The Sunday Times July 02, 2006

Get out of here, dweeb

I hate to sound like some crazy man-bashing paranoiac, but I have a theory that, at this moment in time, men hate women to an unprecedented degree.

The evidence is all around us, especially on the internet, where it seems pornography has become synonymous with abuse: as far as women are concerned there’s lots of the “adult”, and very little of the “consenting”; the humiliation of women is a recurrent theme.

It also informs the content of “lads’ mags”, where women are portrayed as either sexually avid huge-breasted freaks (hooray!) or whining “mingers” (boo!), with nothing in between and no other qualities apparently worth celebrating.

If you believe that these magazines are mostly read by unattractive, lonely, sexually frustrated adolescent males, the woman-hating on offer is likely to be formative, and is therefore pretty alarming. But it’s epidemic: see also the female contestants in the Big Brother house: all but one of those who remain have silicone breasts, two have long blonde hair extensions, all of them parade around in minuscule clothing.

Given that the show is watched by millions, it gives out a pretty deranged message about women.

Men may change nappies and rustle up salads, but they’re also getting more aggressive. The other week, my sister — who was nine months pregnant — honked at a pedestrian who had dashed out into the road in front of her car. Did he apologise, or walk away? No. He hurled a stream of the filthiest abuse and tried to climb into her car — the window was open — to get his point across better.

The fact that she was so clearly pregnant seemed to work as an added incentive to make her feel as distressed and frightened as possible. And he wasn’t some strung-out crackhead: he was a young man in a business suit.

I know it’s only one incident but I think this kind of pointless, spontaneous unburdening of male rage is now commonplace — in fact I think it’s behind road rage, air rage and all the other rages. They’re not about cars or planes or traffic or the Pringles running out. They’re about man rage.

Having said all of that, if I were a man, I might be raging too. Last week’s issue of Campaign magazine, the advertising industry’s bible, accused advertising agencies of portraying men as “castrated dweebs” who appeal to no one. What happened, the magazine asks, to macho types like the Gillette Man, the Milk Tray Man, or indeed the Marlboro Man? Where are the hunks?

And who are the emasculated saps who pop up on our screens during every advertising break — the Mr Muscle six-stone weakling in comedy underpants, who can’t even do a bit of light cleaning on his own; James Nesbitt’s buffoonish, disaster-prone character in advertisements for Yell, the online directory; the bloke in the Carling advertisement who cleans the house with his tongue after his girlfriend pours beer on the floor; Kris Marshall in those BT commercials, always lagging behind his new family.

Meanwhile, the way in which women are portrayed in advertising has also changed beyond recognition: there are very few Oxo Mum-style housewives left. They’ve all been replaced by knowing, sexy, powerful women, happy to ridicule their men at the drop of a hat. Even Asda briefly got in on the act, replacing the smiley, drudgey hausfraus of the past with, of all people, über ball-breaker Sharon Osbourne.

The public emasculation of men started off with an honourably feminist motive: doing away with macho clichés — with the notion that the big butch man was in charge while the docile little wifey was busy inside making a cordon bleu meal, being fertile and looking pretty.

But it’s gone too far, with disastrous results, which is why men who behave like men and say what men think (my esteemed colleague J Clarkson, for instance, or Gordon Ramsay) are fallen upon ravenously by hordes of men (and women) desperate for a bit of non-namby real manhood in their lives; why the aforementioned lads’ mags, on the few pages devoid of top totty, are full of tales of macho achievement; and why The Dangerous Book for Boys is the publishing success story of the year.

The irony in all of this is that women find macho men a thousand times more attractive than any of the saps on the television advertisements — and yet the saps are the ones that seem omnipresent.