Book Review: What Do Men Want: Masculinity and Its Discontents by Nina Power
By Patricia Patnode
Nina Power’s book, What Do Men Want: Masculinity and Its Discontents? is a kind, yet crass, exploration of the inter-gender communication crisis and the predicament of the modern Western man.
This book doesn’t tell the reader what men want, or even what they think they want, but it does consider what man is wanting for.
Power exposes the demonization of men in the media and broader society in the hopes that the sexes can commune again for family building.
She sympathetically dives into the ‘manosphere,’ meaning the many pro-masculinity online communities that seek to improve men’s dating lives as well as their physiques.
One reviewer of her book in The Guardian said, “Set against her caricaturing of bien-pensant liberalism, Power’s ostensibly reasonable call for compassion feels at best platitudinous, at worst disingenuous or even reactionary: most forms of political struggle involve some measure of conflict between competing groups; to renounce this altogether amounts to a politics of quietism.”
English writers, for some reason, assume their readers have a more advanced vocabulary than American writers do, apparently. After I googled 70% of the words in that paragraph, I realized that I disagreed with that rather rude take on her book. Young men are drawn to various manosphere personalities because they are lacking a sense of masculine purpose and understanding. When your brain isn’t fully developed, or you’re an isolated teenager with an absent father, you as a male may be searching for clarity.
Given that adult male suicides are on the rise, we should emphasize with and show charity towards young men.
There may not be a global war against men, but there most certainly is a cultural war against traditional masculinity in the West. In 1774, Lord Chesterfield, the pen name for a British statesman and diplomat, wrote an extensive collection of letters dictating appropriate manly behavior written to his son which were published posthumously as “Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman” (1774). Today, writing such directions about gentlemanly behavior and decorum could land a father on a government watchlist.
Some may say that women need to let men sort the issue of masculinity and the broader manosphere debates sort themselves out. I think there’s some truth to that, and Nina seems to agree based on her interview for the Lotus Eaters podcast. Still, we women do worry and think about our fathers, brothers and husbands. After all, women are certainly part of the problem, and will be part of the solution.
As she points out on page 10, “When working well, the family can provide sanity, protection and normality, a small haven amid chaos….eliminating the family very much suits an economy and a culture that create and prey upon the isolated, atomic individual…”
We need to carefully reflect on what behaviors in our own lives could be discouraging our ability to join and grow a family, and what characteristics we should intentionally cultivate in our children so they can avoid an atomized existence in orbit of the mal-manosphere.
What Do Men Want? is a lovely exploration of our present gender division. I look forward to the author’s future commentary.
Patricia Patnode is a columnist at The Conservateur and a Junior Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. She can be found on Twitter @IdealPatricia.
Media: George Plimpton, Jared Paul Stern, and Cameron Richardson January 1999 cc Larry Flink courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
