As a psychotherapist, you have worked mainly with women and with couples. I gather that you are now beginning to take a more detailed look at masculinity. Why is that and what conclusions have you reached?

I am involved with a group of two men and three women psychotherapists who, while aware of gender-based theories about the construction of femininity, wanted to think through similar theories about men. Feminists have argued the importance to women's psychology of being brought up to be emotional nurturers and givers. we are looking for a parallel that explains men's need to deny their vulnerability, their repudiation of closeness, and their repudiation of the feminine We want to know why boys like bang-bang movies and girls like romance movies. And we're trying to understand men's terror and fear of women. we've looked at various anthropological papers and mixed in our clinical experience. One way we are trying to understand masculinity is to accept that men are brought up to be warriors and economic providers. These two characteristics are central to how men are related to as little boys from the very beginning, which kind of values they have to ingest and the kind of psychology which is created. Other important male characteristics such as sexual prowess and being in control - are, I think, derivatives of the imperative to be a warrior.

Males grow up learning that they might be killers, or if not killers in reality at least in a position to brutalise others This must affect their whole relationship with themselves as well as their relationships with their parents and with others.

I take it you reject any notion of masculinity being somehow genetically determined.

we may make jokes about our sons having testosterone poisoning, but I really don't think that we have enough evidence to say that masculinity can be explained genetically. Some varieties of masculinity across the world produce men who aren't violent, aggressive, hateful or angry. Even in the West we know that men have the capacity to be very caring, loving and engaged.

I also have enough information from about how I bring up my son and how my gender conscious friends treat their sons to see that we are relating to them very, very differently from how we relate to our daughters. We all have own unconscious beliefs about masculinity that we are not even aware of.

What does your experience of bringing up a boy make you feel about the possibilities of changing masculinity in our culture?

My son was a very gentle kid when he was at nursery. When there were fights, he'd come home very upset about them. He would be interested in finding a different solution. His behaviour changed very dramatically in a matter of weeks after he went to school. Now he identifies with the fighters. The social pressure of having much older boys in school means that the five year olds have no chance to create their own culture; they mimic the culture of the older boys. He has understand that you cannot possibly be a boy and express your emotions You might be able to have them but you can't display them in the playground.

I know that you can't insulate gender-conscious children in one family, just as you can't insulate socialism in one country.

Also, his life now is wrestling That's where the action is in the school in crowd. I didn't think I'd now be sitting around trying to understand wrestling and going along with his interest, which I absolutely hate. I feel alienated by it; it hurts on some level; I feel perplexed I hope he will get through it now, so it doesn't stay with him forever I don't want him to feel alienated from the culture but I'm unhappy that his interest has taken this particular form.

I know that you can't insulate gender-conscious children in one family, just as you can't insulate socialism in one country I do feel though, that I have failed to offer an alternative to what the culture has to give him as a boy. I also do think my son's got many positive things going for him. He had and probably stir, has a very wide emotional vocabulary He did see his parents accepting his feelings and honouring them and validating his pain and confusion. He also saw his father doing as much domestic labour as me. I remember him saying when my partner got a book contract, "Daddies can't write, only mummies can write". Although he did change dramatically after a couple of weeks at school that doesn't make me pessimistic He has certain values I'm sure he will be able to express at some point..

Would you agree that what has to happen to men to turn them into warriors and providers is virtually a programme of systematic mistreatment?

Absolutely. And you can see it very clearly when you read some of the anthropological stuff about other cultures, where boys are torn away from a maternal environment and not allowed to relate to women for maybe the next five years. I think men's socialisation is appalling. I think it's very limiting It gives them certain skills which are important but their lack of emotional literacy and their lack of relational skills is a serious matter.

I've never been one of those feminists who thinks that sexism works for men; I think men suffer terribly. This is particularly true now, when so many of the things that enable men to feel like men have gone. For example, there's no such thing as knowing you can be a provider; unemployed men lack support for their masculinity.

Can you say more about how men are affected on an emotional level?

Vulnerability is an impossible state of affairs for men; it's very frightening and it is designated as "other", not to do with masculinity. So I think that the personal cost to men is a tremendous fear of messy, difficult, emotional states. If you're a warrior or a provider, you are taught to act all the time; you're not taught to stay in ambivalence or difficulty. Men disassociate from their emotional lives, feel very robbed of them and need somebody to do the emotional work for them They also heel very resentful, very jealous of those who they designate to play that role. They feel a great need to distance themselves from their emotions, so there's a great internal alienation in men.

I think that men are often not aware of the emotional labour or the relational tasks that women perform for them and they end up being very confused about how inter-personal relations happen. It makes them very scared. At the same time they are also incredibly eager to somehow ally themselves with someone who understands this other piece of work.

Do you think many women have not understood just how vulnerable and powerless men actually feel beneath the mask of control?

Because men have been designated as the ones with the power, women are desperate to ally themselves with that power and take it for real. They don't see it as a construction, they don't see that it is built on a shaky foundation. I do think that women project onto men a power that men don't feel they possess, although they act as if they do.

Do you think women play a role in the way masculinity is constructed?

In the last 20 years or so, a lot of psychoanalysts and others working with masculinity have talked about how males have to separate very early on from their primary identification with the feminine That seems to me not to be a sufficient account. It does not fully explain what it is that women who are parenting are actually foisting on little boys. It's not simply that the boys reject the feminine, the women also are pushing them to repudiate something about closeness and attachment. women do that partly to protect their sons against what they will find when they meet other boys, or start their schooling.

In recent years, the media has made much of "the New Man" and suggested that men are changing. Do you see any signs of this?

About men as a whole, I have absolutely nothing to say. within my own very small and gender-conscious community, I do think men are clearly very concerned about their lack of connection to children. Some men are making efforts to have a much more direct relationship with children. This involvement has totally transformed the men I know They have had to develop skills they didn't feel they had before They have also experienced some of the anxieties that mothers have, although perhaps slightly differently. Mercifully, they don't seem to feel so guilty when they're not with their children.! think these men have also changed their relationship to work and are more conscious of the meaning of ambition.

Because the fathers in my circle are very involved with childrearing, their children don't link nurturing exclusively with the feminine. They associate nurturing, cuddles and talking about difficult issues with dad too. That will make an enormous chink in the notion that to be masculine men always have to show pseudo-strength. It will mean eventually a whole cohort of boys who will be able to express a masculinity that isn't about the repudiation of emotional life.

What also hurts me a lot is that I don't have independent male friends at this juncture of my life.

I hear rather a different story from my clients, who are a range of ordinary women, not necessarily feminists at all. these may be in relationships with, for example, corporate men for whom being involved with a child means seeing it for ten minutes before bed-time. I would say from my clients that the men who they are involved with are not very different from the generation that raised us. Their men may have a notion that they should be doing something but they don't take the idea that seriously.

What also hurts me a lot is that I don't have independent male friends at this juncture of my life That seems appalling. All of my girlfriends are in that situation. Our emotional relationships are still with girlfriends or our male lovers {if we're heterosexual). I don't actually go out with or have independent relationships with men. I suppose this is because men don't bring to their friendships with women those capacities which we find in our girlfriends It's different with the men we live with because they are prepared to be more open with us. Other men won't be open or vulnerable because they're not our lovers.

I know a lot of women who are very interested in men when they're vulnerable but what they find frustrating is men's inability to articulate their vulnerability. If a man withdraws because he's feeling vulnerable or scored, that drives women apoplectic. I think that when men are able to articulate their vulnerability, women find it very, very attractive.

Do you think men change only when they're pushed by women?

Men are obviously challenged in any relationship and of course there's the weight of the Women's Liberation Movement in an individual relationship. My partner would definitely say it was in his own interests to change; he doesn't go in for this "being pushed" business In fact, I don't think any of the men I know would say they've changed because of a moral imperative. They would probably be contemptuous of the suggestion that they were doing it for women as opposed to it being in their own self-interest to change. They would say it was much more to do with their own dissatisfactions around masculinity.

I suppose it's also true that the men I know essentially didn't make it as "regular" men. Just as women who are feminists can be seen as "failed women", because they rejected the limitations of sex-role stereotyping, so the men I'm talking about are "failed men". There was something that wasn't right about their lives for them, whether they were successful in their jobs or not.

Don't all men actually fail as men? The masculine stereotype is so demanding that I would guess even Arnold Schwarzenegger probably doesn't feel much like a real man.

That's interesting to hear. I've certainly had bankers and commodity traders in my practice who suddenly realise that they don't have anything inside. They see themselves as failed men even though they're making six figures a year. I've also had women who are models in my practice and they feel like failed women even though they are how women are supposed to be.

Would you agree that to talk about a masculinity - one cultural norm to which all men are supposed to conform - is less accurate than talking about masculinities, in the plural, that take in the differences between men of different backgrounds?

Yes. Jewish men, for example, are certainly a very particular category I would say that masculinity is significantly divided along class lines too. The influence of class is really profound. If you're from a mining village, there's a completely different category of what is an acceptable masculinity.

Bly puts the mother in the role of preventer and constrainer when he's supposed to be addressing the difficulties in father-son relationships.

In the last year, we have heard a lot about Hobert Bly and his hook 'Iron John'. He talks about the poverty of meets relationships with their fathers, and argues that modern men need to find ways of being "initiated" into manhood. But Bly says very little about men and their mothers. Do you see this as a problem with his work?

Yes I do. In fact, I find a lot of misogyny in Bly and I am not a fan of his work, although I know it strikes a chord in all sorts of men His work certainly contains an implied criticism of women who bring up sons alone. I think what is interesting about how Bly tells the Iron John story is that he has the mother taking and hiding the key to the cage containing the central character of the wild Man. Bly puts the mother in the role of preventer and constrainer when he's supposed to be addressing the difficulties in father-son relationships.

I do think men need to understand their relationships with both the active parent, who is the mother, and with the non-active parent, the father. I often think a boy's relationship with his father is indirect - it reflects his mother's view of the father-son relationship as well as the actual relationship. The mother is absolutely central in the psychology of boys. That is their first love affair and it is their first experience of disappointment. All their major emotional struggles are played out around the feminine, not the masculine.

Boys and men carry a tremendous pain about their relationships to both parents, but Bly is asking that men's relationships with their fathers should fix things for them, in a way I don't think it's sufficient just to engage with the father or the internal father.

More recently, we have seen Neil Lyndon adding his voice to the anti-feminist backlash with his book 'No More Sex war: The Failures of Feminism' and what amounts to an assertion of a "men's rights" agenda. Why do these ideas appear to command such great interest?

Sexual politics exploded in the early 1970's and there were ten years of intense struggle which filtered down through the whole culture. Then we had Thatcherism and Reaganism and an absolutely intense war and backlash against all the values of the 1 960s and 1 970s. It happened because the cultural space has been insufficiently contested by women over the past two decades and we haven't managed to bring in the changes we want. After all, we still have nursery teachers being women and we still have judges being men. Many men haven't seen the benefits of feminism; they're just freaking out because they think women are rejecting them.

There is now a climate where the confusion between the sexes is so great that people think that the solution is to turn the clock back. We are in a situation where the whole issue of masculinity and femininity is not really being contested openly and being thought about creatively - like thinking about changing patterns of employment, domestic labour, relations in the public sphere. People are drawn into reactionary responses like Lyndon's.

In the short term, it is very frightening for men to think about rearranging things when they feel so fragile. When somebody comes along like Lyndon and says we shouldn't be re- arranging things and instead we should be consolidating male power, then this provides a place of safety.

Of course, there are some men who are trying to develop a more progressive men's politics in this country. Sometimes they call themselves the "Men's Movement" or talk about "Men's Liberation". What do you think of those terms?

I've always been extremely uptight about the idea of a Men's Movement. What ore they liberating themselves from? I would prefer to call it a gender-conscious movement. Using the word "Movement" seems to me to valorise what men have been up to. Nobody would feel comfortable with the idea of a "White Movement" and it would be seen as racist I prefer to think of men as distressed, not oppressed.

What are the priorities for men in terms of healing their hurts?

I want men to begin to do something that is very hard when they are 20, 40 or 60: to take responsibility for their own emotional lives and have a level of self-awareness rather than to keep dumping stuff onto their lovers, without realising it. I want them to take some responsibility for exploring and digesting what they are actually feeling. This process can take place at work at the BBC, where they might be dumping problems on the only female colleague who is at their rank or in a domestic situation where they let the woman do all the exposure of need and all the emoting. None of my girlfriends or I want to be a kind of emotional sewage treatment plant, although it's very hard for women to stop doing it because it's part of our identity as women.