What do men want?

Nina Power on the impasse between the sexes

Coming out Feb 2022

When Nina Power gives a talk or writes, I pay attention. It was thus since she was the occasional contributor to the Lyotard listserv that I also happened to be in, a million years ago, when the listservs were the early internet prototypes for Reddit and Quora. Whether she writes about the arts, culture, society, critical theory, film, whether in the form of a chapbook, listserv post, Substack, book review, essay, traditional book (her best known is One-Dimensional Woman (2010), a critique of the consumerist choice-feminism) – it’s sure to be incisive, well-informed, and brave. She is currently working on a new book which looks at some of the impasses of our hetero-social lives and how we can move forward and establish trust between the sexes in the age of #metoo and incel forums. We talked in her book-lined flat in South London in September.

LP: You taught in the academia for more than 10 years and you’re one of the thinkers in the Anglosphere who actually read closely the “postmodernists”. Are people like Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida now forever lost for the Anglo readers because of this Anglo-academic takeover of their work (notably Judith Butler) and the media who chew on that version instead of the original work? Should we care?

Nina Power: I definitely think there are aspects of the post-war French philosophy that have been taken up in the Anglosphere to the detriment of a broader understanding of what these thinkers are doing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the politics of desire and what a disaster that word’s been – Judith Butler included. The problem is once you have politics that’s based on what people want or what they say they want, it’s going to end in a clash of rights very quickly. The idea that sexual desire should come to dominate public sphere is disastrous. I mean, repression is useful for a reason; politics is public sphere and of course you have to legislate on things to do with desire but once desire starts to take over the law and becomes the law, it’s very bad. And it’s always going to be worse for women and children because male desire is often horrific [laughs]. That, in combination with a kind of consumerism which encourages the creation of new desires, and the blurring of the boundaries between needs and wants, you end up with a really disastrous situation – a sort of power battle for the supremacy of desire. Whose desire is more important? I wouldn’t want to say that’s directly the fault of Foucault and Deleuze & co. but nevertheless there’s a complex way in which these things percolate… and I think you can see in Deleuze and Guattari’s later What is Philosophy, they start to realize that their philosophy itself is being reincorporated as a series of slogans. Whether it’s the Silicon Valley and the LSD hippie mind-expanding thing that ends up as a kind of techno-capitalist thing… it’s all going on. The ideas and the practice and the technology all swirling together.

Then there’s the academic trans activism and trans humanism that takes over the concept ‘bodies without organs’ – we are adjustable assemblages of impulses and bits…

Yeah, or to quote a friend of mine, “everyone’s a Lego set”. This dehumanizing language of “uterus-havers” and “birthing bodies” because you can’t use the word woman, it’s abhorrent. Obviously no one’s calling men penis-havers, or testicle-owners, or whatever. The levels of re-coded misogyny and the denial of bodily autonomy and integrity – of selfhood, really, whether you use the religious language or existentialist language – is quite something. I think de Beauvoir is still amazing, as is The Second Sex. She talks about what actual freedom is for women, and that it’s also the freedom to fail, but that it depends upon a certain freedom to create meaning for oneself, and a certain way of naming one’s own experience and re-internalizing it. And if these words are taken from you – it’s impossible. This is the whole thing about naming and pronouns, you have to call me whatever I want but I also get to call you whatever I want. Well, no. And then there’s this desperate desire to control how other people perceive you. You can never control how others perceive you.

It’s so disciplinarian. What is this desire to call the policeman, enforce the law, read the statutes, call the boss to get people fired… the post-structuralists were anarchists and libertarians, this Anglo version that’s now authoritarian, how did this happen?

It’s a combination of things. Some of it is – especially among Millennials, if you want to use this generational language as a shorthand, and I am friends with a lot of people in their thirties -- I think for them, that sense of precarity was so internalized that they think that in order to get a job, any tactic is viable.

So it’s economic precarity and dog-eat-dog?

Honestly, they said this to me. If you can get opposition out of the way, you’ll use anything you can. Snitch on someone because they said the wrong thing… it’s like Stasi plus capitalist precarity plus the Millennial online-ness; it’s a combination of terrible things. And I think also the personality types, regardless of politics, that have been encouraged by this culture. And obviously it’s what Christopher Lasch talks in The Culture of Narcissism, beloved by the dirtbag left, but it’s a very prescient book. Add to the mix the internet impersonality which totally allows for this kind of a sadistic, authoritarian type to thrive…

…and claim they are the victims, actually.

Yes. The cry-bully, as Julie Bindel would put it. Nick Cohen had a good column in the Guardian recently. One of the things that he points out is that historians who studied the Gestapo files discovered that about 40 percent of the denunciations were motivated by personal animus. Envy is one of the first things in the Bible for a reason. It’s one of the oldest human emotions, and if you read René Girard, he shows that mimetic rivalry is absolutely foundational. So we’re in a culture of scarcity, which is also narcissistic, and people are trying to get ahead – if you see anyone doing anything or having any degree of recognition, someone is going to want to destroy that person. And the mechanisms for doing so are easier today. I did work experience in newspapers when I was a teenager and I remember that they would always get crazy letters. Random people would send deranged letters, and they’d just put them in the bin. And now somehow every email or tweet is taken seriously.

Apparently Jess de Wahl’s work was removed from the Royal Academy shop because there were 8 complaints on Instagram?

I think there’s a general collapse of responsibility. No one wants to be the adult in the room, no one wants to say, Hang on these people are crazy, I’m not accepting anonymous accusations, and WTF. I don’t know what it is, whether it’s the collapse of – psychoanalytically speaking -- the paternity function or something along those lines.

You think? I spotted this in the blurb for your book, that you’re arguing in favour of the survival of the Paternal function in some form.

It’s interesting… I think one of the most controversial things today is to try to be reasonable. And so I try to write THE most reasonable book about men that I can possibly manage. Because it seemed very obvious to me that if I wrote a polemic that it would be easy. And there are a few of those about. There’s that book I Hate Men, by Pauline Harmange. It’s fine, but it’s a short polemic. It says we should be allowed to say “I hate men, they do terrible things.” And absolutely, she should write this if that’s how she feels, but I think the time for writing polemics for me at least is over. That’s a young person’s game, I wanted to do something that is taking into account the diverse range of encounters with men. It’s not a personal book, it’s a generalist book about trends in culture and so on, but I was really tired of these sorts of generalizations about toxic masculinity.

And the hashtag yes all men, and even #metoo had its problems I think.

Yes, absolutely. One of the things that struck me again with what’s happened since the 1990s is – that cliché about feminist women being men-hating, has sort of weirdly become true, for a feminism that I don’t think it’s really feminism. They just hate men; hating men is encouraged. So you write lengthy articles about how all men are evil.

And this is all heterosexual women. I find myself scratching my head, thinking hmmm wait but you’re dating and fall in love with men, what’s going on here.

Yeah, no, it’s not a kind of principled separatist position; it’s a resentment really. Like it’s an encouraged and acceptable form of resentment. So I basically try to say that the resentment between the sexes is encouraged and predicated on a greater image of scarcity; and this is a zero-sum game, that the culture encourages the idea if one sex gains, the other one loses. And that this happens on both sides. So that the resentment that the women feel towards men – and I’m not saying that it’s not legitimate: most interpersonal violence is between men and men and then it’s between men and women, obviously I’m not trying to deny that it’s based on reality - but I’m trying to say if we want this to stop, if we want to limit male violence, we need to think about how we do that. And in the book I argue that I don’t think these generalizations about how men are all toxic are going to help. On the contrary, they’re going to make this resentment worse. I’m trying to find if there’s a way, after #metoo, that we can rethink what I call the heterosociality which is the fact that we live in a mixed world.

Men are not going anywhere.

No they’re not. My opening line, which is also controversial, is that men and women exist. I’m referring to sexuation, and unambiguously, and I’m saying there are men, and there are women. There are two sexes, we live in a heterosocial world (all of us, straight and gay). Had I written this book, say, eight years ago, this vocabulary would not have been controversial, and today it will probably be.

To go back to what you said about the zero-sum game… Don’t know if you follow Meghan Daum’s podcast? She had Naama Kates recently on, who came to talk about her own podcast about incel subcultures. At one point Daum suggests that some of the unhappiness of men is due to the loss of access to women who would traditionally marry them, as marriage was the only venue of self-actualization and economic self-sufficiency available to women. Now that large numbers of women don’t have to marry to have a life, they don’t – and those that want to, compete for the so-called higher status men. Therefore this ‘surplus’ of men for whom there’s no demand. I don’t know what to think about that theory.

It’s a difficult one. We’ve recently had in this country a shooting by a man who was described in the media as incel. I’m familiar with Kates, I’ve read the interview with her in Spiked!. It’s not quite clear that the shooter fully belonged to this culture, and even if people identify as incels, this is not necessarily the direct cause of someone behaving in a violent way… This reminds of me of the 1990s, and the conversations around the Columbine shooting. And people bringing up that the shooter listened to Nine Inch Nails or something, as if there’s some obvious direct causation between cultural consumption and violence.

But there is an argument, some radical feminists are making it, that there is a straight line between say violent porn, video and film, violent fantasies, the habits of ‘toxic masculinity’, the fact of growing up in patriarchy etc – and violence against women.

I don’t know, obviously, but I’m more interested in how you stop these men becoming violent. No one is in disagreement that we need to think about why this is happening. But people disagree on how you do it. And I do disagree with a lot of the contemporary left liberal wisdom about what’s going on here. I don’t think demonizing young men or men who can’t get a girlfriend is the right way of doing it. I think that further causes ostracism. I don’t know if you’ve seen the American documentary, TFW No GF (That Feeling When No Girlfriend) by Alex Lee Moyer? She interviews several incels, men who are active in these communities and involved in meme culture etc. They’re largely young, economically dispossessed men living in deprived areas. Class is completely cut out when we talk about these things. They are poor white men living in economically deprived areas who have no cultural power whatsoever who are doing their own thing online… an in the liberal media you are allowed and indeed encouraged to hate these people.

One way around the issue of celibacy, some suggest, is to be paying for sex. Or we can thought-experiment in a jokey way about the practice of arranged marriage. Houellebecq wrote about this.

What do you think of Michel Houellebecq?

I think he’s a genius, in the strict sense that he channels the spirit of the age. I think that he doesn’t seem beholden to the niceties of polite society; he is definitely shocking the bourgeoisie, that’s his role. I think the world would be poorer without him. But you hate him?

I can’t get past the obnoxious narrators…

Absolutely, but he captures the reality of that. The latest book, Serotonin, is so heartbreaking. This is a book about the sadness of men, actually.

Which is the one where the socialist party allies with the Islamic fundamentalist party to win the election against the far right, after which sharia is introduced to France?

That’s Submission.

That’s kind of cogent, I must say.

That’s what I mean by genius: he’s taking existing tendencies and shows what they would actually look like if they come to full fruition. It’s like a thought experiment. I think he’s quite philosophical.

Well I ended up in those books with self-pitying narrators who go to Thailand for sex tourism.

No they are horrible books, but because they are books about a horrible age. And I think in that sense they are channeling reality.

Do you write about Houellebecq in your book?

I briefly mention him in relation to this question that we talked about. He famously says, Some men will have almost all the sex, and most men will have almost none.

Ah, the incel philosophy.

That’s right. He’s identifying the problem, if you like. In a way, my reasonable and very gentle suggestion is that everyone should lower their expectations, because I think if you encourage the women to think they’re princesses and they should always marry a prince – this bears no relation to reality. I think that men and women do get along, most of the time, and that would include heterosocial relationships and friendships and work, and that category of interaction is often ignored or overlooked. So I think if there’s more humour, or more just acceptance of the fact that everyone’s flawed and nobody’s perfect, we’ll all be in a better place. It’s the most gentle book.

What if the women had more casual sex, therefore approach coupling with non-marital expectations? Women certainly have less casual and anonymous sex than men, and some people use the evolution argument to explain that (we hoard and protect our reproductive resources, as it were, because that’s the strategy that paid off: stability, avoidance of risk etc).

I guess that’s the kind of thing that’s been proposed by the dating apps. I’m against that, I think that it’s destructive of intimacy and that it actually erodes people’s character.

So you develop a moral argument! Do you write about online dating in the book?

Yes, to some extent. But to go back to your question about evolutionary biology, one of the things that’s happened in the manosphere, and the pick-up artist ‘community’, is that they take certain aspects of evolutionary biology or psychology and make them their whole philosophy. So one of the words that appears is hypergamy. It’s the idea that women will always marry up, that women are always looking for the ‘best’ man. In the manosphere it’s often described in horrible ways, like “alpha-fucks beta-bucks” which means… women will sleep with high status men but get lower status men to pay for their offspring.

And apparently Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are considered beta-bucks in this world?

This is the interesting thing. One of the questions is what actually counts as a high-status man in our world, because it can’t just be physical strength because strongest, most violent men are most likely in prison. The excesses of alpha masculinity make it anti-social. Or we can say, it’s not physical it’s money, but a lot of the very rich men are nerdy. They’re beta in the physical sense. So this argument is too simplistic I think, it’s not really working. Even if there was some truth to “hypergamy” as a hypothesis -- because let’s say women have more invested in a sexual encounter because they want best for their offspring and they have fewer reproductive chances by virtue of their biology – I don’t think women think so straightforwardly. I don’t think it actually works like this.

But one of the things I defend in some ways is the encouragement of certain kinds of masculinist ideas or projects or books that actually stop men wanting to blame women and take control of their own life. You get this in Jordan Peterson, for example. One of the interesting things that he does do which has an effect on relationships between men and women is to tell young men to stop blaming women for their own failings and limitations. Basically, sort your own life out. It’s not your mother’s fault. I think this is a positive for women because it’s like, no, you don’t get to lie about and moan and complain why don’t I have a supermodel girlfriend. And that’s also to do, as I see it, with the paternalistic role. Very evidently Jordan Peterson plays a role similar to the 1950s paternalist. I went to hear him speak in London in the very big venue O2, and it was interesting to see the kind of people who went to see him. They’re often very well presented young men, often with women, girlfriends or friends, so it was quite mixed, and mixed ethnicities as well, and – how to put it, he evidently represented a certain aspirational quality, both of kind of material but most of all a spiritual life, because of his fusion of Jungianism and Christianity and paternalism… and I sort of thought: this isn’t bad.

OK but some of the mythologizing is… awkward. Feminine chaos and so on.

Sure, yes. But the main thing I’m trying to say is, rather than just attack him, we should try to understand why he has so much appeal. And I don’t think the net effect has been a negative one if he encourages people to take responsibility for their own shit.

Definitely. But another thing I was going to ask you about heterosexual dating is: do hetero women still seek a better earner, a role model, a more active partner who always makes the first move? And if that expectation complicates things?

One of the books I draw on is called Society without the Father by psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich. In it he says that what happens in the twentieth century is this collapse of the paternal function, after which men and women start to become like brother and sister so the relationships between men and women in modern consumerist societies are like sibling rivalry. They’re in competition for jobs, experiences, and that this has in some ways a detrimental effect on things like sexuality…

But what about The 50 Shades of Gray? Why was that fantasy of domination so popular?

Yeah, there’s that. I don’t talk so much about that, but I do talk a little about this return to traditionalism and this desire for trad wife lives in the book.

I’m sure you know Mary Harrington? She’s like a very brilliant… trad wife philosopher?

She’s very funny, I like her a lot. She’s writing a book where she’s defending this idea of “reactionary feminism”, it’s very funny… I think she’s on to something. But yes she’s opposed to every aspect of the liberal political subject.

Whenever  I read her, I end up feeling terrible for not having accomplished ~ a husband and children ~

To be fair, Mary openly talks about the time when she used to be part of some queer theatre collective, but then she got married later and had a child.

She doesn’t incorporate that history in her present thinking…

She does talk about it some times. I think on some level though what she’s saying is, this dominant liberal culture actually makes women unhappy. That’s one of her provocations. That liberal choice doesn’t work for women.

Mm, I think for her women who don’t have children are like some perfectly adjusted liberal subjects – men, effectively – and they’re not politically interesting. Women with children are “more representative” of the female condition and they are a greater challenge for liberalism’s basic premises.

I’ve disagreed with her in private. She thinks feminism wants to murder the mother, and I don’t think that’s true of Second Wave feminism, although I think there are aspects of that in it. I’ve written critiques of Shulamith Firestone, for ex, and don’t like the techno-transhumanism business… Verso, which is a major publishing institution of the left, has now adopted this techno-optimist view.

Yes, they published Sophie Lewis’ Full Surrogacy Now, and Andrea Long Chu…

And the xenofeminist staff. And now if you are into nature, you’re a fascist.

That’s such a wealthy society fantasy.

Plus it’s completely compatible with Silicon Valley-dominated economy. You may claim you’re a communist, but your fantasies are similar to Elon Musk’s.

II.

So what do men want? Do you answer that question?

I answer it as a joke – I asked all my male friends and I assembled all the answers. One answer was: a pleasant woman. Or, a particular type of woman… Nigella Lawson, I believe someone said. Then some answers are like: a beer. A shed. To be left alone.

What about money? Particular kind of jobs?

Not a lot of those desires, but that’s maybe the company that I keep. [laughs]

I also say in the book: there are a lot of men who are already good. Of course I say I can’t answer the question what men want; it’s a silly question, just as when Freud asked what women want. But we can use desire as a way into what men are saying, and what they’re doing. In the end, I want to defend the idea and the possibility of being a good man. If we say all forms of masculinity are bad, because they’re masculinity, and all masculinity is toxic, then you’re not offering men any other opportunity. If we say that all masculinity is tainted of course you’re gonna get men saying, I want out. And I don’t want that. Implicit in my argument was the idea that if we want men to be men, not in the sense of being macho or aggressive, but rather thoughtful well rounded potentially good friends and husbands and fathers, we have to allow for the possibility of good masculinity. And I say, look, a lot of men are good. A lot of men aren’t violent, don’t hate women… in a mixed world we encounter men and women all the time, their sex is in most contexts unimportant, most of the time we’re like a neutral subject – which is the liberal subject – it doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman behind the counter etc.

I do look at male separatism too, there’s this whole Men Going Their Own Way movement… And I also talk about the infantilization of culture, the fact that we are encouraged to think of ourselves as toddlers, always in the sibling rivalry.

I liked your latest Substack, where you talk about all of us living in the Angelocene. Angels are pure *and* they have no sex. Have you seen the polls that say that the Millennials are having less sex than previous generations?

I do talk about that in the book. I think there are various things going on. People using the apps are having quite a lot sex but they are not having relationships. “Don’t catch feelings, it’s the worst thing that you can do”.  

I have a gay friend who told me he gets attached to people after sex, there are always emotions, and he tells me, You can imagine how I fit in to the dominant gay paradigm...

I too have a gay friend like that who’s very romantic, and he basically doesn’t participate in the gay sexual economy… he just reads female poets.

There are probably more people like that than we think.

Yes… and I talk about the fear of touch, how touch has become so tainted and politicized, and obviously it’s even worse now in the pandemic – the kind of fear of getting it wrong because the penalties are so extreme, you may end on an internet list, being called an abuser. There’s very funny meme, with an office scene, and a pretty woman, and a good-looking guy comes in and says Hi, how you’re doing, you’re looking great, and she’s thrilled to chat, and then next scene is a regular guy comes in and says the same thing and she’s immediately on the phone, Hello, Human Resources? The fear of that. Lots of people used to meet their future spouse at work, but the edict against that now is so extreme. It’s the policing of every gesture, nothing can be ambiguous. And if you have an app, why would you attempt to chat up a stranger anywhere, under any circumstance?

So we’re losing those life skills?

And the randomness and openness. I do make a defence of risk and I like some of Camille Paglia on this. She’s saying, Look, women are not children, if you want to be an adult, then you accept a degree of risk. That’s what being alive is like.

Paglia of course goes even  further and extrapolates that to rape as well. Virginie Despentes writes about this in King Kong Theory, that she found Paglia’s thoughts on rape liberating. “You dust yourself off and go on being free; physical danger is the price worth paying for freedom” type thing. But you can’t make that argument now, you’d be torched.

Yep. I did a review, separate from the book, of Germaine Greer’s book about rape.

She’s making a similar argument, I think?

She says that a lot of so-called rape [for women in Western societies] is bad sex.

And she’s hated for that.

But it was a discussion in Second Wave. Is rape the worst thing that can happen to a woman? And a lot of women said no because that’s giving too much power to it. And to the penis.

The mysterious power of the penis.

There is definitely feminist argument for at least deflating the penis power -- which is not to say that rape isn’t criminal offence. There’s a huge difference between someone grabbing you off the street as opposed to a slightly coercive situation where you don’t necessarily want to have sex with someone you like but do it anyway.

I try to be balanced in the book, overall.  And try to both address female concerns but also some male concerns. And I don’t pre-emptively say that all of the things that MRAs say are evil and white supremacist. I talk about male suicides; I talk about the fact that men still dominate in dangerous jobs, because these are genuine concerns. I’m not saying we should have more women dying in dangerous jobs – it’s more to recognize that there are asymmetries based on sexual difference. Sexual difference is real and there are ways it plays out in the world that we can't just wish away.

September 2021