Now self-help books are aimed at men

"Having fed every kind of female insecurity, we now aim self-help books at men. It’s a new market. Kiera O’Brien of the Bookseller magazine said: 'It’s almost like male readers are looking for guidance or reassurance on how to be a man in a post #MeToo world.' It’s a constant surprise that I haven’t been commissioned to write such a tome, although stretching 'Don’t be a dick' into thousands of words would be quite the ask.” 

This from Suzanne Moore in the Guardian. It illustrates the whole problem. We - by which I mean the sisterhood - would always go for the ‘don’t be a dick’ type of advice, if asked with insufficient time to think! This is because we do not, at a basic level, understand men at all. It is beyond us to grasp that when a man says, ‘Could you just move your legs further apart so that I can see up them?’ he is in fact trying to solve his life problem. Had we understood this, we would probably have been born men, or had the operation to get to the core of it some time ago. I can talk to the sisterhood about this mysterious behaviour, and they will quite understand my astonishment. Few men will. They will go into Wittgensteinian explanations of the complexity of language, legs, and how easy it is for us to misunderstand them. Legs, I mean. The problem is, they cannot move out of a place in which they are in perpetual denial, about themselves, their lives, their attitudes and their absence of a sense of a male future which has nothing whatever to do with legs.

Men need to talk to each other, and this is my conclusion. With no women present who can make awful jokes like the above, which go down like an atomic chastity belt in my experience. Men need to share what they think about women - what they really think, as opposed to trying to please the sisterhood.  I’ve noticed a few more sensitive of my male friends lately mentioning, cautiously, the things men say about women when they are talking among themselves. They always claim to be embarrassed by it, sometimes shocked, but nobody has yet explained to me how they then told their fellow males what a bunch of dicks they were! It seems it doesn’t happen. Men lead two parallel lives (at least two), the one they live when they are with women, and the one they live when they are with men. If a woman told me that she felt honour bound to be knocked about every Saturday night because that is what women do, I would tell her to get her head examined, and then find a man who could treat her like a real person and not a doll to break at whim. Or even consider not having a man at all! Which (outrageous suggestion though it is) would appear to be several points up on the previous scenario.

Men need to do what women have been doing for decades:  speaking their own truths, banging the table, kicking the cat (gently), reading liberation articles and books, discussing progress, holding sit-ins, raging and storming and ultimately weeping for what has been done to them! Only they know this. We have been trying our level best to tell them for decades, and for decades they have failed to hear us. I don’t think they can hear about the damage of patriarchy to them - not to us. When we mention it, it just makes them feel guilty and impotent. They need to tell each other, to discover for themselves that there are other ways to live, that they can choose for themselves, don’t always have to be nagged or lectured by feminists, or kicked into line by other men who always seem to know better how to be a man. And who tell them how far short they are falling? Which seems to be the way men relate to each other. (Search me, guv, I've no idea why this is an essential part of male relating.)

My great news is: a man can decide how to be a man without reading a single self-help book, which will know less than him about it, and is probably written by a woman anyway (the writer’s wife). I wish them all the luck in the world in this project.  But it is time they got down to it.