'We heard a rumour that Norwegian explorers were contemplating this," the professional adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes said last week, as he announced some insane outing across the Antarctic involving complicated training and a caravan of bulldozers, huts and fuel. "We realised we were going to have to have a go."

Pressed on his motives, the 68-year-old Sir Ranulph, who has survived a heart bypass as well as the loss of various digits on previous expeditions, seemed to accept that British-Norwegian rivalry was not the most compelling pretext for his winter expedition to a fully mapped region that has, in any case, been crossed in summer.

"It's what I do," he said, adding, as if it was the worst that could conceivably be said of a mountain: "Everybody's grandmother goes up Mount Everest at the weekend." Much was made of the hideous conditions he and his men would "brave", so long as they did it at the most disagreeable time of year, and virtually nothing of his decision to leave behind a six-year-old daughter for the sake of an escapade that would not attract attention if it did not threaten to finish him off.

You gather that, for all the advances in paternal involvement, attitudes towards mothers and fathers who leave their children in order to do pointless and life-threatening things have changed little since the mountaineer Alison Hargreaves died on K2 in 1995, leaving two small children. She was widely accused of being a neglectful mother. Bonkers father of one Sir Ranulph, however, remains the beau ideal of The Dangerous Book for Boys, a manual much prized by Michael Gove, and of the kind of online commenter who praised him last week for his "balls of steel". Indeed, lavish media approval of a scheme so fabulously harebrained as Fiennes's can't but suggest continued respect for a version of masculinity that will always reject domesticity and grandmothers in favour of all-male challenges in the Antarctic, or at the golf club, or, failing that, at the House of Commons. In Parliament, we have again been reminded, balls of steel are cherished as keenly as they were when Prescott confessed: "I thumped a bloke" and Blair invoked Brown's "big clunking fist".

To judge by recent weeks, British politics remains utterly committed to displays of what a new Samaritans report – "Men, Suicide and Society" – calls "hegemonic masculinity", or the kind of male behaviour that remains most highly prized. In general, it explains, "hegemonic masculinity is characterised by attributes such as: striving for power and dominance, aggressiveness, courage, independency, efficiency, rationality, competitiveness, success, activity, control and invulnerability; not perceiving or admitting anxiety, problems and burdens; and withstanding danger, difficulties and threats". Step forward, by way of example, Andrew "Thrasher" Mitchell, last seen abusing and harassing policemen as they did their job, and compromising his own, notionally that of Conservative chief whip. Prior to this engagement, our public servant was mainly noted for his schoolboy enthusiasm for corporal punishment, hence "Thrasher".

While this clown's latest assertion of his alpha-maleness, in debased imitation of Bertram Wooster's misadventures, will undoubtedly add to female consternation about a Drones Club government whose leader insults women and twits his rival for being insufficiently "macho", Mitchell's contribution to the public understanding of hegemonic masculinity also deserves a mention. The interfering policemen were insulted as "plebs", who had "best learn your fucking place".

In one arrogant, de haut en bas encounter, presumably not unique, Mitchell neatly illustrates what the Samaritans make clear in their unsettling paper: that men, as well as women, suffer the consequences of unreconstructed masculinity.

Whether witnessed close-up, as in Mitchell's case, or from afar, in the exaltation of Sir Ranulph as he escorts his wig to the Antarctic, a narrow model of male prowess is actively damaging huge numbers of non-dominant, powerless or jobless men, who struggle, the charity explains, when they are unable to meet expectations. Summarising their research, undertaken after the discovery that middle-aged rather than young men are now the highest risk group for suicide, and three times more likely to kill themselves than women, the authors assert: "Masculinity – the way men are brought up to behave and the roles, attributes and behaviours that society expects of them – contributes to suicide in men."

Their many recommendations include a wish that fathers be invested and acknowledged in their children's lives in a way that goes beyond the conventional model of provider. Not all fathers, after all, want to live like Sir Ranulph. In fact, while Thrasher was tearing the wings off flies last week, a less-well known Conservative MP, Tim Loughton, told Woman's Hour that the lack of time with their children is "a hidden problem among men", who still don't feel, unlike women MPs, able to discuss the issue.

Tim Loughton, at least, extracts what the Samaritans call a "patriarchal dividend" from his MP status. The risk of male suicide is highest among disadvantaged men or, to use the political jargon, plebians. "As you go down each rung of the social ladder, the risk of suicide increases." Although the impact of the current recession on women's jobs has probably had more attention, more men are unemployed, a fact not unconnected with some men's inhibitions, again because of conventional notions about manliness, about doing "women's jobs".

Once a man becomes unemployed, even if he has family responsibilities, a society built on Thrasher principles does not show him the respect it does to female full-time carers who have lost their jobs. Why would that change, anyway, when in the time it has taken Naomi Wolf, alone, to write seven books, and in which there have been approximately 10,000 articles deploring the prevalence of pink, the literature exploring masculinity has barely advanced since Neil Lyndon wrote No More Sex War in 1992, with a sincerity about this outcome that could perhaps be surmised from his subtitle: The Failures of Feminism?

By the end of the century, he predicted, "the harridans who have been so proud of their spite will be trilling denials at their dinner tables".

As it is, just as the imminent arrival of Hanna Rosin's new book, The End of Men, may struggle to shift the impression that hegemonic masculinity still looks to be in rude health, it could be tricky for a man to challenge the Thrasher version of maleness without eliciting a reflexive diddums. Long before his embarrassing apology, the derision and invitations to "grow a pair" that greeted Nick Clegg's admission of emotional responses to music and literature, indicated – along with speculation about his controlling wife – limited interest in challenging the inflexible "big beast" and "bruiser" orthodoxies of political success.

Women, in this respect, escape lightly. It is certainly hard to admire an oik or an Ed Balls, hegemonically acting out on the frontbenches – but at least no one expects you to imitate them.