The sufferingent was a creature easy to mock and hard to pity, but you can understand why he popped up in the final decades of the 20th century. Trendspotters, marketing men, commentators — they’d all seen the future and there was no sight of men anywhere. They looked at the present and concluded that men were having a crisis of masculinity (COM).
The COM thesis went something like this: men were no longer sure of what their role was any more. They were suffering from a lack of respect; they were belittled in the boardroom and mocked in the bedroom.
Every other week a new survey would come out to say that men were overworked and stressed out; rates of suicide and depression were on the rise. Men were afraid of their feelings and their female side. They were redundant as providers and procreators.
The century that began with a bang of masculine Victorian optimism ended with the sad whimper of the sufferingent. Well, here we are three years into the new century and something has changed.
That plaintive cry of male suffering and self-pity seems to have faded. The sufferingent is no longer writing books about how hard it is to be a man; now books about the joys of fatherhood are the flavour of the month.
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The whole anti-male trend in popular culture seems to have disappeared. Jo Brand’s anti-bloke jokes, all those kick-men-in-the-nuts advertisements and the wilder excesses of girl power have all gone with the wind. Men as the enemy, men as the victim — both are anachronistic images in 2003.
In fact, men have dropped their claim to victimhood. We don’t want to be the new women, thank you very much. We’ve come off the couch, taken off our crown of thorns and are prepared to say it loud and proud — we’re here and we’re queer! Oops, sorry, wrong chant. What I meant to say is that for the first time in 20 years, it’s a great time to be a man.
In the 1990s it seemed that every month there was a new scientific study to show that male sperm rates were in decline and impotence was on the increase. But in the past month we’ve had some wonderful and unexpected good news. It seems that mother nature isn’t a crazy man-hating lesbian after all.
Let me explain. Not long ago, scientists were claiming that the Y-chromosome — that little bundle of DNA that makes a man a man — was, to put it in layman’s term, an effete little nonce who couldn’t cut it in the cut-throat jungle of the gene pool. It was predicted confidently that men were set to become extinct in a million years’ time.
But recently scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that the supposedly wimpy Y-chromosome is much tougher than scientists had thought. So men are not doomed and the future is not exclusively female. The other piece of good news is that life expectancy of British men has increased sharply in the past 20 years. According to the European Men’s Health Forum, 20 years ago the average life expectancy of the British male was 70. Today it’s 76. That statistic alone defies the whole men-are-in-bad-mental-and-physical-shape scenario that was at the crux of the COM thesis.
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And there are signs that the male species is evolving in the right direction. After the atavistic hedonism of laddism we are seeing the rise of the metrosexual. Who he? Think David Beckham. He’s the urbane male with a taste for grooming and style that only gay men used to enjoy.
It was Freud who posed the famous question: what does a woman want? Well if isn’t a guy free of nose hair, body odour and who dresses better and can admit that he likes listening to Barbra Streisand, then frankly I don’t know what women want.
Men have a greater freedom to choose how to live and be a man than ever before. The old fear about being less than a man because you’re sensitive, or care about your personal appearance, or show your emotions, is over.
Back in the days of laddism, this got a chap labelled as a wimp. I suspect that young men will be the great benefactors of these social and cultural changes. They’re growing up in a world with a greater degree of freedom to define what kind of man they are than ever before. And that can only be good for both men and women.
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Jonathan Miller is away