During the 2000s, lots of women’s studies departments in UK universities renamed themselves as faculties of gender studies. Was it to get more men involved? Was it to address LGBT and trans concerns? Was it perhaps to sound more inclusive and funding-friendly?

Whichever is true, the take-up among straight men has been slow. These are tough times for arts and social science postgraduates and MAs are luxury items. In any case, there aren’t actually that many dedicated degrees. Most disciplines incorporate modules, like ticking a box.

But it’s high time gender studies – by which I mean applying all the insights and intellectual tools evolved by women’s studies departments to both sexes – gravitated to the mainstream.

Modern men like to congratulate themselves that they’ve made great progress in thinking about women’s rights and sexism. But, according to Terrell Carver, professor of political theory at the University of Bristol, we’re not even sure what we’re talking about.

“Men – but not women – can present themselves as both the 'presumptive generic human individual' and as 'gendered in ways that are presumptively good' (e.g. father, brother, husband etc.). Hardly any studies take this critical distinction on board.

“The former presumption makes women somewhat inhuman (compared to a masculine norm), and the latter one erases specifically male/masculine issues, e.g. criminality, war, violence, all of which is overwhelmingly done by men within masculinised and masculinising institutions.”

'Among men there is a complex game of denial going on' Credit: Alamy

This terminology and the quote marks are academic – but the central point, that the word “man” comes to us freighted with meanings, can’t be ignored.

All of us, all our lives, use “mankind” without so much as a mental blink of the eye.

We talk about women soldiers, women entrepreneurs, women priests, because men are the norm.

We see men when we look at group shots of our nations’ leaders, at business conferences, at professorial high tables, at the judge’s bench. Ergo, that’s how we think of “man”, as power and status.

In the quotidian arena of sports, we still think of male achievement as the standard against which others are measured. Women’s finals are the warm-up for men’s finals. But that’s because Bolt is much faster that Fraser-Pryce, you say (if you can even remember the women’s 100-metre gold winner at London 2012).

The brother-father-husband point is trickier to simplify and much harder to swallow. Men love to define themselves by their manliness, so long as that means physical strength, an ability to fix car engines and a dislike of shopping. They’re less keen to accept the far more precise definition of man as warmonger, dodgy banker, rapist and conman. But there it is: “con man”.

Among men there is a complex game of denial going on in which he (we!) wants to be very visible as a man and yet invisible as a representative of his gender.

A couple of weeks ago the world celebrated International Men’s Day (IMD) – or rather it ignored it. Terrorism was dominating the news agenda and the promotional campaign was poor.

But the whole project was badly conceived. According to IMD official UK website, the main themes for 2015 were: shorter life expectancy; high suicide rate; our collective tolerance of violence against men and boys; the struggles that boys face in getting an education; the unique challenges of the father-child relationship; the negative portrayal of fathers, men and boys.

In the media we're told that society is 'failing boys' or 'persecuting men' Credit: Alamy

Shove the cork back into the champagne and hide the party poppers.

Was IMD an attempt at activism or a cry of self-pity? I suspect the latter – with a bit of chauvinism thrown in too. Gender studies experts I spoke to all pointed to a trend in the so-called “men’s movement”: to isolate and exaggerate men’s putative problems at the expense of a balanced view that takes on board women and children too.

What is also problematic is that a hair-shirt-wearing list like this presupposes that there is some kind of “crisis” taking place in men and masculinity. This reinforces the spew of news reports that women are beating men up more and more, that men are all becoming dumber, that it’s harder than ever to be a “man”.

“If you follow media commentary, men have been in crisis at all times since the Second World War,” says Dr Mark McCormack, co-director of the Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities at Durham University.

“’Crisis’ is too blunt a term to understand complex phenomena, including positive social change – such as the fact that men are less homophobic, less violent, more able to express their emotions, more able to express care, more able to be tactile with their friends.

'Men have been in crisis at all times since the Second World War' Credit: Alamy

“Yet it is true that there are serious and profound issues for men in the contemporary world. The violence we do to our young men is astonishing. Male suicide rates are a significant issue. But the ‘crisis’ narrative hinders a serious discussion of these issues and isn’t necessary to examine, critically, both the costs and benefits of being a man in society.”

It’s not, then, about ignoring men’s problems. But the crisis narrative hides the truth about genuine shifts that are taking place across society. If today's men are lonely, depressed, abused, this may be to some extent a redress. We’ve had quite a few millennia owning and running schools, governments, banks and lots of golf clubs where we were never lonely; in the last few decades, we have ceded some control.

Dr Christopher Matthews, a sociologist and gender expert at Brighton University, warns that, “In the media such ideas are often constructed using moralistic language about how society is 'failing boys' or 'persecuting men’.

“Headlines about 'men in crisis’ ride roughshod over what is often a complex issue only fully understandable as produced through intertwined processes of social, economic and cultural inequality.”

This is precisely where gender studies could bring some cool reason and calm reflection to the debate. Just as, 30 years ago, women’s studies helped women focus on areas of concern and analyse them in terms that could inform social and political thinking, so boys and men need a new way to think about themselves.

Thanks to the pioneering work of feminists, there’s already a framework for heightened awareness about gender and tackling the sticky subjects of biology, religion, eroticism and power with our gender-specs on.

But academics tend to talk to one another, and while the media can help in translating their reasoned debates, it prefers to lead with headlines that provoke controversy. What is needed is gender studies from school-age onwards, so that boys can discuss anything from the assumptions about gender in cartoons (deconstructing Bob the Builder would be great fun) to the fairness of them having to play more dangerous sports to the way all their subjects are skewed by gender representation.

Far from being a tedious navel-gazing affair, it would be akin to a Damascene revelation, seeing the world anew. Who knows, if school and college students followed this route, there could one day be master’s degrees in men’s studies, with the accent on this gender – and a proper, informed discussion of our deepest dreams and darkest desires.

The alternative is to keep on claiming men are in a slough of despond owing to a conspiracy of feminists and liberals. If there’s a crisis, it’s one of confidence and communication.