It is common for women to describe men as 'boys'. To her way of thinking he never grows up, while she does. This attitude is as matronizing as his is patronizing. He puts her down by claiming not to understand her, that she is indeed beyond understanding, and she keeps her self-respect by claiming the opposite. Men and women are seldom more equal than in their lack of understanding of one another. Why else would women enjoin men to 'get in touch with their feminine side'? But where does he find it? How does he look for it? Does it even exist? Perhaps, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, 'there is no there there'. To ask men to improve themselves by relating to their feminine side is to ask them to become like women, but men are distinct: they are possessed of the differences that make for a real difference.

So why, some women ask, must his differences make him so brutally dominant? For too long, she feels, he has forced her into his social frame, into the role of the wife or the little woman, excluding her from his privileged world. As a result women feel anger and resentment, which are not unjustified. There is a need to strike a better balance between the traditional male view that he must manage her world (protect her; give her what he wants) and the hardline feminist view that she should gain power over his world (to protect both her and him from himself).

UPSET THE EGALITARIAN APPLECART

One way out of the conflict between his view of her and hers of him is to claim that there is essentially no difference between men and women. Anything he can do, she can do. Underpinning that conviction is the idea that, when we look beyond the obvious physical attributes, men's and women's brains are the same. But they are not. Science has upset the egalitarian applecart by conclusively showing that the sexes are distinct in how they act and think.

ANACHRONISM

Plainly the traditional male, the deeply unreconstructed brute himself, is a sad anachronism in this shifting, boundary-free world, and so the attempt is being made to change him. This can only be done, of course, if we accept that masculinity is a social, cultural, political or historical construct in the first place.

Today's man is under pressure to change. He is told to get in touch with his feelings, to be more considerate, to be more communicative and open to his emotions. Yet this new, softer, more caring male, just like the old-fashioned patriarchal man, is a one-dimensional caricature of what it is to be masculine. It is a form of sexism, a masculine stereotype as extreme and as crudely reductionist as its predecessor, the traditional male.

The traditional male is a dominating bully, a misogynist who stamps his views on women. He believes the female is merely a pale and inferior copy of himself, an adumbration of the superior male. This male sets the standard: he is normal, she is deficient. He sees only one side, his.

Any man who matches this stereotype is indefensible, for he reduces women to an inferior status by denying her essential and valuable feminine qualities. But equally, those with a gender agenda deny the essential male qualities.

The new, caring male has recognized his shortcomings and corrected them. He sees that the old sex boundaries had nothing to do with biology, but were the results of social pressures (perhaps he was given toy guns instead of dolls). This is the male who has got in touch with his 'female side', and the defining quality of his masculinity has become the denial of his masculinity. She is the new standard, and he can only aspire to be more like her.

The reader may find one or both of these views a farrago of nonsense. But both viewpoints, if only because they are widespread, must be taken seriously. Each highlights a set of social aspirations and both lead to false expectations. Past and present views of the male -- traditional and postmodern -- are equally poor measures of the masculine.

The traditional male is well known; the postmodern version is less so (at least outside the academic world). The 'new' man is predicated on the understanding that all significant differences in gender are socially conditioned, constructed or learned. This is crucial. A man is not born a man, but is made into one by the assumptions of the culture in which he grows up. Take away the assumptions and he would grow up -- what? A woman? There is an ambivalence here, but we need to recognize that there is a ritual obeisance in postmodern studies to all things complex and ambivalent. Postmodernism is a rejection of hitherto accepted certainties. Uncertainties are therefore good. The ambiguous is good, the clear-cut is bad. Seeing things as good or bad is also bad; right or wrong is wrong, and clarity is out.

...

He cannot experience the menses, birthing or lactation. Trivialities, says the feminist. Failure to experience such physical processes does not affect the male's ability to embrace and adopt feminine virtues: peace, cooperation, holistic dreams. The time when the lion will lie down with the lamb or, even better, the lioness. How much the world would be improved if only they, men, were more like women.

 ...

Postmodernists have no answers (answers are unambiguous, and unambiguity is bad), and that is the problem. They confront certainty with the question, 'How can you be so sure?' It is a useful logic for unsettling coherence (and is used not only by postmodern academics but also by neo-Nazis in their rejection of the existence of the Holocaust). It also advances all the frontiers of ignorance.

This postmodern 'understanding' rides in tandem with a common female approach to the world in general, an approach that is non-confrontational, non-judgemental, unaligned and multi-cultural. The past is seen as having been defined by male certainties, summed up in the dismissive acronym DWEM, which defines and rejects the philosophy, art, literature and cultural assumptions bequeathed to us by Dead White European Males. The old canon -- that body of knowledge which was thought essential to an understanding of our culture -- has been dismissed by many parts of the academy. To claim that Shakespeare is a greater writer than, say, some previously unknown woman is to be elitist. Thus we witness the feminization of the academy.

What is fixed is decreed authoritarian. What is authoritarian is male. What is male is bad.

We move from a time of sharply drawn lines to a time where the line drawn is against the drawing of lines. Fifty years ago a man was expected to play the dominant role; expected, if successful, to provide for his wife and children. Today the great expectation is of a sexual parity at home and at work, in the ways we relax and in the games we play, in our learning and in our parenting. Lines of demarcation, present for millennia, are being blurred.

 ...

A discrete body of knowledge is building up. Evidence is being brought together from mainstream science -- from psychology, psychiatry, neurophysiology, endocrinology -- and the sum of the evidence suggests that men and women are different. It does not suggest that one is better than the other, it makes no claims for 'equality', it simply describes the differences. To understand those differences is to understand each other. Mutual respect can only be based on a clear-eyed acceptance of sexual 'difference; not on their denial.

...

The new orthodoxy claims that there is no distinctive male mind -- nor, indeed, a distinctive female mind. The old demarcation between him and her has been replaced with a muddling whirl of complex and shifting social assumptions. 1 A reverence for equity in all things has dulled the critical faculties. 'You can't generalize about people.' 'You mustn't stereotype people.' 'All generalizations are misleading [except, of course, this one] .' 'We are all different' [a safely vacuous remark to which is often added] 'but not that different' -- which is to collapse meaning. Such claims are good ways to paper over cracks; but they hardly lead to understanding.

Return, for a moment, to the postmodern ideal of a man. He rejects the old traditional male assumptions, preferring to recognize the existence within himself of female virtues: cooperation, tolerance, non-judgementalism and an instinctive acceptance of equality (meaning sameness). O brave new world, that has such creatures in it. Get rid of the artificial lines and how the barriers will fall! There will be no more 'glass ceiling' (the barrier traditional males erect against female success), no more 'homophobia' (the barrier which encourages heterosexual males to treat gays as lesser beings). The lion, lioness and lamb are all one.

But suppose this postmodern ideal is wrong. Not morally wrong, but scientifically wrong. Suppose, perish the thought, that there are lines, not drawn by society but etched by blind, uncontrollable nature. Lines as ineradicable as the leopard's spots. Lines drawn by biological forces.

That is the subject of this book, which attempts to explain the findings of current scientific research into gender differences. The assumption of the book is not that 'we are all the same', but rather that we are distinctly different. That to be a man is not to be an inferior version of a woman, nor a better version, but to be what nature intended. This is not to say that a man (or woman) cannot change, but it is to claim that there are constant masculine values. The postmodernists want men to change, to become, indeed, more like women; when men constantly fail to live up to their expectations it should be allowed that the expectations themselves might be false, and here science can be of assistance.

We hear a lot these days about the 'new man'. He is more sensitive than the older model, more ready to help about the house or to spend time with his children. He is civilized, de-clawed and gentle. He can still be strong, of course, but his strength is manifested by patience and emotional warmth. This paragon sounds suspiciously like a female; indeed, it is often said that the new man is 'in touch with his feminine side'. The supposed compliment betrays a fin de millennium unisex ideal. It is RuPaul, supertransvestite, advertising M.A.C.'s Viva Glare lipstick (all profits to an AIDS charity). It is Generation X- with a splash of Calvin Klein's CKOne - cruising the line between sexual identities and possessing the best traits of both with none of the old male's inconvenient faults.

Today New Man is updated by another: Postmodern Man, the new man dressed to the hilt in academic theory. He is also a sharing, softer sort of guy, less competitive than the traditional male, and at home with his amorphous sexuality. He too is meant to be in touch with his female side. It might seem, then, that there is a biological component to his makeup. But no, he is entirely moulded by social forces. He is a human object of whom no part is given by nature. Postmodern man is a boy-child of intellectuals who teach gender studies. New man is a creation of popular feminism, media hype and out-of-touch copywriters. What is common to both postmodern man and new man is that they are aspirational figures: neither exists outside the academic mind or Gucci perfume ads. There is one big obstacle to the whole theoretical caboodle: a realistic account of sex differences will close the door on the intellectual postmodern republic.

 ...

Some cynics may doubt whether this gender-bending new postmodern man truly exists outside advertisements, women's magazines and a few urban enclaves, but the ideal persists. It is based on the assumption of bisexuality: that within each of us lies both a male and a female nature, and that the male can be tamed by getting in touch with his feminine side. A man who succeeds in doing so will be less threatening, especially to women and gays, and it is hardly surprising that most of the strident headline pressure for men to cast off their old macho image and become sensitive, caring, new-model males stems from the women's and homosexuals' lobbies. Women and gays, after all, have most to fear from the old, unreconstructed male who can be intolerant, crude and show a frightening capacity for violence; the new man, if he can be fetched into existence, will be a much pleasanter creature. We have turned Professor Higgins's question on its head. Now we ask why a man can't be more like a woman?

Perhaps the most extreme and obvious example of this assumption is seen in America where, in the last few years, lawyers have forced the hitherto male-dominated military to open all its doors to women. The result has been legal equality and constant trouble. The men are consistently accused of insensitivity or, worse, of sexual harassment -- and it does not take much for a serviceman to be accused of that most heinous crime. Indeed, according to guidelines laid down by the Pentagon, if a soldier merely looks at one of his female colleagues for more than three seconds then he is harassing her. The US Navy even closed itself down for a whole day so that its men could be lectured on the evils of sexual harassment. The whole experiment, which rushes on with the inevitability of the Gadarene swine nearing the precipice, can be simply summarized: women demand equal opportunity, gain it, then complain that the men behave badly. 'Sensitivity training', or even disciplinary action, then follows to change the men's behaviour to make them gentler; in fact, to make them more like women. It would be easier, surely, to recruit only women?

 ...

Assertions of androgyny, that the male has a 'female' side waiting for his embrace, is made nonsense by science. To tell a man to 'get in touch with his female side' is an insult, for it implies that his male side is inadequate. Do women alone show concern, love, compassion, sympathy or kindness? To suggest as much is as offensive as to suggest that only men possess courage, honour, audacity or determination. For a man to have compassion or for a woman to display courage does not require a peculiar internal facet of the opposite sex but common humanity, and within the pool of common humanity lies an extraordinary range and variety of people.

 ...

Common sense, not to mention the lessons of several thousand years of history, might give us pause about the underlying assumption that men and women are the same, but those with a social agenda ignore the evidence and insist that culture alone is responsible for our masculinity or femininity. Such pundits might not really matter -- they could be classed with other eccentrics like those who still believe the earth is flat -- except that these postmodernists have inordinate influence in education, government and, at least in the United States, in the media.

Yet research laboratories are producing evidence that contradicts this new orthodoxy.

We have seen that men are not made like women. Their aptitudes and skills are different. Not worse, not better, just different. A good father does not need retraining by the state to raise his children, he must just do what is right by his beliefs, and if society expects men to be surrogate mothers then it will be disappointed. Many men desperately want to be good fathers, but feel inadequate and confused because they fail to do what women want. They escape from the home because they feel that their own skills and nature are not valued; nor, perhaps, needed?

THE NEW MAN SHOULD DO HIS FULL SHARE OF HOUSEWORK

 There is a common belief that men do nothing about the house. They slump in front of the television, maybe deigning to raise their legs to let the vacuum cleaner go beneath their feet. In fact he does just as much work about the house as she does. The difference is that his work is mostly household (DIY) or car maintenance, while she does most (70-90%) of the cooking, shopping and housework.

The constant whingeing about men not carrying their share of the domestic burden seems particularly unfair when the statistics demonstrate that men work harder overall than women. In 1996 he averaged a working week of nearly 46 hours, six more than she did, while enjoying one day less holiday per year. In paid work he works twice as many hours as she does. Though men travel twice as far to work they tend to get there five minutes earlier than women (37 as against 33 minutes). Professor Colin Pooley of the University of Lancaster has shown that women not only use slower forms of transport but also use the time to shop and take the children to school. Most men do work hard, only to be told that they do not work hard enough and that they should be cleaning the carpets when they get home.

Endless bickering about who does what is destructive to a marriage, yet it is encouraged. Two-thirds of women say their men do not pitch in as much as they should. According to the magazine Top Sant, in a survey of 5,000 women, men help out equally in only one in ten households.

The New Man is reportedly a good guy and an example to all men. Once home from work he plays his full part in parenting and doing the household chores -- he's a true partner. He cares. He shares. How can this portrait of epicene domesticity not appeal? Here is the preferred male of the future: the new and improved house spouse. This rosy view of the New Man is, if not media driven, media fed, for the New Man is news (the appendage 'new' helps make him news). Much of what makes for a good feature story in journalism is what goes against common sense, against common belief and against the common grain. The New Man fits that prescription because he is what most men are not. He cleans. He cooks. He minds the kids. He irons! The only problem is that reported sightings of the New Man do not tally with the population on the ground.

 ...

Feminism, which encouraged women into the workforce, still refuses to accept any responsibility for the increasing breakup of marriages, for the general lowering of wages in the middle and lower income groups, or for the devaluing of motherhood and domestic work. The common feminist solution is that the male should spend less time at the workplace and take on more domestic chores -- as if he were the same as her (even as we find that he is not).

 ...

So a woman might well be annoyed that a man does not help keep the house clean, but in all probability he has not even noticed that it is dirty. He is oblivious to dust, dirt, and even to mould on a mug. His observational powers are simply not as acute as hers. He is not her and it's not because he's mean, unhelpful or does not care, its simply because these things do not register on his mind.

And can he even do the job as well as her? The organization of a man's brain makes running the home more difficult for him. The focused nature of his thinking makes it difficult for him to do many things at once. His brain is designed to go step by step, to concentrate on one job, to do it well and then go on to the next. The very nature of a home filled with the competing demands of children, laundry and cleaning makes it imperative that several jobs are all running at the same time.

It has become received wisdom in the last few years that the world would be a better place if only men could get in touch with their emotions. One (female) letter-writer to the Financial Times summed up the claim: 'if more men got in touch with their emotions the world would be a calmer, much calmer place. It is a beguiling vision; the world would be at peace, bereft of hostility, if men could only be a bit more touchy-feely, if they could weep openly, if they could be warmer, if they could simply become more like, well, women?

 ...

The demand that a man get in touch with his emotions is sheer psychobabble for, unless he is dead, a man is already in complete touch with them. It just so happens that his emotions are not hers. What that letter-writer was really saying was that if only men could be gentle, caring, considerate, forgiving, soft-hearted and compassionate, and, just as importantly, could express those virtues in soothing tones, then she would find the world a more congenial place. And doubtless she might, but would the world really be a better place if men's emotions were feminized? When danger lurks do we really want him to respond with empathy? His emotions are not hers, and because his can be far more explosive they require more rigorous controls.

The conclusion seems obvious. You can have a man, but you cannot have a man who feels, touches, cares, and empathizes like a woman, not if you want him to stay a man. And if you really want him to be in touch with his feelings, take care, for those feelings might be explosive.

So how do men show their emotions? He is more likely to do it by actions than by words, so when he rebuilds the kitchen cabinets, perhaps he is really saying 'I love you' (or perhaps he was just nagged enough). But what he won't do, hates doing, is talking about his feelings. He detests being under the microscope and, rather than endure the scrutiny, he will become curt, he will back off or he will simply walk away. He does not want to talk about it; she thinks everything could be put right if only he would, so she pushes him and he reacts angrily.

He needs space (even in company)

A famous actor, known for his many love affairs, was once asked what he liked most about women. 'Proximity,' he answered, but the truth is that men are not much given to proximity except when sexually aroused. He lies on the edge of the double bed so that they do not touch, and he reads nothing into that fact though she might read a lot. Indeed, she might think he is keeping his distance because he has no interest in her, but in truth he is keeping his distance because that is natural behaviour for a man. She finds allure in emotional closeness, he does not, and that aspect of a man is one of the hardest things for a woman to understand.

 ...

The wife-beater and rapist is not the norm, despite what proponents at the outer limits of the feminist movement preach. Instead such creatures are men who have never learned to control their strong feelings and who see atavistic violence as the only answer to their immediate problems. The rogue male who cannot control his temper or his lust is no more to be admired than the man who has never learned to control his bladder.

Control is the key to understanding a man's emotional life. He might swing between chilly detachment and over-heated responses, but most of the time he prefers to have things under control. This is why so many women believe men are emotionally cold, while the truth is that men simply fear their passions and so suppress them. Once more, those who deny that the male is distinct have a problem when they ask him to abandon the differences they deny.

Is it true, as Adrienne Burgess claims, that there is nothing in the nature of the male that disqualifies him from looking after his children in the manner of the female? By definition he has no maternal instincts, but the existence of those instincts is now denied by the postmodernists. To believe in the maternal instinct is a heresy, for if you think that women have a unique ability for looking after babies then that destroys the idea that there are no innate differences between men and women. The whole idea of the Man is predicated on his gentleness, sensitivity and willingness to use the baby changing stations in men's toilets.

The first obvious point to make is that women take far more interest in babies than men do, and the way a woman responds to a baby, her facial expressions and her gestures, are distinctly different. Some people will protest that these differing reactions are merely the result of social conditioning. Women, they will say, are bound to take more interest in babies because they have been the role of mother almost since the day they were born. If small boys were encouraged to play with dolls, would they not grow up to be as fascinated by babies as women are?

 ...

women are imposing their view of the world upon men, and this is the prevailing sexism in the unisex age: the age of the unsexed. Differences -- real, substantive and determinable -- in the mental worlds of the sexes are denied. It is a genderless dream, a world without sexual conflict in which fathers are mothers. There was a time when men did not expect to be present at their baby's birth (they were down the pub handing out cigars), but today he is an integral part of the 'birthing experience' and is expected to go hand in hand with the mother through the rest of his child's infancy. Many men are made to feel guilty by their inability to feel the right emotions during this process, but that guilt is imposed on him by a feminine view. The home truth is that he is not going to rock the cradle, though he might well build it. The New Man is a biological fantasy, a fancy of the New Woman.

A man can move with the times. He will collect the non-chlorine-bleached Pampers from Mothercare in the four-wheel-drive pickup, and he will even do more. He will love his children, play with them, and enjoy their company, but it is useless and counter-productive to force him into a unisex frame that denies what he is and tries to make him what he cannot be. Fathers are not mothers. Men don't iron. And he has no need to be ashamed of that. He has his own virtues and, if he is thoughtful, he will not impose his world upon hers. The mature human -- the real new man -- is in touch with minds other than his own.

We do not denigrate masculine traits that do exist -- that search for variety, action, competition, risks, in his hard-focused world. Nor do we ridicule her more caring, familial, connected, competent, security-conscious world. The easiest way for a mind, male or female, is to follow old courses. At the same time we do not look for -- radical change -- a different sexual chemistry or aesthetic as proposed by the social reformers of the sexes. Only by pointing out the differences in the brains does science open up windows on reality.

 ...

SUMMARY

· Men's brains are organized to deal with one thing at time. They find it difficult to do lots of different things at once.

· He is neurologically designed to find housework more boring and less rewarding than she.

· His brain is built for action, hers for talking; he does, she communicates.

· His primitive brain is more active -- he boils over more easily, then goes away to 'chill out'. Her communicative brain area is more active -- she likes to consider the problems.

· Men are not equipped to read the social cues -- they find it hard to gauge the emotional temperature. They do not feel the empathy with others' pain that she does.

· He is a creature of emotions -- but his are not hers. He has a passion that can explode -- a passion that is better under control.

 ...

He is not equipped to do the home-making jobs as well as she is. The sexes would be happier together if they were more generous about each other's virtues -- he has many.

We can continue to pretend that he has all the capacities to be like her, but it will only lead to disillusionment and resentment. He cannot be what society deems the 1990s man should be. The way to a good relationship lies in understanding the differences in the male and female mind. Learning to try and see things from his and her mind's eye. That way leads to peace -- contentment -- the other to strife.

The idea that men lack emotions or are not in touch with them is one of the most destructive of the myths. It has led to an assumption that if men were in touch with their emotions, men and women would live together in more harmony. There has been an expectation that he could and would change -- but he has failed to do so. She is angry with him and gives up. He is angry with her and, unable to fulfill her dreams, he gives up. Yet men have strong emotions -- or passions. He is a wise man who recognizes that and learns not to be too much in touch with them -- for they are his dark side.