According to Diane Abbott, Britain is facing a crisis of masculinity. In a speech made on Thursday under the auspices of the thinktank Demos, the shadow health minister warned of a generation of angry, inarticulate young men who had no idea of their role in society. Raised on a diet of pornography and consumerism, they were "caught between the stiff-upper-lip approach of previous generations" and the "pornified ideals" of a youth culture that featured Viagra as a party drug and promoted sexism and homophobia.More prone to depression and less well educated than young women, and perhaps jobless despite a degree, they often found themselves trapped in the parental home as long-term adolescents who increasingly resented family life. In Abbott's phrase, they were hyper-masculine – that is, aggressive and misogynistic – without any understanding of the many-sided nature of a man's life and no talent for self-expression.

The speech was contested even before it was delivered. The columnist and novelist Tony Parsons wrote that men have never been better – never as articulate about their emotions, or more involved with their children and partners. To remedy any remaining flaws, he wanted boxing lessons in every school and a return to the "manly virtues" that would oblige good men to protect women and children by punching bullies "in the cakehole". Here was a man joining in the debate, as so many women writers have recently invited us to, and finding part of the solution in how men behaved in the East End c1948, or at least as how Ealing studios imagined they did. A world in which a man lands a blow on an adulterer and says: "That'll larn ya"; a world without "nonces" or killers photographing their dead 12-year-old victims; a world where grooming still means "Don't overdo the Brylcreem, sonny, and straighten that tie!" Could such a place ever have existed? It may be worth remembering, if we are charting the Fall of Man, that Jack the Ripper walked the same streets 50 years before.

Writing as a man … but a sentence that begins that way is too ridiculous to finish. Let's try instead writing as a boy. As a boy growing up in the 1950s, what did I see and hear that might confirm Abbott's implication that men were somehow better then? I see more of my mother than my father, who goes off to work on his bike every morning before I get up, while my mother makes the fire and shops and cooks and cleans until he returns after five. From our street of 26 families, only two of the married women have jobs outside the home and only a few of the men are pub-goers. I have hobbies – a bike, comics, a stamp album, model trains – that now seem almost risibly characteristic of their period. I have no idea of pornography and have never heard the word, though at the bottom of a cupboard my father has secreted his prewar copies of Health and Efficiency magazine, which I sometimes excavate from their protective covering of gardening manuals. Black-and-white photographs show naked women smiling innocently up at the sun; they all look rather wholesome and elevated, like Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup; the only eroticism lies in their nudity.

As my father once had a brief flirtation with naturism – a sun lamp is other evidence – I have never known whether the magazines were proof of personal philosophy or secret desire. Perhaps both. At any rate, they constituted my idea of "dirty magazines" and were therefore of little help in understanding the details of the Profumo affair and the Duchess of Argyll's divorce case when they became the twin sensations of 1963. For the wider public, the gripping mystery of the latter was the identity of the "headless man" in the Polaroid pictures shown to the court (but never published). For me, it was the puzzle of what was allegedly being done to him by the duchess. In 1963, I wouldn't have known what fellatio was, couldn't have guessed what the judge meant when he mentioned depravity, and in that year I turned 18. I had already started work.

How typical was I? I suspect that at least I wasn't untypical – arriving just too late for national service, my generation of young British males may have been the most sexually under-informed 18-year-olds since 1939. But it may be wrong to construe from our ignorance the notion that women and children were then less endangered by the malevolent behaviour and fantasies of men. "Lewd and libidinous behaviour" was an intriguing phrase that cropped up in the local paper's court reports. Across our street, a husband sometimes gave his wife a black eye (and presumably other less visible bruises too), while in the next street a man went to prison for sexually abusing his daughter. The incest of uncles with nieces also produced one or two children I knew. Most of these facts were related to me only many years later. No matter that we read the Eagle comic and won our badges in the cubs, promising to do our best for God and the Queen, our village had not been Brigadoon.

Still, I think that taken as whole the men of our fathers' generation, by which I mean men born in the first quarter of the last century, were better people than we have been, or perhaps have needed to be. The American TV journalist Tom Brokaw coined the phrase "the Greatest Generation" to describe the men and women who had grown up in the 1930s depression, fought in the second world war or served the military effort at home, and in the years after victory, turned the US into a superpower. Of course, the phrase is absurd even when confined to the prism that is America's view of itself: who's to be the judge? But its appeal becomes difficult to resist even in a British context whenever an old pilot, soldier or seaman appears on television; most recently the survivors of Arctic and Atlantic convoys. Their matter-of-fact stoicism seems incredible. As Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote recently in a review of a memoir by Churchill's daughter, Lady Soames, in which she recounts her days with the women's army corps: 'Sentimentality about "the greatest generation" is a besetting temptation. But damn it all, they were wonderful, and we who came after have not lived up to them.'

But this isn't just about the war. Those of us born into the old working class also tend to venerate our parents for their self-denial and decency, and also because that way of life, being dead, is more easily simplified and honoured. Sir Alex Ferguson is perhaps the most extreme example of what might be called working-class ancestor worship. Few of us would name our houses after our father's workplace or a racehorse, supposing we owned one, after an artefact that our father's workplace had built – but the Ferguson mansion in Cheshire is called Fairfields, after the Glasgow shipyard, and his horse Queensland Star after a cargo liner that Fairfield's launched for the Australia trade in 1957.

This is a reciprocal act of love: a small repayment for the love that Ferguson never forgets to stress he enjoyed as a boy. Of all the factors that may contribute to Abbott's condition of hyper-masculinity – idleness, drugs, industrial quantities of pornography – the absence of love is surely the most crucial, though whether more of it existed in 1948 than in 2008 is impossible to know.