Dave Hill Guardian, November 17, 2001

A while ago, a researcher working for an advertising agency came to visit me. His client had a problem, summarised in a simple diagram. A square of paper was divided into quadrants. In the first was written "Traditional Man", for which you read masterful, silent, strong. The second box said "New Man". You know him: sensitive, nurturing, caring. A third box was marked "New Lad": the lark-about, the iconoclast, the rogue. Three familiar archetypes, each a distinguished servant of British advertising industry who, when skilfully associated with the things men tend to buy, has helped to push those products into your homes.

But now there is a problem. As the researcher explained, it is that all these shorthand male identities have become such clichés, such caricatures, such jokes that they have only brought the companies debts. And you can see what he means. You are only amused now by one memorable advert with Traditional Man, the cold-eyed, rock-jawed tamer of nail-painted women who praise Denim aftershave, "for men who don't have to try too hard ". At the same time 1980s New Men have become ridiculed as wimps. And even the relaxed, lager-swigging scallywags who represented New Lad are looking tired, as if suspecting that for "lad" the world now just reads "loser" or even "lout".

This brings us on to quadrant number four. On the researcher's diagram, this was assigned to a character called "Ideal Man" and to him was attached an urgent question mark. Who exactly is he, the researcher enquired? What are his passions, his perspective on the world? What qualities does he possess that other guys relate to, even aspire to? Where is Ideal Man to be found?

Good question, and one being asked not only by confused creatives in Soho advertising agencies. The difficulty with defining a plausible male ideal is a revealing symptom of much deeper difficulties that western societies have lately been having with men, masculinity and what we think they ought to mean.

The search of Ideal Man is continuing against the backdrop of the great debate about the moral, mental and physical condition of men and boys. It is a debate with a long history - as long, perhaps, as the history of the species - but the most recent male incarnations came in the wake of two great post-war shifts in the way we live today: the ongoing emancipation of women, and the related restructuring of the world of work. The implications of these changes for both sexes and their children preoccupy many people now and, as always when gender relations slip into instability, anxiety is everywhere. Acres and hours of media space are devoted to the pressures and dilemmas of being a modern woman, especially the sort of middle-class, having-it-all professional woman.

And, more recently, similar media interest was directed at men. But that is where perceptions of the destinies of the sexes start to differ. How far it is true that "the future is female" may be questionable indeed, but for some women, at least, it clearly looks that way. For men, though, the great tomorrow is more usually perceived as far less rosy, its shape and possibilities less clear. The notion that men's roles have changed in some fundamental way has become almost universal, but in the place of optimism has come talk of crisis and of fear. What sort of human do we want a man to be? What sort of human is he capable of being? And if, in some way, men can no longer be men the way men used to be, how dire might the consequences be?

In part, the standard male role models in ads have declined. This goes for female consumers as well as male. However, the top upbeat models of womanhood remain decisively more credible than any parallel celebration of manhood. Presumably that's why that sturdy-but-sweet Scottish lassie in a workout kit went to explain that her deodorant is "strong, like a woman". Presumably, too, that is why it is so hard not to scoff at that Mr Perfect who leads campaigns for Gillette.

This is not to say that young, mainstream male consumers cannot be reached through the same interests and attitudes as before: football, fast cars, acting like idiots with their mates and all the rest of it. But you can no longer approach them by means of some credible male figure representing everything those young men would dearly love to be. He just wouldn't be taken seriously. You can still appeal to blokes, but not by giving them a paradigm for blokeness. Trying to find an Ideal Man these days is like searching for fool's gold.

The extent to which advertising reflects the spirit of the times is often overstated: in truth, it reflects reality only at the points where it concerns shopping. But in our case, what goes for advertising really seems to go for wider society as well. Can it be merely a coincidence that some of the recent ads focus on gender disorder where a Man's World is no longer the way it was, a world in which the rules of gender relations are bent and broken as often as they are observed: pretty women might turn out to be lesbians or transvestite construction workers, men fuss over other men like old mother hens and podgy characters mess in the kitchen wearing the little lady's apron.

The Ideal Man is not only conspicuous by his absence from adverts - at times, the whole of popular culture seems to have given up on him. In recent situation comedies, for example, we've found most of the women to be witty, wise or at least interestingly imperfect, while all the men have been: dim and useless; mad and useless; vain, snobbish and useless; lost, drunk and useless; useless except for One Thing; emotionally useless; vacant or all at sea and useless; gormless, slothful, delinquent, quiescent, inert, catatonic, credulous and useless. Of course, the uselessness of men, especially without wily wives to keep them in line, has its history: The comedy "Men Behaving Badly" seems to have made explicit a truth, that the comedy of gender relations simply cannot accommodate the notion of a man who is not a five-star fool.

We find other variations on the same themes of haplessness, hopelessness and caricature. Sly Stallone and Arnie Schwarzenegger came to fame as iron-bodied action heroes, but even their admirers have long since perceived them as camp jokes. Some of the biggest boys act like cranks. Some parade the spectacle of not giving a damn, but behind the posturing all that remains is a braggart and a boor.

What explains the popularity of icons and archetypes who symbolise a manhood that is ridiculous, reactionary or depressing? Why are more preferable types of maleness described as fake, unachievable or both? For the "sex war" school of feminism the answer is easy: art is reflecting life in that all-men-are-bastards truth. For the "men's rights" lobby and other red-misted nostalgists, it's simply that those nasty "femi-nazis" have convinced a credulous world that even good guys are bad to the bone. But even if the story were so straightforward, it would not explain why men as well as women consume and so often enjoy these unflattering cultural constructions, why men take part in sustaining the perception that they have become the dead loss sex.