Recently, Australia has started manufacturing a new range of products which are creating plenty of gainful employment for newspaper feature writers, specialist bibliographers, therapists and academics. The generic name for these products is ‘Men’s Studies’. The practices that go with the title are disparate and slippery. They vary from the consciousness-raising style of small-group talking and touching (if it moves, call it a feeling), through to a more theoretically ordered uncovering of capitalist hegemony in the school and on the sporting field. What these approaches tend to share is a sense that feminists are ‘onto something’, that there is a crise de conscience of masculinity (and that the crisis is justified and not before its time). In particular, the emerging literature — whether it takes as its father Lacan, Gramsci or Maslow — seems to concentrate on the desirability of men’s attempting to explore the non-violent, collaborative aspects of their practice. In other ways, the approaches are probably very different. But they seem to share an envy of the way that the constructive expression of emotion has been associated with women. Some of the men’s groups that have appeared in response to feminism have tended to concentrate on the body: in effect, using feminism as a new way to come. The line is something like: ‘We thank feminism for the challenge it has laid down and all that it has done, and can continue to do, for us.’ ‘Masculinists’ have also developed anti-feminist positions on divorce and abortion, based on putative ‘men’s rights’. 

There are two significant intellectual elements to this response. First, there has been a rapid recolonisation of the academic/discursive terrain that feminism had established and occupied. Secondly, ‘gender’ as an area of study is. no longer simply to consider such matters as inequalities between men and women, or even more complex questions around the interpellation and unity of the speaking subject. It must now encompass (however subtly) the matter of how men can cope with ‘the modern woman’.