Men

Well, enough people have called me an arsehole on this website, so bugger it. Let’s talk about that part of my anatomy.

Specifically, let’s talk about the colonoscopy I had a couple of years ago. And let’s do so in the spirit of Movember, a charity which raises money for two major men’s health issues – depression and prostate cancer.

Movember ended yesterday. Hopefully that means there’ll be a few less Boonies and Mervs prowling the streets. Last year, Movember raised $70 million globally. This year it’ll be $93 million. Much of that money goes to medical research. Some also goes towards awareness programs. That’s what this article, with it’s admittedly vulgar headline, is all about.

Continue reading "Bugger it, let’s talk about my bottom" »

There are 17 strangers in a training room. Over the course of eight hours, they’re repeatedly divided up by gender to brainstorm. At one point, the trainer makes a joke about turning testicles into a purse. It gets a laugh.

This is a parenting class I attended recently. Eight couples with nothing in common except their pregnancy and an assumption that it’s apparently OK to joke about castration. 

Over at news.com.au, we’ve been looking at male identity in a post-GFC jobs market and a post-post-feminist household.  We have found traditional “male” jobs in decline and what one expert called a “sex-segregated workforce” taking its toll on Aussie men.

We have also found an increasing number of men seeking help through mental health services and therapy sessions. But in a way, that’s the good news – at least men are finally prepared to talk.

Continue reading "Learning to be a dad’s the same as learning to be a man" »

Sometimes I have a moan about my husband to my mates. I’m not talking character assassination – that sort of trash talk is plain nasty – but occasionally I’ll blurt out something that infuriates me.

And, no, I’m not going to go into details here. That would be monstrously mean (and possibly unjustified). Suffice to say, if your 23rd chromosome is XX, I’m guessing you’ve had your own blab or two.

Naturally, my good mates also confide in me. At least, they did. (They’re probably reconsidering it about now.) As long as these chats are good humoured and don’t descend into mockery, I’ve always thought they were perfectly healthy – a bit of emotional cleanse, tone and moisturise.

Continue reading "Omertà: It’s Italian for top secret men’s business" »

“Raising awareness” is a catchcry for cancer events. Prostate cancer awareness is complicated like no other cancer by the mixed messages on early detection.

Urologists and pathologists urge men over 40 to get tested regularly; others in the clinical community involved in cancer screening advise men to make an informed choice about being tested, after discussing their family history and other personal concerns with their GPs.

Why the debate? Because there’s no screening test that adequately distinguishes between an early-stage prostate cancer that may lead to a patient’s death if untreated and a cancer that will do no harm in the patient’s lifetime.

Continue reading "Stop giving men a bum steer on prostate cancer" »

As the finals near and we sort the footballing wheat from the chaff, let us pause to salute those players who are neither exquisitely talented nor thrilling to watch.

The ones who are Commodores, not footballing Ferraris. The players who have to buy their own drinks in nightclubs, and probably even queue to get in.

That is not to denigrate their contribution. Not by a long stretch. Average players are the infantry who make the generals look good. They are the quiet guy in the office toiling away uncomplainingly while the suits are out to lunch.

Continue reading "A salute to humble, honest footballing toilers" »

MY husband, a man I’ve long adored for his principles, his fine British wit, his modesty and – I’ll admit it – his good looks, has just done something completely out of character. He’s bought a flash car.

OK, it’s not that flash. It’s a few years old. But it’s a posh make favoured by the royal family and the type of car Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson calls “slightly caddish”.

Oh all right, what Jeremy actually says is, “It’s the sort of car driven by the sort of person who would go away for a weekend with his wife and spend the night flirting outrageously with the waitress.” (I’ve never liked Jeremy.)

Continue reading "There’s something about men and cars…" »

There’s a man drought in the city. Single girls outnumber single guys two to one, maybe even three to one. This is true because I’ve read the proclamations in countless articles, seen the stories on A Current Affair and watched in horror as hapless farmers take their pick of a hundred potential wives.

The odds are probably closer to five to one. 

Being newly single and on the fast-track to 30 I know things are stacked in my favour. I can get dressed on my own, cook a balanced meal and my addiction to video games is mild… I can stop playing whenever I want. Really.

Continue reading "A single bloke’s guide to surviving the man drought" »

Ever since second-wave feminism kicked off four decades ago, people have been wondering if an equivalent movement for men would emerge. There was a short-lived media frenzy in the 90s when a handful of men took to banging on drums and declaiming bad poetry about their neglected inner warrior, but that turned out to be a false dawn.

Nowadays, leaving aside those fathers’ rights groups who like to create a public nuisance while wearing ill-fitting Batman costumes, there’s really no such thing as a masculinist movement.

Except maybe there is. Or at least the beginnings of one. The pick-up artist (PUA) subculture has been around in some form for two decades but it crossed over into the mainstream about six years ago.

Continue reading "Is the pick-up movement men’s answer to feminism?" »

For years, I, and many like me, have suffered in silence - hiding our shame in plain sight. We’ve struggled through life without support groups, online forums and Oprah specials, praying each day that no one notices our humiliating affliction. We are the smooth-cheeked ones who walk among you, we men who cannot grow beards.

Much like “Eyes Slightly Too Close Together Syndrome” (ESTCTS), “Chronic Male Beardlessness” (CMB) is a very real condition that affects countless men around the world.

I myself have been a victim since birth. During a recent two-week break, I decided to defy the gods and grow a big ol’ beard. Turns out it’s really hard.

Continue reading "It takes a strong man to grow a face-mane" »

The drinks went down easy. A little too easy for a wet Monday night. Alpha magazine was no more, the pin pulled in an 11 am meeting with management, and past and present staff were out drowning their sorrows. Outside, the rain poured down, as though in commiseration.

In its heyday, Alpha was the biggest-selling men’s magazine in Australian publishing history. Its demise says much about the current industry focus on electronic publishing. But it says more about how incredibly tough it is, and always has been, to sell magazines to men in Australia.

Men’s magazines are a tough game. The toughest. While women across all demographic groups have an automatic reflex to purchase mags both quality and trashy, men have no such compulsion. It’s like our hormonal cycle, or lack of it compared to women. The impulse is just not there.

Continue reading "Farewell to the first and last great Aussie men’s mag" »

The average guy with a few kilos to lose has no time for celebrity-endorsed weight–loss programs, according to Weight Watchers in the United States.

But he sure loves a good beer and a bit of joke at the expense of his mates, according to their new online advertising campaign (you can watch it in the video above).

You can tell a Weight Watchers “kind of guy” by one of three possible outfits.

Continue reading "Weight Watchers for men; actually more fun than beer" »

Scientists today published preliminary studies into a new contraceptive for men, designed to be worn as a slow release patch or as an implant under the skin. 

Previous efforts at male contraception have suffered from several drawbacks, namely compliance of the males, and lack of trust on behalf of the female partners to believe that their beloved male is actually taking the contraceptive.

Females have always been keen to be the primary users of contraceptive, since they are left holding the baby, so to speak.  This new form of contraceptive solves both these problems in a unique and stimulating way.

Continue reading "New contraceptive linked to men’s animal urges" »

True equality is impossible. We are not born equal, and we cannot be made equal.

But equal opportunity for all is a noble and realistic goal.

In a fairly short time – say, a century – women’s position in society has altered dramatically. This time one hundred years ago women had few rights. They were second-class citizens.

Continue reading "All men (and women) were not created equal" »

In his spare time Penbo writes a column for the Australian Womens Weekly each month and this is his latest. It’s a bumper edition featuring an excellent recipe for roast chicken with tarragon, and a great interview with Anna Bligh.

There are men and there are men and then there’s Alby Mangels. Alby, you will recall, is the adventurer and film maker who became an overnight sensation in the 1980s when he travelled the untamed parts of the planet in an old Land Rover with nothing but a blue heeler, a compass, a bag of dried apricots and two dozen Miss Australia finalists.
 

Alby was related to some family friends of ours and, as a teenager, I had the privilege of going to his house to watch the unedited pre-release version of his World Safari film. It went for about 14 hours. I was glued to the screen, marvelling not so much at the adventures he had but the really hot women he got to have them with.

It didn’t seem to matter if he was wearing the loin cloth shorts or the mud-spattered Chinos, Alby was a veritable chick magnet. He famously shed the loin cloth in 1985 for Cleo magazine, saying enigmatically: “We come in with nothing, and go out with nothing, nudity is our truest form.”

Continue reading "Advanced body hair? Yeah yeah." »

What was it that we women set out to achieve so long ago I can hardly remember the detail?  Did we want to take over the world?  Did we want to make men subservient to our will?  Were we angry enough to march in the streets for our right for equality?  No to the first two and yes, to the last. 

I remember the US author Deidre Bair telling us at a Writers’ Week that what we wanted was equality, we all had men as friends, lovers, husbands, sons, brothers, we just wanted to have the same opportunities as they had and that bitterness had no place in a brave new world. 

Well, for some it had, those most mistreated in some cultures, but for most of us women living in affluent Australia, it didn’t seem too hard to expect that we could easily settle for equality of opportunity.  So, why now, in another century ,is it still so hard to achieve that equality?

Continue reading "SA Parliament: Where have all the women gone?" »

Some people really know how to land on both feet. Such as the three blokes who host the absurdly popular TV show Top Gear, who are paid a whole shed-load of money to remain in a state of arrested mental development and live out an extended midlife crisis on television, while taking the piss out of people of other races whom they find stupid.

It’s assumed that men everywhere adore this program, hence the preponderance of Top Gear DVDs taking pride of place next to the socks and hankies every Fathers Day. It’s also said that women like the show too, that there’s something of a raffish, knockabout quality to host Jeremy Clarkson and his crew which the ladies find endearing or even irresistible. I know a few blokes who enjoy (or enjoyed) the show, but I’ve never met a woman who claims to like it, and suspect the latter assertion is made by men who simply want their wives or girlfriends to endure their seven-hour-a-week Top Gear habit.

Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond will be heading our way soon on one of their “Down Under” tours. It’s a pity that they didn’t choose instead to take their show on the road to another southern nation, namely Mexico, which was recently the subject of one of their zany gags, and whose excellent citizens would probably love the chance to see these blokes in the flesh.

Continue reading "Is Top Gear the best children’s show on television?" »

Twenty years I’ve been in the workforce. That’s 20 years of deadlines, jumping on planes, working late into the night and, ultimately, furthering the fortunes of companies and proprietors who are decent enough – sorry, lucky enough – to have me.

During those two decades, how many times do you reckon I’ve asked for a pay rise? Most years? Biannually? Nope. Just once.

Not a savvy thing to admit, but a quick ask around friends and colleagues reveals the same: Women don’t ask for pay rises.

Continue reading "Sisters should ask for pay rises themselves" »

Ever hooked up at the supermarket?

Not me. I did see Poh Ling Yeow there once - but as I live in Adelaide I see each of our four celebrities at least on a weekly basis.

And beyond ``I like your paintings’’ (this was pre-Masterchef) there was nothing I could think of to blurt out in a supermarket aisle which wouldn’t have come across as lame (note to self, buy a copy of The Game:  Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists).

Continue reading "A feast of options in online dating" »

A mate of mine went to the Big Day Out in Adelaide on Friday. It was a regular kind of day – plenty of good music, a few beers, just the one brawl where a young guy was king-hit from behind and left lying unconscious on the bitumen, his motionless head propped up with a bundle of T-shirts as his friends waited for medical staff to arrive.

The organisers and media declared the day “relatively incident-free”. And so it was, in a relative sense, as in Australia these days there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about someone being knocked out cold, being left with a permanent brain injury or even being killed, in a random fight with a stranger.

I spoke to my mate yesterday and he said he was so rattled by what he saw that he decided not to go out for beers with his friends on the weekend. He didn’t feel like drinking and he couldn’t stop thinking about the guy who’d been knocked out, and checked the papers that morning in vain for any reference to the incident. There was none.

Continue reading "A tale of two punches" »

It’s common knowledge that men like to perve on women. But what about the reverse? Do chicks want man-p*rn to stick up in their workshops and ogle over with their mates during homoerotic poker games?

Do women like to watch?

The editor of a new mag offering photos of nude men and their dangly bits answers with a resounding “you bet”.

Continue reading "Male nudity: Do women like to watch?" »

Not so many fin-de-siècles ago, it was widely assumed that women’s place was in the home.

Gallivanting about polling booths was supposed to render us unladylike and – quelle horreur! – unmarriageable. 

Suffragette writer Alice Duer Miller responded to these oppressive stereotypes by turning the tables in a satirical piece entitled Why We Don’t Want Men To Vote.

Continue reading "Woah, man! Sweeping gender generalisations" »

Bettina Arndt asked: “Why do men take such risks for the sake of sex?”. Novelist Philip Roth wrote: “Every mistake a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator”. What is it about men and sex?

The problem for males begins early. When a boy reaches puberty he’s almost immediately at his sexual peak: too young an age to negotiate sexual agreements with girls his own age who are likely to reject his clumsy advances with disdain, and go off to pine romantically for older boys. So it is with a sense of rejection, inordinate levels of sexual desire and accompanying guilt that he abandons himself to the sordid adolescent world of chronic masturbation - “a world of matted handkerchiefs, crumpled Kleenex and stained pyjamas”, said the famous Alexander Portnoy.

Continue reading "Men and sex: not a healthy relationship" »

The battle of the sexes is over. Sorry to break the bad news blokes, but women have won. Well, this round at least.

The last three years have represented a global tectonic shift in women’s economic, political and professional fortunes that has unravelled gender roles centuries in the making.

This new financial reality in which many women out earn men or are the family breadwinners has triggered a startling and widespread identity crisis for men.

Continue reading "Can men handle women economically on top?" »

Manliness is about getting swallowed whole by a Great White only to eat one’s way out and emerge triumphant from the waves like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne’s lovechild. Or is it?

Maybe it’s about meticulously shaping some designer stubble before effortlessly whipping up an eight-layered vanilla cake. Or, perhaps it’s about chomping on some live shark while simultaneously plating up some exquisite baked goods.

There’s been a lot of talk of late about gender equality and changing perceptions of men and women.

Continue reading "Manliness isn’t just granted, you’ve got to claim it" »

The other day I was reading a popular men’s magazine. I won’t mention the name, all I’ll say is it was for men, and about their style. The style of men really, or more precisely, men’s style. All I’m saying is it wasn’t GQ.

After only a few page turns I realised that while I am in possession of a penis and an extra chromosome, this magazine was well and truly not talking to me. Which naturally lead me to but one conclusion - I am not a man.

I’m not a man, I’m a guy. A guy at best, a dude at worst, and so white the only way I could even think of being a bro is if I created my own hilarious and not-racist-at-all-god-where’s-your-sense-of-humour Red Faces routine.

Continue reading "Why I’m not a man" »

A funny thing happens when the men in my South Australian office travel interstate:  the first thing they do is remove their ties.

Adelaide men, you see, still wear ties to work.

Apparently their counterparts in the Eastern states do not (at least in the media industry). A colleague who’s been visiting Sydney and Melbourne a lot of late says open neck shirts are the go.

Continue reading "The ties that bind no longer" »

A strange thing happened when I became a parent. I started to get upset when I saw stories like the one of the five young men who were killed in a motor crash at the weekend.

I’ve also found myself saying ‘in my day’ or worse, ‘when I was young’. I’ve already made decisions about a computer in my child’s room and whether she will have a mobile phone.

Sometimes when the entrepreneurial gene comes out, I wonder if I could get a mobile phone made that simply dials home and does nothing else. I would market it as not having a camera or video function, wouldn’t be able to surf the net and it wouldn’t rack up bills of many hundreds of dollars. (That’s where the entrepreneurial gene fails me.)

Continue reading "Road deaths - statistically, boys, it’s not good" »

MANLINESS or the right to be the opposite has been THE hot topic up here in Central Queensland lately, so here’s something that might get things smoking.

A mate sent me an ad from Ebay for what could be the ideal gift for the true blue Aussie bloke who has everything. It’s billed as “A real man’s barbecue – not for metrosexuals or latte drinkers.

“Features: Manliness, awsomeness …. free sausage fat, free spiders, seasoned pollen plate…

Continue reading "A real man’s bloody awesome non-latte sipping barbecue" »

When Demi Moore was quoted a few weeks ago in W magazine saying “I’d rather be called a puma than a cougar,” I was at first quite pleased. Somehow, puma seemed a nicer name (cougar, to me, sounds as cringeworthy as nails scratching on a blackboard) and I hoped it would catch on.

But after some digesting, it dawned on me that calling women who go out with younger men ‘pumas’ isn’t any more flattering. A puma is still a wild animal who feeds on innocent prey – which is where the term cougar comes from – and is just as offensive.

Demi Moore, shame on you for thinking a prettier word will make you feel better. Besides, it’s not going to catch on. Unfortunately, the cougar is here to stay.

Continue reading "Cougar is a dirty word" »

If blokes are honest, most of us would admit to behaving differently when there are no women around. While the extent of the change varies from guy to guy, most of us do things and say things we wouldn’t dream of doing or saying in female company.

Usually it’s low-level yobbo stuff - drunken anecdotes, sexual innuendo, a sneaky wee on the lemon tree – but for a minority of screwed-up blokes it involves a complete personality transformation where they drift into a shocking moral orbit, their macho posturing cheered on by their equally boorish buddies.

In the context of sport, particularly in light of Brendan Fevola’s unravelling and the car crash quality of Wayne Carey’s memoir, it’s clear that for many of our sporting heroes, life has been one extended boy’s night.

Continue reading "The boys’ clubs protecting our sporting yobbos" »

Oh. No. Really. Won’t someone please mop the tears of unreserved mirth? Apparently, Women Love Shoes! And Men Just Don’t Know What To Do With a Vacuum Cleaner! Oh, hahaha, the difference between the sexes. They’re just so funny because they’re just so true.

Jokes about the location of the clitoris or the importance of the shed are every bit as progressive and useful as beta-video. Equally acquainted with the pleasures of both, I’ve never understood the merit of these gags. 

Perhaps this is because I am a mannish girl.  Or perhaps it is because jokes about the “Gender Wars” have their place.  Viz. only on disgraced Austereo breakfast programs or in forwarded emails sent by my father-in-law.

Continue reading "The lame world of men-versus-women humour" »

I finally got around to watching Twilight recently and, as a result, fear for a generation of impressionable, young and deluded women.

Wherever Robert Pattinson, who plays the enigmatic teen vampire Edward in the blockbuster book and movie franchise, goes these days he is swamped by hysterical young girls who appear headed down a rough old romantic road. And now I know why.

You see, Edward is the template of everything I, and so many women like me, tend to go for in a man which, despite the wisdom of age, several broken relationships and all good intentions, remains best described in one word: unattainable.

Continue reading "Us girls are always sucked in by a blood-sucking bastard" »

The other day I couldn’t help but over hear a spirited conversation by a group of girls at an Italian restaurant. 

Their discussion focused on the lack of nice blokes in night clubs and drinking spots. Not to be a grinch, I suppress the urge to inform them that nice guys will soon join the Dodo in extinction.

They will be the latest addition to the graveyard of male archetypes – such as chocks, snags and metrosexuals – that men unsuccessfully adopted when wooing the other sex.

Continue reading "Death of the nice guy may lead to end of the species" »

I just saw Public Enemies, the upcoming Johnny Depp-as-John Dillinger gangster flick, and boy oh boy did it get me thinking about ‘guy movies’. With its suite of expertly choreographed bank jobs and jailbreaks, smoothly criminal wardrobe and salty tough guy dialogue, it’s exactly the sort of muscular entertainment best enjoyed in the company of men.

And even though Depp-as-Dillinger does find time to romance a Depression-era beauty played by French Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose), she’s on hand mostly to get him philosophising about armed hold-up.

‘’I can hit any bank I want, any time. They got to be at every bank, all the time,’’ he tells her, dropping the first genuinely quotable line of dramatic Hollywood dialogue in many years.

Continue reading "Public Enemies and the top 5 guy movies of all time" »

Women of the world, don’t be fooled. Men can multitask – if they have powerful jobs and are not expected to be faithful.

Silvio Berlusconi, Mark Sanford, Gordon Ramsay and Eliot Spitzer are all superb multi-taskers who check all of these boxes:

Big time job, tick

In the public eye, tick.

Gaining considerable fortunes, tick.

Discovered to be having extra-marital affairs, tick. In some cases, tick tick tick.

Continue reading "Men can multi-task just fine ... in the bedroom" »

With Swans coach Paul Roos all but saying he’d like forward Barry Hall to retire after landing another stray punch, the question is now being asked: how many chances should Hall get before he’s just sacked?

I’d ask another question. Is Barry Hall really as big and bad as he is being made out to be, or is the controversy just an indication of how soft football and sporting culture generally has become in Australia?

In short – and at risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw - are Bazza and the likes of Andrew Symonds really too hard or have we just become too soft?

Continue reading "The hard men that soft modern sport has left behind" »

Apart from the kerfuffle it caused in Brisbane last week, the nation may have missed a rugby league scandal that makes Cronulla’s woes look as shocking as a Phil Spector wig.

In fact it was less a rugby league scandal and more the culmination of years of a war on the interaction of the sexes in the workplace.

Poor Joel Clinton, the Broncos frontrower, was fined $50,000 for inviting a friend to his room the night before the match against the Tigers recently. That friend happened to be a woman.

And? And nothing That’s it, that’s all he did.

Continue reading "Wowser watch: battle of sexes skewed against men" »

I can’t decide which takes the cake - the grey vinyl lap top bag for a women who doesn’t own a lap top, or the magazine filled with pictures of kelpies for a wife to browse during labour.

Neither were as cruel as the all-expenses-paid trip to Morocco where the she was promptly dumped. Or as indiscreet as the yoga mat recommended by his “friend” the yoga instructor - who he’s now dating.

It’s incredible what some men think is an acceptable gift for their partner.

Continue reading "You got me what? Men and the terrible gifts they buy" »