Rosalind Coward's article (Made by women with men meanly in mind, May 22) helps to create a climate in which issues surrounding men, masculinity and male psychology can be discussed intelligently. I am prompted to ask three questions.

Andrew Samuels, Jungian Analyst (Society for Analytical Psychology, London)

Published in the Guardian, 29 May 1995
Copyright 1995 Andrew Samuels. All rights reserved.

Rosalind Coward's article (Made by women with men meanly in mind, May 22) helps to create a climate in which issues surrounding men, masculinity and male psychology can be discussed intelligently. I am prompted to ask three questions.

First, can men change? Certainly, male behavior in the home and on the streets has not changed very much. But something that we could call the "aspirational atmosphere" may be changing. The problem is that educational, social and communal provision also needs to change in step with evolving aspirations. For example, which politician is going to state openly that clarion calls for more paternal involvement are useless if it isn't clear what these more involved fathers are supposed to do and what governments can (or can't) do to make it happen.

Moreover, there is a very dangerous idealisation taking place—not least in the Labour Party—of what fathers can do as "moral presences" in a family. Many lone mothers or women parenting together, are already successfully figuring out how to provide those aspects off parenting traditionally done by fathers.

Second, are men powerful? By all social and economic indicators they are. But the generalisation about male power would be disputed by many men living in poverty and homelessness, black men, physically-challenged men, gay men, men living in lands under the heel of an invader, and young men dying in uniform in pointless wars or rotting uselessly in prison cells.

Third, do men hate women? Any idea of a beautiful partnership in which progressive males and females march together into a fair and equitable sunset is just plain silly. The sexes have different agendas at home, at work, and maybe even in terms of what they have to do to fulfill themselves. It is inevitable that suspicion and envy will exist. But the overlaps of interest are also there—in most social and communal situations, and in personal relationships. Perhaps the images we need to heed are of coalitions and alliances rather than of marriages or love affairs.

There is a sense in which the answer to all three questions is "yes and no." I hope that the Guardian continues to try to meet the hunger for complexity which is screaming for attention in the contemporary world alongside the far better known hunger for simplistic certitudes.

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