On Men : masculinity in crisis.
Anthony Clare Chatto & Windus 2000

God, please, save us from experts. This book is written by a "Professor of Psychiatry" and all-round guru to the BBC. It is thick with footnotes and scholarly references and the author speaks with all the ponderous authority of his rank. What a pity, what a shock to discover that On Men : masculinity in crisis is nothing more than a huge pudding of facts hiding dark slivers of prejudice. We hardly know where to start.

Let's start with page 123 in the section entitled "The age of the amazon" (and we are not talking dotcom super-stardom here). "Prior to Viagra", we learn, "men (sic) were putting their faith and hope in a plethora of pills, potions and gadgets including vacuum-constriction pumps, injections into the penile vascular system of agents to act on GMP and other relevant enzymes, surgical implantation of stiffening rods and surgery to the actual blood vessels". Well, really! What, all men?

Anyway, hold these lurid images of sexual desperation in your head or wherever for a second while we fast-forward to page 129 in the chapter revealingly named "Farewell to the family man" (Farewell?) :

"The decline of the traditional nuclear family represents one of the less recognised but arguably the most significant of all threats to phallic superiority".

Beginning to feel uncomfortable? Afraid there is more. Cut to page 2000.

"Men do split women into good and bad, mother and monster (sic), saint and sinner, madonna and whore (sic), but the split is never resolved in favour of either".

Notice once more the terrible confidence in the blanket descriptions of "men" and "women" and this crude language that claims to understand the battle of the sexes for us. Clare's whole book is culturally located somewhere between the Daily Mail and Radio 4, a place where time stands still and where provincial platitudes hide deep neuroses about sex and gender and love.

Everything about this book references the now sadly fashionable decline-is-the-only-truth school of social analysis.Clare just has to prove that the major socio-economic changes of the last thirty years have not become a progress at all. Men are unhealthier, more stressed in a fevered workplace, emotionally eviscerated by women's new power, driven to abandon their responsibilities to homes and children… It's all become too, too ghastly and a fully-grown "crisis of masculinity" is the result.

The trouble though is that none of this is ever actually proved in any proper analytical sense at all.

Across On Men, bits of fact can slur into diagnostic conviction in moments of outrageous intellectual manipulation. Anthony Clare has opinions to sell - not analysis to offer. A trivial notice might say that finding a psychiatrist who claims that mental illness is rampant is like finding a greengrocer who says we should all eat more cabbage or an arms dealer who says that we all need handguns these days, don't we? And yes, towards the end, Clare does offer a somewhat unsurprising opinion about what, as crisis eats our mortal soul, we should be teaching our school-children these days. "What is needed is a proper, systematic and co-ordinated introduction to human psychology…". Not so much healing as special pleading. An academic insisting on the primacy of the discipline where he makes his living. Not a pretty sight.

But this is not the worst of it. Clare has to face quite a lot of evidence that men are, en masse, actually improving as fathers and spending more time with their children. This would indeed be a conventional view in many research houses and think-tanks in the UK. But, of course, any such suggestion is seriously destructive of Clare's central claim that men are in a state of continuous cultural detumescence and that, as a result, the whole of society needs help. So, how does he treat this evidence? Well, by suggesting that it is not there at all! For evidence of increased parental responsibility "does not necessarily mean that, overall, children are receiving as much or more attention from their parents". (Eh?) And what's more : "The greater involvement of fathers may reflect the trend towards less involvement of mothers due to the demands of the workplace". But strangely for a book that closes with 27 pages of footnote references, this "trend" goes un-referenced, unmeasured, unproved. Yes, when the evidence does not suit, give it a quick trashing.

And it gets worse still. This section, from which we quote, elides into a discussion about men being inhibited as fathers by "the spectre of child sexual abuse", a phenomenon which will, it is alleged, increasingly force them to keep their emotional distance as a result. Clare clearly feels much more at home with the possibilities here. Stunningly, a further verbal elision takes us to what he calls "the terrible epidemic (sic) of child sexual abuse". Not one figure or fact corroborates such a claim : only a footnote reference to a chapter in an obscure book about children written in 1994. This is just the worst kind of cheap mental stunt; an attempt to horrify the audience into agreement, a massive exaggeration of a genuine anxiety, a subliminal claim that if you are against child abuse then you must agree with all my points of analysis.

This is essentially a book about a man's religious faith. He believes in his version of strong families and traditional values. He has to prove that we have turned away from righteousness and thus have found only misery. You can feel the tingle of his upbringing running down the spine of his ideas. Now, we are not here to moralise. There is nothing wrong with being a conservative, a secular priest, a believer in the wisdom of the ages. But there is something very wrong with being so totally manipulative that you have to bend all facts to fit your convictions and not the other way around. Clare virtually says out loud that children are better being raised in the conventional way by their natural father (and not "step" alternatives), almost no matter how that father actually behaves. This is a view he simply must prove. Things as important as this cannot be allowed to become matters of opinion. Troublesome facts must kicked into the long grass. This all gives us a really distressing reading experience.

We close with a revealing little quote from the last chapter of On Men. Fatherhood is being praised as the finest state (of grace?) a man can enter. Then suddenly Clare says this :-

"I have no firm views one way or another concerning the fitness or otherwise of gay or lesbian couples to be parents".

Oh, come on, Anthony, why not?

You have such firm views on everything else.