Well it’s not quite handbags at dawn. More like one particularly garish lady’s bag versus a home-made spear, the rough-hewn flint bound to its ash-wood shaft with nettle twine.

Because Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize-winning transvestite potter, so much admired in fashionable circles, has launched a blistering attack on fellow celebrity Bear Grylls, TV’s helicopter-hopping action man, and the kind of ‘old-fashioned masculinity’ he represents.

Sparking a row ahead of a new series on modern masculinity, All Man, which starts on Channel 4 tonight, Perry said that Grylls would be better off teaching people how to walk ‘into an estate agent in Finsbury Park and come out with an affordable flat’.

Grayson Perry attending a party at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. But there's more to Britain than just London you know, Grayson

That’s in North London, by the way. Like most of our cultural ruling class, Perry seems to think that Britain begins and ends with London.

Or hunting for a good state school for their children. Not foraging for wild mushrooms, eating seaweed or teaching a bunch of jungle wannabes how to survive on a desert island.

It’s a shrill but instructive outburst from the celebrated ceramicist and professional show-off, and Grylls responded in predictably robust style, saying of Perry’s attack: ‘It’s desperate. [Grylls’s TV programme] The Island celebrates masculinity. It shows what men can do when stripped of everything — if we’re suddenly without technology, without our car, without our supermarket and without our conveniences. Is it useless then?’

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The fact is that Perry’s comments are so spectacularly wrong-headed, so smug, ignorant and unimaginative that they almost defy belief.

You may love Bear Grylls or loathe him, or maybe just find him getting a bit too glossy and successful these days: too many swooping helicopter shots, too much hanging out with outward-bound celebrities — Barack Obama even appeared on his show.

But there’s no doubt that he approximates more closely to most people’s idea of a bloke than Grayson Perry. He has no fear of climbing cliffs, sleeping out in jungles or eating unusual parts of animals — and admits he dreads going to drinks parties and having to make small talk.

Perry is another kind of creature altogether, very much at home, one imagines, at a metropolitan cocktail party wearing one of his latest amusing creations: dressed as Pippi Longstocking perhaps or Anne of Green Gables. Fine, if that’s what butters your crumpet.

But he goes further: this is how all men ought to be nowadays, he argues. Exploring their feminine sides, playing with their identities and leaving all that manly outdoor stuff behind. It simply has no place, says Perry, in the modern world.

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But Bear Grylls and his macho world are part of a very British tradition that goes right back through the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, the founding of the Youth Hostel Association, the Boy Scouts (Grylls is Chief Scout) and that firm, no-nonsense hero of Empire with his neatly clipped moustache, Lord Baden-Powell.

It’s hard to imagine a less fashionable figure in today’s landscape than old Baden-Powell, yet his insights were timeless.

The great outdoors is a tremendous place to learn self- reliance, experience real risk, test your courage and learn to work in a team. To stop whining, put up with a few bumps and bruises, get the job done and come back home at the end of it pink-cheeked, a few pounds slimmer and altogether a fitter, better, happier person.

And what’s wrong with that?

No doubt it all sounds far too hearty and outdated in the fashionably languid salons frequented by the likes of Perry.

‘A hangover’ is what he calls Grylls’s style of Boy’s Own outdoor adventuring: a useless leftover from a vanished past.

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The truth is that boys (of all ages) are as desperate as ever to be allowed to be boys still. Witness the staggering success of The Dangerous Book For Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden, which went straight to the top of the best-seller charts on its launch in 2006 and is full of stuff about how to make a bow and arrow, lay tripwires, and hunt and cook a rabbit.

A health and safety nightmare, and, of course, a colossal hit, beaten in the sales charts after its publication in the U.S. only by Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows.

Yet our nannyish society becomes more regulated and feminised by the day, as even some outspoken feminists acknowledge.

In a culture weighted, almost prejudiced, against traditional masculinity, there can be few men who haven’t heard the complaint: ‘Oh, that is such a male way of looking at it!’

To which the most reasonable answer, I suggest, is: ‘Well, I am male. What do you expect?’

A generation of boys is growing up frustrated, bored to tears in a world of ‘No Skateboarding,’ ‘No Ball Games,’ ‘No Competitive Sports’; by history lessons that demand they empathise with the victims of the Empire, but never hearing those stirring tales of unbelievable bravery or grim self-sacrifice for a higher good that have gripped schoolboys for centuries. The Cockleshell Heroes? The Dam Busters? Nelson at Trafalgar? Not a chance.

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That whole field of masculine heroism, loyalty and comradeship — qualities that ultimately protect families, nations and win wars against tyrannical foreign powers — is dismissed by Perry contemptuously as being nothing more than a capacity for casual violence.

‘Men might be good at taking the risk of stabbing someone or driving a car very fast,’ he sneers. ‘But when it comes to opening up, men are useless.’

So, in Perry’s fantasy world, instead of cultivating physical courage, mental toughness and practical skills, men could make a more useful contribution to the modern world by talking about their feelings.

This is all we need. Already there are far too many weepy youths on talentless talent shows, blubbing because they just got pipped at the post by some other desperate warbler or criticised slightly by Simon Cowell.

And the cross-dressing potter wants more of this! God help us. Hasn’t Perry heard that, quite apart from everything else, Women Do Not Fancy Blokes Who Blub?

He is always eager to open up about his own feelings, of course. Nowadays, he favours what he calls a ‘Little Bo Peep’ look.

‘It’s the furthest from the macho look you could get,’ he gushes. ‘It’s vulnerable, it’s young, it’s humiliating. The fantasy of humiliation is a big drug for many men.’

T ell that to the thousands of white teenage boys for whom humiliation at school is a daily reality. Survey after survey has shown that young white males are struggling.

Grayson Perry sporting his Little Bo Peep look. The lady behind him seems to be admiring his shoes

They are 50 per cent less likely to attend university than women from the same socio-economic background, and 52 per cent less likely if they are from a poor background.

This is not because boys are more stupid than girls. It is they who are being kept back by the feminised system that education has become.

It’s unlikely Perry will see his desire fulfilled, that modern man will abandon his longing for risk, challenge, the outdoors, and settle down at home in a fright wig and a pair of satin pumps, eating a nice salad and feeling pleasantly vulnerable and humiliated. Most likely men will just ignore him and carry on doing whatever it is they like doing — even if that means spending an entire afternoon in their shed sorting their screws into slotted, double-slotted and Phillips.

Still, figures like Perry are influential, and his ill-thought-out prejudices and loud-mouthed opinions do huge harm.

For as the Roman poet Horace put it forcefully 2,000 years ago: ‘You can drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she will still return.’

And if male instincts are scorned, repressed and stifled by political correctness, they will simply come out in ever more ugly ways: drunkenness, mindless aggression, predatory and pornified sexual behaviour. You can’t civilise boys by turning them into girls. Only by turning them into better boys.

Perry’s message is the mirror- opposite of Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady — remember him? — who sang that notorious song: ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ His refrain today is more like: ‘Why can’t a man be more like a woman?’