No, Caitlin Moran: men do talk about their feelings – and birthday parties, and plaits

Article here. Excerpt:

'I can’t know what it feels like, as a man, to watch any of this unfolding around me. But as a woman watching from the sidelines, it’s been both revelatory and often moving, triggering a desire to hear more. Which brings us rather awkwardly to the writer Caitlin Moran’s hotly awaited new book What About Men?, whose breezy argument that modern men just can’t share their problems or their deeper feelings like women supposedly do seems to be provoking something of an unexpected backlash.

She’s right, obviously, that plenty of men are struggling; that they’re still disproportionately likely to be homeless or addicts or in jail or to die by suicide, that toxic masculinity is worryingly rife in schools (as parliament’s women and equalities committee pointed out this week) and that too many men put off going to the doctor, especially for help with mental health. But it’s quite the leap from there to arguing breezily in Esquire magazine that “men themselves don’t talk about their problems, or give each other advice, at all”, or that millennial dads are muddling through with “no fathering memoirs; no pub discussions about the practicalities of being a father – how to plait hair; how to arrange a turtle-themed birthday party”, as if men never chatted on the school run or YouTube wasn’t full of dad tutorials on ballet buns or the plethora of charities and thinktanks and men’s support groups that have been springing up since the late 1990s (when the Fatherhood Institute, for example, first emerged) didn’t exist.'