buttress his own remarks, to provide some evidence for the essentialism implied by his title – “it isn’t only my mind that works like this”, the message seems to be – but though their authors are identified in square brackets, the quotations are rarely given any context, and their provenance can be obscure. At one point he attributes the following to Angela Carter: “There’s no romance without female masochism”. It would be nice to know where this comes from, since it seems out of keeping with various other statements Carter made. In The Sadeian Woman (1979), an exploration from a feminist perspective of the very themes listed in Shields’s subtitle, she spends much of her time unpacking the social construction – that is, the contingency – of female masochism.

Masochism and its opposite number are central concepts in Shields’s book: he believes that they’re present in every relationship, and in his own marriage he views himself as the submissive partner, his wife as the “subtly” sadistic one. This obtains in the bedroom (“the only thing that’s sexy to me is what hurts”) as well as in a number of other contexts, some of them fairly surprising (“I truly love how little you like any of my books”). We’re invited to read The Trouble with Men as a masochistic project, and it’s true that Shields reveals plenty of embarrassing stuff about himself. But as Angel puts it in Daddy Issues, “writing isn’t simply exposure: it’s also protection”.

Shields doesn’t offer many glimpses of his own behaviour as a father, but at one point he recalls his wife telling him: “You’re forty … Time to move on and let our daughter be the needy one”. His failure to explore more deeply the effects of his “weakness” on those around him – and the ways in which weakness can be just as tyrannical as strength – perhaps demonstrates the limits of his professed masochism. It’s certainly the case that by describing his wife as the sadistic partner in the relationship, he rhetorically vests most of the power (to coerce and to hurt) in her. More generally, by presenting men as inherently weak, he tends to ignore their structural power. There are moments when this leads him to some uncomfortable places: “People will say about an especially pretty little girl, ‘She’s gonna be a heartbreaker’ – which is, to me, an odd and revealing phrase. What does it mean, exactly? It means that when she grows up, she will use her beauty as a weapon (and is expected to)”.

But the really “odd and revealing” thing about the phrase is surely its barely concealed sexualization of the little girl. Analysed a tiny bit more closely, it means something like: “let’s project our reaction to this child’s appearance into the future, when it won’t be so disturbing to us – and for good measure, let’s make her entirely responsible for our reaction”. Shields’s inability to parse this sort of thing makes you wonder if he really is the best guide to the reeking back streets of the male psyche. And for all his reliance on quotations from other writers, it’s striking that he doesn’t engage with any of those – Judith Butler, for instance – who have viewed male masochism as a subtle strategy for asserting phallic power.

Despite expectations raised by its title, The Trouble with Men doesn’t have much to say about the recent slew of high-profile abuse scandals (Harvey Weinstein receives a single mention). But Shields did deal with them directly in an article that appeared this summer in Psychology Today entitled “Men, #MeToo, and Mommy Issues”. There he argued that Roger Ailes’s “mask of inviolable strength” was rooted in his “extreme vulnerability”, while “a crucial aspect” of Weinstein’s motive was “clearly (if indirectly) self-abasement”. There’s doubtless some truth in both these propositions, and Shields is courageous to make an effort at understanding rather than condemning out of hand. But to provide psychological explanations of Weinstein’s or Ailes’s behaviour at the expense of structural ones – to turn abuses of power into straightforward expressions of powerlessness – is surely to ignore the larger part of the problem.

Both Angel and Shields hold the traditional heterosexual family responsible for some of the more toxic elements of contemporary masculinity. But where Angel focuses on the various privileges accorded to fathers, Shields is more interested in the relationship between boys and their mothers. He quotes the American critic Laura Kipnis:

The problem for men is that they had mothers. Having once been children, at a time when women controlled their bodies in humiliating and disempowering ways, men seek to turn the situation around in adulthood. Mother-dominated child-rearing, thought [Dorothy] Dinnerstein, is the reason behind men’s loathing of women and everything culturally inscribed as female. Both men and women remain semi- human and monstrous under such arrangements, and this is both our social situation and our personal tragedy: men can’t give up ruling the world until women cease to have a monopoly on ruling childhood.

We know, because he tells us in The Trouble with Men, that Shields finds evidence for this world view in his own upbringing. (Angel, by contrast, doesn’t write directly about her relationship with her father.) At one point he quotes his therapist telling him: “emotionally, your mother raped you all”. But where Angel is sensitive to the fact that she both selects and prosecutes all the evidence in her book (“in writing I create the object – the reader – the father – I can destroy, and who will survive that destruction”), Shields demonstrates no real awareness of the power he wields in the act of writing. “I can’t imagine what it feels like to humiliate another person”, he assures us at one point, but it’s hard to square that with the existence of a book that he acknowledges his wife wasn’t looking forward to (“it’s so perfect that you don’t want me to write this book … if you were fine with me writing it, I’d have no desire to write it”), and which holds up several aspects of her personality to public scrutiny: her “reservoir of coldness”, her “tendency to exaggerate”, even some of her sexual preferences.

There must be a tone available to a responsible, self-critical, post-Weinstein masculinity that lies somewhere between John Oliver’s pious opprobrium and Shields’s abject oversharing. Both seem to exhibit a desperate (whether conscious or unconscious) desire to distinguish their own masculinity from the toxic variety, but the difference is always going to be a question of degree rather than of kind. If men can’t base their conversation on that premiss – if we can’t try to look for the Weinsteins in us all – then #MeToo will have had a much more limited impact than, back in 2017, people dared to hope.