What’s it like to be a man in 2018? We already know what men think of women — the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to shut up was almost 3,000 years ago — but what do men think of themselves?

Chatelaine magazine, edited by the great Lianne George, has struck a blow for uniting women and men in the feminist cause. It surveyed 1,000 men and asked some of them to talk publicly, on camera, about their feelings.

And they did. The results were charming and upsetting, promising and bleak.

Forty-five per cent are insecure about their weight, 23 per cent about hair loss. Twenty-seven per cent say they don’t watch porn at all while 37 per cent watch at least once a week. When women talk about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, 25 per cent of men say they feel nothing, and 12 per cent are bored. The rest are sad or angry, so there’s hope.

Forty-two per cent aren’t comfortable talking about their emotions with male friends. About half say they haven’t benefitted professionally from being a man. Next question: did they say this with a straight face? In which case we are done here.

The jewel of the survey was the filmed interviews, with brief responses offered like woodchips to big questions like “Would you call yourself a feminist?” (“No. I am Team Me,” one man said) and “Who’s the manliest man you can think of?”

Almost every man was taken aback by the latter question — I would have said Foghorn Leghorn — but some hazarded a guess with “my father” or “Barack Obama.” Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, always happy to meet anyone and discuss anything, was flummoxed. Finally he answered. “I don’t know what a ‘manly man’ is. And I don’t know who gets to be the manliest man out there.” He found the phrase absurd, and at this time in history it is.

When asked if mansplaining was a real thing, many men claimed they’d never heard of the term. (It’s when men explain things to women that women already know, whether or not the men know what they’re talking about.) There was a shabby little procession of confusion, and then Trudeau appeared: “Yes! Mansplaining is absolutely a real thing.”

Some men sounded sad, 31 per cent of them saying they don’t have a close relationship with their kids. That’s horrendous. There’s a Care Home for Unloved Parents in your future. It will be silent, it won’t smell good, and you won’t get a lot of visits from your Josh and his family. Get cracking on the love, guys.

Men do feel insecure about their appearance. Trudeau laughed about this. “As a teenager I was too skinny, I had terrible skin, I had big thick glasses, I had a nose that didn’t fit my face. I tried to wear pink flamingo ties ‘ironically’ but looking back, it was just sort of sad.” He went to an all-boys school, and when girls arrived in Grade 11, he was speechless. “I had no game.”

Women do have to think very deeply about having been born female in order to understand the strict limits placed on their careers, behaviour and freedom. The men in this survey don’t seem to think this way about manhood. It exists, it rocks and why would they study a fact? But this exercise would reveal the ease of their lives compared to the lives of the women they work with every day, and it would be a starting point for equality.

One good man was distressed by his wife being laid off after her maternity leave. I liked him. He and his wife were a team; the team had sustained an injury.

My overall impression was that men still think they’re the gold standard of humans by which everything is measured and women are still extraneous. I’ve often thought this in traditional journalism where men get all the “important” beats while women are assigned to write about “female” subjects, just as columnists of colour are expected to write only about race.

Are there no feminist men to write about the world as seen through a feminist lens, to use an increasingly common phrase? Slate.com once gave its American abortion beat to a male (I used to call him the uterine correspondent) and it didn’t work at all. He called abortion a “tragedy” and saw himself as The Arbiter, the god of pompous men, from whence comes mansplaining.

Women are still a tiny sector in corporate management. It’s the old glass cliff; they’ll only let women into corporations and industries nearing their end.

But in the federal cabinet, women are half the team because the prime minister made a choice. Out of this nettle, sexism, we pluck this flower, equity, Hotspur in Henry IV sort of said. Hotspur was an idiot — he basically ended up with a Shakespearean Darwin Award — but it’s still a good line.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Why don’t all men think hard, as the prime minister does, imagine what it’s like to be female, and then make equality their goal? We’re here. Invite us into those male spaces.

hmallick@thestar.ca