From the archive: The trouble with men

March 1996: Rachel Cusk on masculinity

Photo by Mark McEvoy/ Millennium Images, UK

Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, is reviewed in the magazine this week. Thirty years ago, the author wrote a number of articles about television for the New Statesman; her piece of 1 March 1996 reflected on a season of TV shows about masculinity.

“Being male… isn’t easy,” admits the narrator, straining to get the treachery out. This cri de coeur opens a season of programmes devoted to the difficulty and its constituent smaller difficulties. We women saw this coming from our arrival hilltop long ago. The Trouble with Men (daily, BBC2), I always thought, is that they drink beer and can’t be bothered to go to the doctor. And what is their reward? Nightly inducements, in easy-to-swallow doses of ten minutes – minutes coaxed to fly, reasoner, by a chubby soundtrack and a blizzard of fashionable graphics – just to groove and slide their way to good health. The smear, the pessary, the Well Woman Clinic, never looked drearier, more cysterly.

Apparently men do lie young, though, which I suppose is worth a few minutes of anybody’s airtime, even if it only turns out to be because they drive up the wrong side of motorways when they’re drunk or try to somersault across rivers on skiing holidays, while women sit at home worrying about serial killers. Why Men Die Younger (Sunday, BBC2) does tell us that we’ve all got a finite amount of heartbeats. I certainly wasn’t going to waste any of mine feeling sorry for men. They don’t relax, it seems, except when there are things to be done around the house. Also, they have failed to find favour with the hormone fairy who creeps into their rooms while they sleep and silts up their arteries. This is a biological disposition. It’s the same thing that some men talk about when they say, “We’re biologically disposed to be polygamous. We are!”

The first sound-health bite concerns sexually transmitted diseases. It fell rather flat, seeing as none of the men interviewed had heard of any of them. They kept saying “The Clap!” and sniggering, as if they’d been asked the name of their favourite pop group. It was all a bit yuck, so a lot of innuendo was required. For this purpose, a billiard hall was intensively filmed. Perhaps this Rabelaisian tone is the one to take with men. The opening salvo on testicular cancer – “Balls – we all got ’em, we all scratch ’em!” – drove me to lie down for the afternoon, although admittedly this was mostly because I tried to imagine a similar programme on breast cancer.

Forever Young – HRT for Men (Thursday, BBC2) dispensed with the demotic and brought back the proper medical people with steel-framed glasses and filing cabinets. Many of them displayed large classical busts on their desks instead of the usual spider plant. The profession has obviously changed; or perhaps we are visiting its philosophical margins. Men, it appears, are now laying claim in their hundreds to the menopause. A vicar was administered a course of testosterone after complaining of a headache; a headache his wife may well now have uses for, as ungovernable impulses rule the marriage bed once more.

There’s an aspect to these people that I find rather distasteful. They’re all glossy and coy. They act like they’ve got a private joke. I prefer the haunted celibate look myself. The profession is keen to point out that HRT is no substitute for touring the Aegean in a private yacht with your 22-year-old Swedish girlfriend. The most likely cause of failing powers is the one men apparently find hardest to accept: getting older. A female doctor prescribes a change of partner for this condition, but doubts that it will ever be available on the NHS. For good measure, a Testosterone Survivor is ferreted out to tell his side of the story. He took it to make his siblings grow. Now he’s almost bald. The trouble with men is that they’re never satisfied.

This is an edited version of the original story. For the unabridged article visit newstatesman.com/archive