BEAUTIFUL 18-year-old women in tight vests cavorting in backlit joy, long blonde hair swirling around their fresh, laughing faces? Hello! It must be August when, as the dwindling readership of such newspapers as The Daily Telegraph must surely believe, only ravishing young girls get their A-level results.

This probably isn’t an example of the type of female agenda-setting that Michael Buerk had in mind when he spoke out about the growing female hegemony. Life in the UK, he said, was now being lived “in accordance with women’s rules . . . the traits traditionally associated with men have been marginalised . . . men are becoming more like women.”

While it seems that the men who choose the pictures for the front page of the Telegraph are immune to this transformation, at least for now, Buerk does have a point, but I fear it might not be the one he was making.

I met him last year when I was on his Radio 4 programme The Choice and failed to rile him even though I forced many retakes by repeatedly concluding answers to his questions about why I had chosen to go back to sea with the observation: “Of course, at that point, I had no choice.”

However, men do have more choice about their roles in modern life than Buerk suggests. For instance, the eight fathers taking part in the BBC’s latest foray into insultingly sexist reality TV could have said no. He’s Having a Baby, which started on Saturday, right after The Weakest Link (which appears to be what some producer considers fathers to be), seems to be more of the same “Ooh look, aren’t men useless and funny” sexism served up by the BBC in the horrendous The Week the Women Went.

Modern men could also decline to drop neatly into demographic fictions dreamt up by marketing executives to sell us moisturiser. The so-called “metrosexual” was invented by the same US advertising executive whose latest foray into pop sociology, the book The Future of Men, appeared appositely in The Times last week, illustrating some of Buerk’s points.

Author Marian Salzman is part of an advertising industry that has helped to set the tone for an era where men, in her words, “have moved from defining the world . . . to having their world defined by women”. By women like her, actually. As she says (with a straight face), men are the butt of every joke, whereas no one laughs at women because that would be politically incorrect. Wait in vain for programmes such as The Day She Tried to Change a Tyre.

But Salzman’s latest shtick seems (like most of the BBC’s “reality” output) to have overlooked the reality: while men have never had it as good as some women like to think, the measurable gap between the sexes is closing. And when it does, the joke ultimately could be on women.

“Men’s work” — the hard and nasty business of heavy industry — is in decline: service jobs today account for one in five UK jobs, compared with one in ten in 1981. Then, one in three jobs held by men was in manufacturing. By 2001 it was one in five. No wonder male grooming’s booming. Twenty years ago, men had three million more jobs than women (many of them grim); now it’s around 12 million apiece and more men than women are being made redundant every year.

Even the pay gap is narrowing. Average weekly pay grew by 4.7 per cent in 2003-4, but it was up by 5.3 per cent for women and just 3.8 for men, leaving the gender pay gap at its smallest ever: in April 2004, women’s hourly pay was 85.7 per cent of men’s, compared with 85.4 per cent the year before. (On the other hand, “working age” for men is still defined as 16-64, whereas women can bail out at 59 — and work fewer hours. No wonder they live longer.) Men do still account for 75 per cent of all suicides but every year fewer and fewer top themselves: the 5,755 adult suicides in the UK in 2003 was the lowest since 1973.

The survivors, however, emerging blinking from the brutal reality that was a “man’s world” right through the industrial revolution, countless wars and the often bitter social upheavals of the 20th century, are more than tough enough to deal with the modern world and their role in it. Bullied by TV shows into the kitchen, the nursery and the salon, men have never been so independent (and fragrant). They are finding that raising babies while holding down a job isn’t as daunting as they were always led to believe. And that cooking sure as hell beats coalmining.

The future of men? I reckon it’s women who are facing redundancy.

jonathan.gornall@thetimes.co.uk

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