Men do think about matters of the heart, but writing about it publicly could be seen as undignified
For every date a heterosexual woman goes on there is, for better or worse, a man there. But while women produce a wide and varied literature about this experience, from dating columns to films, there is hardly any personal writing by straight men about their sex, dating and relationship lives at all. There’s Karl Ove Knausgård. But you could list women writing in this genre for hours. Nora Ephron, Anaïs Nin, bell hooks, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dolly Alderton, Candace Bushnell, and so on.
Men date. Men fall in love. So where is the writing from men about these experiences? There are a few basic dating and sex advice columns aimed at straight men. Rhys Thomas writes Hey Man for Vice, Justin Myers wrote one at GQ for a while. Perhaps this is the masculine mode: anonymously ask a question, get a straight answer. Elsewhere, it feels like affairs of the heart are snuck into writing directed at straight men like vegetables into a child’s dinner. A recent New York Times article about the podcaster Scott Galloway noted that he smuggled relationship content into advice about career paths. And of course, as so many young men are doing of late, you can dive headlong into the cesspit of woman hacking, care of professed misogynist Andrew Tate. But that isn’t exactly what I had in mind.
Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist based in London
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