A timely call for mutual respect, playfulness and vulnerability between the sexes

As the gender juggernaut rolls through the linguistic and sexual conventions of modern culture, it takes courage to write a book inviting us to celebrate the fact that men and women are not the same. Nina Power exposes herself to attack from both sides: from transgender activists for insisting on the non-negotiability of bodily sexual difference, and from gender-critical feminists for pleading on behalf of men. Yet if, as she suggests, our inability to think about sexual difference is “symptomatic of a general collapse in the ability to think at all”, then this book is both significant and timely.

Power focuses on the ways in which men suffer under the triple whammy of feminist demonisation, the reductionist entrapments of capitalism and the loss of traditional virtues and role models. She uses the term “hetero­sociality” to appeal for a new appreciation of sexual difference based not on conflict, antip­athy and commodification, but on friendship, trust and mutual respect between the sexes. The last two sentences offer an eloquent summary of the book’s main argument: “To imagine that men and women can be better, and are fated most wonderfully to sometimes be together, is, in the end, to respect the strange marvel of human existence as a whole.”