How to make sure you're being a decent bloke in 2017

So knowing how to behave is important if we’re going to get along, but it’s also important for its own sake. The past few weeks have been genuinely shocking for a lot of men to learn from women the extent and extremity of workplace harassment.

It’s also been hard to know what to say about it when some critics have accused men of being too silent. For me, that’s because when I hear the other, less violent, misdemeanours mentioned — the talking-over in meetings, the ‘mansplaining’, the patronising attitudes and the rest of it — I have to be honest, and say: I know I have been guilty of those things, I will listen more and try to be better.

As Dom says: ‘Most men don’t actively want to be wankers, do they? A lot of them want to be more enlightened. But sometimes you need to be told what people [by that he really means women] want.’

And when it comes to ‘what people want’, things can be confusing for a man trying to do the right thing in 2017. Because while it’s very clear from the media that men and masculinity have a lot of toxic problems, it’s pretty much impossible to find anyone talking about masculine virtues that we should be playing up. These days, referencing and celebrating ‘feminine’ values is routine and widely accepted: ‘Feminine Values Can Give Tomorrow’s Leaders an Edge’, declared a Harvard Business Review story, listing the most important values as expressiveness, planning for the future, reasonableness, loyalty, flexibility, patience, intuition and collaboration. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, at least not until you ask what the corresponding ‘masculine’ values are meant to be.

In October, as the scandals over alleged harassment rumbled on from Weinstein to Kevin Spacey and on to Westminster, several TV news programmes covered a new University College London/Harris report on modern men. While all the interviewees cheerily agreed that men were changing, no one ever said into what they were supposed to be changing. ‘I read it and I was so excited,’ said one thrilled female commentator on Sky News. ‘Men are really ready to be a little bit redefined!’ Redefined as what, though? She didn’t say. But it’s a fair bet that had anyone put forward some positive masculine values — discipline, rational problem solving, concentration, restraint, extrospection, perhaps — a female contributor would have surely, and correctly, pointed out that women could embrace those values, too.

As a culture we have become uneasy with the idea that there is anything good about ‘traditional’ masculinity, unless it’s seen at a distance. That is why so many TV programmes with a contemporary setting are full of creepy or ineffectual men (Doctor Foster, The Fall, Happy Valley) and the ones with traditionally strong men (Game of Thrones, superhero films, Life on Mars) are all in the fantasy, sci-fi and time-travel genres. And why manly heroes with a more modern sort of manhood (David Beckham, Ryan Gosling, Stormzy, Harry Styles) are said to have become more modern by being in touch with their ‘feminine sides’, as if there were not enough good to be had in traditional maleness. Think of how daft it would sound if we were told that Lena Dunham or Cara Delevingne were modern because they had embraced their ‘masculinity’.

So if, as a man, you think about all this, you can end up in a bit of a quandary. And that doesn’t help those of us who are best represented not by the powerful grabbers and gropers but by the tongue-tied, awkward English archetype such as Hugh Grant in Love, Actually, or Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter (ask your nan). This is a nation, remember, whose greatest male romantic film hero, Mr Darcy, declared his feeling for the love of his life by jumping fully clothed into a pond. We need guidance.

And the fact is, nothing about dividing virtues between men and women helps. When it comes to the real challenges in life — hard things, such as sticking with relationships in the bad times, being kind to people who don’t deserve it and admitting you were wrong — neither ‘masculine’ nor ‘feminine’ qualities will aid us at all. That takes qualities that are really worth having, like bravery, self-assurance, substance and integrity, and those, thank God, tend to be gender-free. My hope is not so much that we redefine manhood — though obviously the harassment must stop, and men have to shut up and start listening more — but that one day we will transcend the whole stupid, 19th-century gender nonsense altogether. One of the many reasons to despise Donald Trump, Weinstein and the rest is that they have pushed that day a long way back for me, you, Dom and everyone else.