Is it an exaggeration to talk of a ‘gender war’?

According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in a ‘battle over sex’. And while that has been going on, ‘another war is being waged. This one is against men, the whole damn lot of them!’ To back up this ‘war on men’ idea, Power cites, among other examples, I Hate Men, a book by the French writer Pauline Harmange in which she damns men as ‘violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly… men beat, rape and murder us’.

Power’s argument is that the all-out assault on men has gone too far. The mistake, she says, is in ‘treating people as mere examples of a negative category, rather than as complex individuals in their own right’. This, she argues, can be dangerously counterproductive. If you categorise men in this way, then you open up the possibility that other types can also be categorised — gay people, trans people and so on — and you merely substitute one sort of unfairness for another.

So what can we do about this ‘war’ on men? We could try understanding men a little better, she suggests, by asking them, as the title urges, what they really want. Men need to be heard. Simply shutting them out of the most important cultural conversations because of their perceived privilege only increases resentment between the sexes. Men, don’t forget, die by suicide ata far higher rate than women. Thinkers such as the academic and self-help writer Jordan Peterson have stepped in to console these ostracised men.

Power concludes by arguing that the aim of her book is to encourage ‘a general reconciliation between men and women’, though she recognises this is ‘naive, if not simply impossible’.