It was, if you think about it, only a matter of time. La Petite Anglaise, the Washingtonienne, Belle De Jour and the myriad other female blog sensations - for years women have been sharing their most intimate thoughts on the pursuit of love and the complications of longterm relationships, first online, and later (thanks to the lucrative deals many of them subsequently landed) in high-profile paperbacks. So yes, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, their male equivalents would want a chunk of the action. Who knew that modern man was so hostile? Or so angry? Or so utterly obsessed by sex? Meet the E Bachelors. The men who purport to offer the definitive insight into the psyche of the post-modern, single male.

Through their blogs, their YouTube contributions and their lecture tours, they disseminate a bleak vision of contemporary masculinity. Bitter, sex-obsessed, borderline misogynistic, really very depressing, they're the new hot properties on the literary scene where they are commanding the kind of book deals that the girl bloggers of five minutes ago can now only dream about.

The question is, are the E Bachelors for real? Are their feminist-baiting, body-fascistic, terminally-faithless and hyper-sexual memoirs serious signs of the zeitgeist? Or are they sensationalist exaggerations of minority attitudes, designed to generate as much controversy as they possibly can?

Spearheading the vanguard of E Bachelorhood is Eric Schaeffer, the 45-year-old writer and film director whose book and blog about his quest to find a wife, I Can't Believe I'm Still Single, has been so contentious - and compelling - it has become a staple of Manhattan gossip columns and fought over on Amazon. In London the novelist Nirpal Dhaliwal is heading the charge with a stream of articles outlining his idiosyncratic disgust at the wussiness of 21st-century man.

Another strident American voice is Chad Kultgen, who says he wrote his bleak novel Average American Male to counter 'the accepted image of the Average American man as ... an oafish retard happy to swallow down gallons of his significant other's crap in the hopes of being allowed to have sex with her once a week or at least watch some football.' And last but not least is the ex-lawyer Tucker Max's account of life as a self-proclaimed womanising 'dickhead' in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

'My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole,' the introduction begins. 'I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers and sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable. But I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world.'

While that may be debatable, it is the divorcing Dhaliwal who is making waves this side of the Atlantic with his scathing views on the failure of feminism and the urgent need for men to fight back against ball-breaking women. Since the publication of his first novel Tourism he has detailed his infidelities and intimate feelings about his marriage - in itself dissected by his wife Liz Jones in a column - in a stream of blunt first-person pieces. 'My wife threw me out after discovering I'd been cheating on her. On the night we got back together, I made strong, passionate love to her,' he wrote last year. 'At the height of her passion, I asked her: "Who's the boss?" Initially she wouldn't give me a reply, but I enticed it from her. "You are," she finally gasped.'

While the first generation of female bloggers could at least agree they wanted to find love, the E Bachelors seem to share a quite different proposition: that women are difficult, dominating and dangerous, and should be avoided. Dhaliwal, 33, for instance, is adamant that modern men should snatch back the upper hand.

'They hold their tongues for fear of being misinterpreted as sexist; they constantly attempt to second-guess their partner in order to avoid giving offence,' he lamented of modern men last year. 'This backfiring feminist conspiracy has, of course, developed hand-in-hand with the march of raging political correctness in Britain. The two have combined to explode in the faces of a generation of women.'

Kultgen, an LA-based scriptwriter who launched Average American Male with a viral marketing campaign on YouTube called What Men Really Think, offers a similarly take-no-prisoners point of view. 'The unnamed narrator of Average American Male ... unabashedly reveals every thought that goes through his head, from his sexual fantasies involving his annoying girlfriend and other women he encounters, and his masturbation sessions while watching porn,' he explains on his website. 'Our narrator suffers through a relationship with his fat-assed girlfriend until he finds the perfect girl. But when he moves into the new relationship, he slowly learns that all women are pretty much the same, that man's true desires will never be fulfilled, and the decision between living alone or biting the marriage bullet must be made.'

This, it seems, is the bleak choice these 21st-century bachelors see themselves as facing. Schaeffer is the poster boy for these alienated, sex-obsessed creatures. He documents with alarming honesty his quest to find a wife, along with the minutiae of the rest of his life: his preference for spending Sundays masturbating, his penchant for dominatrix prostitutes, his loneliness, his passion for Jivamukti yoga, his binges on chocolate cake (and the time he was caught eating it out of the communal trash by his building porter) plus of course his brittle dates with women. He lays bare his self-loathing, his drug-addicted past, childhood with an overwhelmed mother and suicidally depressed academic father, one-time relationship with Molly Ringwald and glory days in the mid-Nineties when he co-starred with Elle Macpherson in his movie If Lucy Fell and played basketball with George Clooney.

But if the undertow in his account, like all the others, is despair, there is also an alarming streak of anger and aggression. Schaeffer is open about his fury when his girlfriend 'April', a fantastically successful 32-year-old writer, refuses to cancel a dinner party to run off to Vermont with him at the end of their first date. He describes how, when his girlfriend of two years, 'Liza', expresses doubts about getting engaged, he walks out and never sees her again. Then there is the time he dispatches another girlfriend, 'Amy', because she doesn't like the brownies he baked her on a date ('all I heard was my own silent internal question: "Should I jerk off or watch DVR'd American Idol after I give her 10 more minutes and she leaves?" She was history.')

Women may find a strange fascination in reading about Schaeffer's view on the upside of dating repressed girls, what he does with his long sessions with Mistress Fiera, the dominatrix prostitute, and what women do to make him hate them on dates. On the other hand, you see why, in the minds of some New York women, Schaeffer has become the epitome of the worst stereotypes of the men 'out there': that they are commitment-phobic, misogynistic and riddled with unnerving hang-ups.

Gawker, the online Manhattan gossip column, was so disgusted by Schaeffer's book it began referring to him as 'Eric I can't believe I'm still single even though every other sentient life form on the planet can soooo believe you're still single'. It invited accounts of dates with him from its readers. ('He is the nuttiest nutjob I've ever met who lives in the deepest depths of denial that I have ever visited,' emailed one.) Nevertheless, it is obsessed by him, perhaps because his book is an almost perfect expression of the impasse of the Western world, taken, in the dating scene in Manhattan, to its final neurotic acme.

But in a final ironic twist, after reading Schaeffer's frank accounts of clumsily trying to pick up women at his Jivamukti yoga classes, nerdishly attempting to bump himself up the popularity chart of the dating site Nerve.com, compulsively scrutinising every women he meets in case she is The One and asking searching dietary questions to waitresses - you begin to wonder if it is actually just satire and not true at all.

But when I meet Schaeffer in New York, I think again. There is something about the intentness of his blue eyes that makes me believe he could be for real. Something in the combination of cap, loose unflattering jeans and a cream woollen T-shirt. His apologies for being 'two minutes late', the abrupt, disconcerting flits to the bathroom, dismay over the quality of the grapefruit he has been served and way he is checking me out - darting glances at my chest and legs and tossing in the odd question about my age and star sign and if I date interviewees ...

'Yes, it's all true,' he assures me. He didn't exaggerate for comic effect? He shakes his head soberly. Not even the cake-in-the-trash scene? 'It's so - I don't have a lot of shame about how I live,' he observes. He crosses his legs, still staring intently at me. 'I feel very comfortable with myself. Even in my imperfections. "Imperfections" is a weird word. It's a judgment, and I don't even want to judge that. '

I ask if he thinks writing about his sessions with prostitutes might put potential girlfriends off? 'But for the average man, I haven't been with that many!' he protests. But the ways he'd been with them and the fact that he wrote about them in such detail? 'I might have explored with the dominatrixes in a way that a lot of men haven't,' he concedes. He does seem slightly embarrassed. 'But anyone who would be sketched out by that, we wouldn't have a compatible sensibility.' Sexually? 'Yes. And it speaks to me as a repression.'

What's frightening to me is the dark preoccupation with sex that runs through all the men's accounts - and the fact that they are so open about it. 'Being a man, being a healthy hot-blooded American male, who really loves sexual contact, going months and months without that can become lonely to me,' Schaeffer argues. Kultgen is equally unabashed. 'Is it relentlessly sexual? Yeah, that's a fair assessment. I never pass a woman on the street without thinking what it would be like to have sex with her.'

Is this the new face of 21st-century man? Or are they just finally 'fessing up to what was there all along? And what's with the anger? Schaeffer is open about the violent tirades his dates trigger in his book. ('By now, after the fifth time in three hours that my stomach alarm had gone off telling me to run for the hills, I despised her. She made me nauseous. I literally wanted to vomit ...')'

'I can't tell if you like me,' he exclaims, disconcerted, 'or you think I'm awful! Disagree with me, fine. But do it in a way that's helpful. And smart and thoughtful. Say, "My impression of Eric when we had lunch is I think he's deluded".' He stares forlornly at his rotten grapefruit. 'I get overwhelming love mostly,' he assures me. 'The people who write the mean things really do scurry in shadows.'

And he is very gracious in interview. I do actually like him. But what I don't get about this poster boy for modern single male is his strange mixture of hostility towards women and the fact that he really, really wants to meet the Right One, ideally right now, on his six-week publicity tour of America for the book.

So can he believe he is still single? 'You know I can't,' he says. He's absolutely serious. Does he think people are ever single because of their own issues? 'Oh, of course, there are people who are commitment phobic, people who have such issues with themselves that they are constantly sabotaging relationships. But I've spent many, many years both in therapy and living on a kind of, you know, spiritual path of meditation and yoga and self-reflection where every day I'm spending time examining my behaviour on a historical, psycho-social level. So ...'

So, I think I would fire his therapist. But, if you have a bazillion dates with people and none of them work out, don't you finally have to put your hand up and say, 'It's actually me'? 'I don't agree,' he says. 'For instance, there was a girl that I met the other day, but she has a boyfriend, and there was something about this girl, we talked for about five minutes. There was a way about her, a sparkle in her eye - it's indescribable. She's not the most beautiful woman, but she's got an energy and a spark. I feel like I would marry this woman in a heartbeat if she was single.'

His memoir ends on a cliffhanger - having manipulated himself to the Number One man spot on Nerve.com with three days of finger-bruising clicking he gets a date with Nerve's Number One girl, the gorgeous 'Taudry Hepburn'. Did they have the date? He nods, pulling down his cap. 'She was disappointing. She was perfectly nice but didn't look so much like her pictures. She was a little hard-edged. She felt a little jaded.'

He leaves a big tip and we go onto the pavement where he dances around me, holding his umbrella over my head and talks hopefully about playing hookey. I do think he's actually rather sweet. There is something really rather heroic about his dogged attempts to find a partner, so undaunted by his endless crashing and burning. Still, all the same, I head back to my hotel.

I've almost reached it when my BlackBerry's light flashes. I am not wholly surprised to find the new email is from him. 'Thanks again for coming to town and buying me that lovely grapefruit,' he has written. 'Had you not been so sweet and charming, even in your not-so veiled moments of disagreement with my interpretation about certain events in my life, I might have had an even more sour taste in my mouth from the foul fruit. But instead I only am left with a twinge of disappointment that you are A: going steady and B: employ a rule about not dating interviewees which rendered the possibility of dinner out of the question. More post-modern man satire? Only you can decide. But if A and B ever change let me know, and you can investigate your theory more closely. It'll be win/win. Either you'll be right and scoop the world or you'll be wrong and maybe fall in like ... or more. And wouldn't that be nice?'

I'm kind of wryly charmed. Maybe, once you get past the prostitutes and the posturing, even with these tough guys, all you need is love.

Sex and the single men

Eric Schaeffer

Schaeffer is a leading light on the We Hate Women scene. He shared musings on his failed attempts to find love in New York on icantbelieveimstillsingle.com and later in a book of the same name.

What he does: He acts, writes and directs. Nothing you'd ever have heard of, but he once did a film which starred Elle Macpherson, and he mentions it often.

What he says: 'I mean we're men. We're wired to see a woman, smash her on the head with a bone, drag her unconscious body back to our apartment by the hair, and f*** her. I think you all should give us a break and, in fact, a little credit.'

Chad Kultgen

Los Angeles resident Chad Kultgen once had the brainiac idea of becoming the Number One Amazon.com reviewer of all time. But, due to his rambling reviews and persistent use of the word 'badass', he was eventually banned from posting. This didn't stop him. At chadsreviews.com he pulls apart his 'saggy-titted skank' colleagues. And he's written a book too. The Average American Male, described by the New York Times as a 'blueprint of how the mind - and penis - of the typical American male works'.

What he does: Starting off as a tabloid journalist, Kultgen chased fame through failed reality shows and Amazon reviews. After a viral campaign on Youtube, he's now turning The Average American Male into a sitcom.

What he says: 'Bloussant is a pill taken daily that is guaranteed to enlarge tits by at least one cup size ... I crushed up all the pills into a powder that I've been mixing into as many of Casey's meals as I can. I've been doing this for about a month and so far the results could be better.'

Neil Strauss

Strauss, known in the seduction community as 'Style', wrote The Game, offering tips to wannabe seducers/questionable-sexual-manipulators and documenting his rise to master pick-up artist. He lives in LA.

What he does: A contributing editor to Rolling Stone, he's spent the year since The Game hit bestseller lists offering seduction classes to a select few singles.

What he says: 'Seduction is a dark art. Every woman I met seemed disposable and replaceable. The better a seducer I became, the less I loved women.'

Tucker Max

As a college student in America, Tucker Max set up a website, The Tucker Max Date Application Page, where his nasty sex stories were swiftly, bizarrely, joined by hundreds of photographs of young women asking for dates. As a pioneer of 'fratire' writing, his latest book, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, made the New York Times best-seller list. Twice. We set up an interview with him, but he refused to answer our call, later complaining he was 'offended by our proposed questions'.

What he does: From chauvinistic blogger to best-selling author, Tucker 'the f***er' Max admits to setting up multiple email addresses in order to bombard entertainment sites with links to his web blog.

What he says: 'Of course I am single. Who the hell would want to date me? Oh wait, that's right, all those crazy and insecure girls who email me. Sounds great!'

Eva Wiseman