An Instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller
With her signature candor and wit, New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Moran attempts to answer societyâs weirdly unasked question: What About Men?
Like anyone who discusses the problems of girls and women in public, Caitlin Moran has often been confronted with the question: âBut what about men?â And at first, tbh, she dgaf. Boys, and men, are fine, right? Feminism doesnât need to worry about them.
However, around the time she heard an angry young man saying he was âboycottingâ International Womenâ Day because âIt's easier to be a woman than a man these days,â she started to wonder: are unhappy boys, and men, also making unhappy women? The statistics on male misery are grim: boys are falling behind in school, are at greater risk of depression, greater risk of suicide, and, most pertinently, are increasingly at risk from online misogynist radicalization. Will the Sixth Wave of feminism need to fix the men, if it wants to fix the women?
Moran began to investigateâtalking to her husband, close male friends, and her daughters' friends: bringing up very difficult and candid topics, and receiving vulnerable and honest responses. So: what about men? Why do they only go to the doctor if their partner makes them? Why do they never discuss their penises with each otherâbut make endless jokes about their balls? What is porn doing for young men? Is sexual strangling a good hobby for young people to have? Are men ever allowed to be sad? Are they ever allowed to lose? Have Men's Rights Activists confused âpowerâ with âempowermentâ? Are Mid-Life Crises actually quite cool? And whatâs the deal with Jordan Petersonâs lobster?
In this thoughtful, warm, provocative book, Moran opens a genuinely new debate about how to reboot masculinity for the twenty-first century, so that âstraight white manâ doesnât automatically mean bad newsâbut also uses the opportunity to make a lot of jokes about testicles, and trousers. Because if men have neither learned to mine their deepest anxieties about masculinity for comedy, nor answered the question âWhat About Men?,â then itâs up to a busy woman to do it.