A Review of 'What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents' by Nina Power
Originally published on August 21st, 2024
I laughed when I was asked to review a book called “What Do Men Want?”, written by a woman. Before Trump went down the escalator 2015, you could visit the checkout line of any supermarket and see an array of woman’s magazines with hot women on the cover, containing article headlines like, as Dave Chappelle phrased it, 100 Ways to Please Your Man by 'Some Lady', where he proceeds to explain that men are not that complicated (so true). This undertaking has been attempted by women before, yet I don’t know any woman who references a book written by another woman as her anchor for understanding men. In fact, the women who truly do understand men have either lived with or slept with a lot of them. The same is true of men who have a great understanding of women.
Few women understand what men want because women have a, let’s say, selfish relationship with the truth. What a woman feels in each moment is the truth, always was the truth and will always be the truth, until they experience their next emotion. Their model of the world is entirely subjective and each event is part of a narrative that relates to them, whether it does or doesn’t in reality.
I’ve never heard of Nina Power before I was asked to review her book, so “What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents” is my first acquaintance with her point of view. Nina very much has a woman’s point of view in the sense that she is naturally a socialist. She wants everyone to get along. She wants this thing to work out well for everyone. It’s cute. It’s endearing. This natural yearning is something that very few women can reconcile given that they’re born equipped with the hormonal tools that improve their success as mothers, which is to excrete whichever hormone that manifests compassion. When a boy scrapes his knee, his mother’s natural impulse is to say “You poor baby. Come inside, I’ll clean that up for you.” while the father may lovingly give his son a light kick and say “You’ll be fine. Get back out there and keep playing.” This is a good polarity in the home, bad when implemented in society. This biological difference between the two sexes explains why COVID-19 was handled the way it was and is proof that we live under a matriarchy.