In other cultures and times they would have taken you off up into the hills and returned you scarred or enlightened or both. For this weekend's inaugural Being a Man festival, the only requirement was to descend to the London underground, emerge to brave a rain-lashed footbridge and pitch up on the banks of the swollen Thames.

You wonder if the timing had been chosen with special care: the festival opened on that most sacred and mysterious of British male days, just before the closing of the January football transfer window, when women across the land traditionally observe the patriarchy pressing its ear to TalkSport radio, expectant of distant tribal news.

Being a man, I guessed I knew exactly what to expect of this gathering. Being a man, I also exercised the right to post-rationalise when immediately surprised, and to self-congratulate when challenged or moved.

The festival is – obviously – the idea of a woman, Jude Kelly, artistic director at the Southbank Centre. Her mission, she suggested, was in part age-old female wisdom: that men need reminding that it might be a good thing to share their anxieties. Or, as she put it, to provide the space "for an overhaul of masculinity" and an "opportunity for men to go naked" – prompting a proportion of her male audience to cross their legs.

Despite its advertised Neanderthal acronym – BAM – this was not an Iron John experience. The tone for the emotional undressing was set by Ziauddin Yousafzai, inspirational father of Malala, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for demanding the right for girls to be educated. In Yousafzai's world, simply making breakfast for his family, as he sometimes did – a man performing woman's work in the Swat valley – was considered a traitorous and political act. He argued not only that all girls should be educated but, equally important, that all boys must be educated to believe that girls should be educated. Being a man lay not in the exercise of power, but in the equal sharing of it.

His theme – the necessity for men to unlearn all that they had been raised to understand of any single dominant masculine identity – was subsequently embellished by many other life stories. By the ex-prison inmate and artist, introduced only as Gus, who described the tough work of dismantling the rules by which he had grown up – when looking another man in the eye would be a necessary challenge to violence – through trust in group therapy and writing plays. By the Ugandan-born writer Nick Makoha, who spoke typically and eloquently of his resolve to be closer to his own children than his distant father had been to him, and of how the overwhelming sensation of holding your child in your arms for the first time was the literal, frightening feeling of "your heart expanding with love".

Many fathers in the world – from south London to the Swat valley – have never, it was noted, had that experience, perhaps because the dangers of such love for traditional power structures meant that holding a baby remained an unmanly taboo.

According to Michael Kaufman, head of the White Ribbon Campaign, a global movement working to end violence against women, this is about to change. The natural conclusion of the feminist demand for equal rights in the workplace, has to be, he said, the male demand for a fair share of parenting. We were, he argued, already seeing that happening (he also confessed to being a utopian).

That utopianism was undermined by some statistics, not least those that showed the "crisis of masculinity" at its most extreme. The fact that 95% of the prison population remains male. That 75% of suicides are men, mostly under the age of 35. The fact that male mental health was declining along with stable employment prospects, and that British boys are less likely than ever before to be brought up with a man in the house or a male teacher at primary school.

Solutions were – at least by the halfway point of the weekend's debate – harder to define. And though there was a general agreement that men might benefit from doing more cooking and having less access to pornography, by spending not quantity but quality time at home, and by talking about it all, there was also an inevitable sense of preaching to the converted. Only a certain type of man has the time or inclination to give up a Friday or a weekend to come and talk about the unlearning of maleness. I didn't, for example, spot a single suit and tie.

Still, it's early days; given the demand for tickets, Kelly has already committed to BAM being an annual event, perhaps even the start of a movement. All movements need a manifesto, and it took Grayson Perry in one of his Bo-Peepiest pink party dresses to provide one. Few men have done as much original thinking about what it means to be male as the transvestite potter, champion cyclist, therapy survivor, Turner prizewinner, devoted husband and father.

Grayson insisted that all we believed about men could be unbelieved – men can, despite the propaganda, multitask ("I never go upstairs without carrying something") – and they can prevail in the constant battle with testosterone and keep it in their pants (frilly or otherwise), if they put their minds to it.

He ended with a scribbled series of demands. "We men ask ourselves and each other for the following: the right to be vulnerable, to be uncertain, to be wrong, to be intuitive, the right not to know, to be flexible and not to be ashamed." He insisted that men sit down to achieve them. He received, deservedly, a standing ovation.