There is no male equivalent of feminism — and that’s a problem

Caroline Ffiske’s recent article on the sorry state of Britain’s middle-aged men touched a nerve.

Yes, men run the country, the corporations — they run the world. Or at least, some men do. The continued dominance of men is unfair, counter-productive and undeniable. But Ffiske’s piece was driving at something quite different, and it made a thought coalesce that had been lurking for quite a while.

Despite all the advantages that men enjoy, she pointed out, middle-aged men are still killing themselves at a far higher rate than women. Men in the UK remain three times more likely to take their own lives than women — and men aged 45-49 have the highest rate of suicide, nearly quadruple that of women of an equivalent age.

A deep current of unhappiness runs through British men, despite their social and economic advantages over women. These advantages may give them power, but perhaps they are not the blessing they appear to be.

The deepest expression of manliness that I see tends to be expressed in an excessive work ethic. Manliness now rarely finds expression in fighting or in any sort of physicality. For most middle-aged men, it’s the role of “provider” that they take on, with all its atavistic echoes of the chest-thumping hunter-gatherer.

To be a man is to provide and to be a real man is to provide lots, which means working as hard as possible. To be busy. Really busy. “Yeah, I’ve got a lot on at the moment. It’s crazy.” I’ve written about the dangers of this before. This fixation on excessive work is deeply unhealthy, but for many it’s the only real expression of manliness that they can make.

What it leads to are wealthy men who have taken about a decade off their life expectancy through absurd over-work and who don’t know their own children. That in any case is the experience of many of the masters of the universe — most of them men — who form the object of so much anger and envy. If there is a power imbalance between the sexes, then these men are most responsible for it.

The brutal irony of this great male act of self-sacrifice is that it ends up not being worth it — it fails the “death-bed” test. By which I mean, when you lie there on the edge of the abyss, life passing before your eyes, will you think to yourself “I wish I’d spent more time in the office?” That question contains its own answer.

And so the manly role of the “provider” — one who leaves the family home on the 6:43 from platform two and returns long after the kids have gone to bed — is revealed as a sham. It’s an empty pursuit. There is no happiness to be found there. No matter how hard he pushes, how many deals he closes and how much money he earns, the existence remains ultimately an empty one. The most commonly taken path to manliness turns out to lead nowhere.

The real problem is that men don’t know what to think of themselves. There is no “theory of modern man”. Women, on the other hand, have a vibrant and brilliant feminist body of thought, dating all the way back to Wollstonecraft, one that takes in literature, criticism, art and cinema. And what have men got? The Fast and the Furious. Football. Top Gear.

There are some popular male writers who have dwelt on what it means to be a man nowadays, but their failure has stemmed from being essentially oppositional — from trying to define a body of ideas to range against feminism. These writers are all from the political right, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that most of them are simply out to trigger the feminists, rather than develop a genuinely original body of thought.

But men, even though most of us don’t know it, want something more than this. What is really needed is a male equivalent of feminism. And I am not talking about a counter-argument to feminism, mainly because as any right-thinking person can see, there really is no counter-argument to feminism. There needs to be a complementary system of thought that speaks to the male half of the population and that works alongside feminism.

The US diplomat Dean Acheson once remarked that, “Britain had lost an Empire and not yet found a role”. I think the same can be said of British men — and the evidence for this can be seen in the huge number of middle-aged British men who take their own lives. The question then, is who will speak for the men — and when they speak, what will they say?