Sir, - Perhaps we should be grateful that Joe Humphreys (Features, April 10th) cannot identify with the "plight of men floundering in a post feminist world". The more imaginative of us might even, at a stretch, be able to empathise with Joe's more contemporary plight - that of coping with his male friends ringing him on the weekend and leaving messages of love and affection on his answering machine. Given his lack of identification, and his view about the irrelevancy and much male suffering, Joe Humphreys was probably not the right man to write a review/feature on the issues raised in my book Ordinary Heroes: A Future for Men.
Humphreys writes: "But many readers will see it as the same old guff trotting out unfounded allegations such as: men have difficulty expressing their emotions; few of them have healthy relationships; collectively, they tend to be poor fathers, more violent than women, and above all are incapable of self examination."
In fact:
The book argues that men have no difficulty expressing certain emotions - those that are part of male conditioning towards power and protection. Thus anger, pity and humour are easily expressed. They do have difficulty with other feeling states - fear, pain, vulnerability - and they tend to channel the latter into the former.
The definition of healthy relationship has changed. What was healthy once is no longer so, and many men are struggling with this redefinition. This is well grounded in both psychological theory and research presented in the book.
All the current research points to serious issues and difficulties regarding fatherhood, the more striking ones being those that show men in modern society spending on average between 10 and 15 minutes a day (depending on which research one looks at) with their children. Fifty per cent of fathers from divorced or separated relationships lose contact with their children within two years. Much of the alarming rise in troubled younger men - violence, depression, suicide, etc - relates to the difficulties among fathers.
The vast bulk of violence is male violence and men are more violent than women. This is not an unfounded allegation. The problem of male violence is examined carefully and underpinned by the work of the world-renowned authority John Archer and others of similar prestige.
The book does not argue that men are incapable of self examination. To do so would make writing such a book pointless. It argues that men are not encouraged to develop an interior frame of reference for their self-esteem and sense of identity. It argues further that a way forward for those who are suffering (and the statistics that show this to be a very major social problem are presented very early in the book) is to pursue a more balanced life in this regard.
Most of the book's references to popular art forms in music and cinema are from the 1990's. Cats in the Cradle is an exception. It is an eloquent portrayal of a father's growing estrangement from his son as a direct result of his over-investment in his career, which in turn is modelled after by his son as a grown-up. If Joe knows a better, more contemporary example that includes these features, I would be interested to know of it.
There are many other inaccuracies in the review/feature but I think brevity here is necessary. Humphreys neglects completely the second half of the book. As a self-help book, this second section is the core of the work. I suspect that Mr Humphreys got tired of reading material with which he couldn't identify, or perhaps he had to leave the work side to return his phone calls. - Yours, etc,
Dr Michael Hardiman, Ph.D, Psychologist, Salthill, Galway.