The problem for feminism is men. Not, specifically, in the sense that men are the source of women’s problems, although the statistics do tend to point in that direction. Feminism’s men problem is that, despite all this, women like men. Love men. One of the lessons of second-wave experiments in separatism is that the idealised man-free existence is always fighting against the gravity of affection.
Sandra Newman’s novel The Men takes that quandary and does something clever with it. She imagines a world in which all the men and all the boys and all the trans women and all the male non-binaries and all the Y-chromosome-carrying foetuses are mysteriously spirited out of existence in one strange instant. How the left-behind women deal with this liberation, this bereavement, is what gives the story its queasy tension.
Jane, the primary narrator, is camping with her husband and young son at the moment of rapture. She’s indulging in a guilty-pleasure daydream of having never married or had a child, an alternate reality in which she could be a prima ballerina in Japan or sail solo round the world. ‘Still, I felt my husband and son there and loved that they were there. I was in love with them.’ And then they’re not there any more. Planes crash when their male pilots vanish from the controls. Fires rage in the absence of firemen. Women, shattered by grief, scream their lost ones’ names in the street, with no one to answer.
But after the cataclysm, a strange peace descends. The women are left in ‘a world of lambs with no wolves’. Girls can play outdoors unsupervised, the threat of the lurking nonce having been expunged. Women fill the parks, luxuriating in their freedom.
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