Terence Blacker: What women really want: a dominant brute

Gradually, over the past few years, men have been learning how to talk to one another. The gruff, self-protective jokiness has given way to something curiously like honesty. Together, we explore things that confuse us – our frustrations, our little or large disappointments. We take the particulars of experience and develop theories around them. This is not generalising; it is universalising the personal.

During one of these broad-ranging yet intimate conversations, a friend and fellow-student of human nature recently made an observation which, at the time, rather shocked me. He said that the majority of women liked to be bossed around. Domination was an essential part of the male-female dynamic. In their hearts, most women knew this but, even those who, for reasons of gender correctness, are in denial about it, still long for it at some profound level.

Nonsense, of course – it had to be. Jo Brand? Camille Paglia? Venus Williams? Julie Burchill? All doe-eyed submissives, simpering for a man to tell them what to do? I had never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. Today, in matters of power, men and women are similar, if not identical. Some like to lead, others to follow. The idea that within one gender lurks a sort of yearning, closet masochism was clearly quite absurd.

I thought no more of this faintly disturbing conversation until reading an article by Jane Shilling in this week's Spectator. The target of the piece was that familiar subject of mockery among female journalists, the New Man, and it contained the usual sneers. The New Man was everywhere these days – sipping mineral water, talking endlessly about his feelings, offering shoulder massages, cooking complex low-fat dishes and generally occupying what Shilling called "a strange, inter-gender middle ground".

As is traditional in Spectator articles of this type, the Sixties were found to be to blame. It was then that boys were brought up to be socially androgynous. Pitifully easy to influence, they were indoctrinated into the idea that to be courteous to a woman was to patronise her, that to take decisions was to control.

Then, startlingly, Jane Shilling took the argument further. She liked a man who would book a restaurant table without discussing it first, who knew how to get cabs, who was in the habit of telling people – her, presumably – what to do. "It is heresy, I know, but true, that there is something far from disagreeable about being ordered about by someone you quite fancy. Being managed is not just restful, but also rather seductive."

This view, which seems remarkably close to my friend's domination theory, is supported by anecdotal evidence. In the past few months, I have heard one woman in her late twenties complain that, on a first date, a man who had asked her out tearfully discussed his last relationship over dinner and, when the bill came, suggested they went Dutch.

Another friend, some 20 years older, bemoaned the fact that men no longer had the confidence to be impulsive and romantic, but were chummily tentative, as if friendship, equality and shared interests should be established before attraction and seduction. She felt – and who could argue? – that it ought to be the other way round.

The problem for a man is knowing where playing the authoritative male is supposed to come to an end. Would Jane Shilling find it far from disagreeable if, back at his place, she continued to be ordered about by someone she quite fancied? Would she find it rather seductive if the masterly one nodded in the direction of the stairs and said, "You, upstairs, clothes off, in bed – I'll be up when I've finished my cigar"?

Now that men have managed to get in touch with their feelings, the New Brute seems to be what is required. It is all profoundly confusing.

terblacker@aol.com