What About Men?
A Feminist Answers the Question
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An Instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller
With her signature candor and wit, New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Moran attempts to answer society’s weirdly unasked question: What About Men?
Like anyone who discusses the problems of girls and women in public, Caitlin Moran has often been confronted with the question: “But what about men?” And at first, tbh, she dgaf. Boys, and men, are fine, right? Feminism doesn’t need to worry about them.
However, around the time she heard an angry young man saying he was “boycotting” International Women’ Day because “It's easier to be a woman than a man these days,” she started to wonder: are unhappy boys, and men, also making unhappy women? The statistics on male misery are grim: boys are falling behind in school, are at greater risk of depression, greater risk of suicide, and, most pertinently, are increasingly at risk from online misogynist radicalization. Will the Sixth Wave of feminism need to fix the men, if it wants to fix the women?
Moran began to investigate—talking to her husband, close male friends, and her daughters' friends: bringing up very difficult and candid topics, and receiving vulnerable and honest responses. So: what about men? Why do they only go to the doctor if their partner makes them? Why do they never discuss their penises with each other—but make endless jokes about their balls? What is porn doing for young men? Is sexual strangling a good hobby for young people to have? Are men ever allowed to be sad? Are they ever allowed to lose? Have Men's Rights Activists confused “power” with “empowerment”? Are Mid-Life Crises actually quite cool? And what’s the deal with Jordan Peterson’s lobster?
In this thoughtful, warm, provocative book, Moran opens a genuinely new debate about how to reboot masculinity for the twenty-first century, so that “straight white man” doesn’t automatically mean bad news—but also uses the opportunity to make a lot of jokes about testicles, and trousers. Because if men have neither learned to mine their deepest anxieties about masculinity for comedy, nor answered the question “What About Men?,” then it’s up to a busy woman to do it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and feminist Moran (How to Be a Woman) tackles in this provocative outing a question often lobbed at her during speaking events: what about the struggles of the modern male? Though at first flummoxed by why she should care, Moran eventually realized that perhaps there was something to the issue. Marshaling commentary from friends, her husband, and respondents to her social media queries, Moran explores the contours of masculinity in the 21st century, wading into such hot-button topics as alpha male stereotypes, "incel" culture, and the "men's rights" activism of writers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson (to whom young boys have turned "in the absence of... relatable, sound advice coming from the good liberal progressive men of generation"). Elsewhere, she addresses men's mental health issues, sexuality, and friendships in sharp and funny—if not always rigorous—takes (a discussion of men's body image anxieties considers the current trend of men's jeans "so tight that they look sprayed on" and speculates that "if you weren't wearing trousers that were actively betraying you, a lot of those problems might disappear"). By her own admission, Moran is short on answers; she also has a tendency to lean on stereotypes. Still, she raises plenty of worthwhile questions about "what it is to be a boy and become a man in today's world," and does so with genuine curiosity, self-awareness, and humor. This promises to spark conversation.
