LIBBY PURVES: Sorry sisters, I'm not going to join the war on men. And here's why...
Sound the trumpet! Let 2026 call a truce in the war between men and women. Now that in the West we have won most important battles, let happy feminists rise and say: ‘Look, chaps, we really like you! We appreciate you. We find your difference and male energy fascinating and fun.’Last year another nail was hammered into the coffin of the patriarchy in the form of Netflix drama Adolescence, which chillingly depicted how misogyny in a classroom can become murder.It inspired nationwide handwringing about the attitudes of our young boys and it’s little wonder that Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced last month that ‘relationship’ classes will be given to boys as young as 11 who exhibit a loathing of women.Of course, there’s a welcome place for campaigns against bad behaviour, like MeToo and the anti-rape movement Everyone’s Invited. All sane people scorn the nonsensical Andrew Tate ‘manosphere’ and condemn the porn-grooming of young boys.But admit it: maleness is not a disease. Let’s call a limit on the indignant rhetoric of the anti-patriarchy. Celebrate the immense but sometimes hidden affection men inspire in us, not just as individuals but in their natural difference. The Netflix drama Adolescence, starring Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper and Ashley Walters, chillingly depicted how misogyny in a classroom can become murderSometimes it’s mixed with amusement, or maternal instinct, but we like it. Manliness, blokeishness, laddishness can refresh us.From banter and black humour to heroism, from ragging to romance, from the courage of Ahmed al-Ahmed, who tackled a gunman during Australia’s Bondi beach massacre last month, to the tireless jokery of Ken Dodd doing six-hour shows to the end, we women recognise certain qualities with half-laughing admiration.Confined too long in all-female company I always feel bereft. I made lifelong female friends at the dear old convent school and more at the school gate, but it’s always nice to hang out with males, as I did with three brothers.There’s a baked-in variation in every cell and every gesture, even when they’re at their most gay or deliberately effete.I once set out to write a polemic book called ‘Liking Men’ but after initial interest the literary agent panicked and ghosted me forever, so I lost impetus. However I happily remember working out how there are things to appreciate at every stage of manhood.Start with baby boys, proven by neuroscience to have a different brain structure and a tendency to reach out towards strange and probably dangerous things faster than girls, whose gift is more empathetic and emotional. All this comes long before puberty. Think of Christopher Robin, dragging his bear Pooh downstairs by the leg, ‘bump, bump, bump’. A little girl would be more likely to give it a bandage and a tea party.Yet there’s a gentleness in small boys who care for live pets or reach out to animals: at six, ours wrote a poem called ‘my saddest day’ and it turned out to be when one of the ewes on the farm rejected her lamb.Move on to the schoolboy, trying to tame his run-around energy to book-learning, needing space to gallop and jump.There’s crudeness, bullying, gangs and suspicion of girls, but also an urge to belong and be loyal: it’s a decent root of the soldierly loyalty on which all nations rely.The dark, rebellious humour of boys is grand, too. One of my heroes, as a girl in more decorous schools, was Nigel Molesworth in How to be Topp, as he sends up his headmaster and shudders at ‘sissy’ student Fotherington-Thomas. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced last month that ‘relationship’ classes will be given to boys as young as 11 who exhibit a loathing of womenAs they grow, comes the age of Romeo: young lover or lovestruck minstrel sighing below a girl’s balcony for just one petal from the rose in her hair. He still exists, beneath or alongside the sullen, confused Andrew Tate guy.He knows something’s missing, a partnership and closeness. He will look for it. We girls have bravery and dreams too, but it’s male courage that most often steps forward and risks a humiliating refusal.Raise a glass too to gay men down the decades: coming out, knowing themselves, defying contempt to be a Harvey Milk or Quentin Crisp, demanding the simple right to love and marry.Remember the fighting heroes: soldiers and sailors, now learning awkwardly to work alongside women but needing their own style of gung-ho maleness: chaps like the weakling midshipman Horatio Nelson, sent to sea at 12 with the bluff hope that he’d either die of hardship or succeed.He later pined in Norfolk between wars, riding daily into Burnham Market in the hope of a recall letter, using his explosive energy to dig a pond in the shape of a man-o’-war ship (you still see the hollow). Man-energy, restless.Older men? Well, in my sketch of this horrifyingly unfashionable book I had a whole chapter called ‘In Praise of Gammon’.People are dreadfully rude about middle-aged men of all classes, especially if they grow wider and redder in the face. We don’t celebrate mature teachers or weary senior policemen (unless they have fashionable ‘issues’ in cop shows) and are worse at appreciating midlife fellows who keep the plates spinning in business, banking, manufacturing and retail.Senior women in tidy officewear are praised, the men presumed to be dinosaurs. But it is they who for decades primarily funded families, serving long grey hours in office blocks and factories, locked into corporate structures or clerical duties, rarely getting home for bathtime and feeling their marriage fade in the discontent of wives with more time for the gym.Some struggle against the odds like any soldier, versions of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman: vulnerable, dutiful, hopeful. When arguments raged about the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square I used to barrack for a statue of The Unknown Commuter. In most of the 20th century, and in this one before Covid and WFH, this figure built the prosperity of the nation.Today there might be a woman alongside him, but it was a man I saw in my head: a lone figure with a briefcase (or toolbag) standing beside a bleak railway line, looking into the distance in the dwindling hope of a train. Born to endure, unbowed and reliable, getting through it with a dark joke. All sane people scorn the nonsensical Andrew Tate ‘manosphere’, writes Libby Purves. Pictured: Andrew Tate with his brother Tristan in Bucharest, RomaniaNext come the old men, still determined to be gallant and easily mocked. Muir Gray, as a young doctor in the ’70s, told me of the respect he felt when campaigning against damp, cold housing: old men saying, ‘Don’t worry about me Doc, I was in the trenches!’Even as the wartime generations recede, such gallantry is still with us, inheriting a tradition going back to the oldest warrior in the Anglo-Saxon poem about the Battle of Maldon. Losing to the Vikings, Essex warrior Byrhtnoth cries: ‘Let our will be stronger, hearts the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength grows less!’I have known many magnificent old men like Mike Richey the D-Day navigator still racing a tiny boat across the Atlantic in his 80s. When his 2CV car broke down on a visit to us he said he got it moving again with the power of prayer. Or John Julius Norwich, historian and entertainer, who was magnificent company into his late 80s, always with a story, gleefully discovering Pilates. Or Bernard Jordan who at 89 escaped his care home to join the Normandy veterans.There can be stamina and heroism and good humour and blackly bantering brilliance in both sexes. But as a woman contemplating men, I enjoy how those qualities come differently arranged in intensity and emphasis.Men are not innately ‘toxic’, problematical or even patriarchal. A vast majority are just fine: no need for us to huddle together suspiciously and assume the worst.Be a sister to them too, as we all trudge into 2026.
