What Do Men Want? Answers Are Perplexing

What do men want? That’s the question Freud would ask today.

But if we are to believe the mavens of popular culture, the answers are evasive.

The TV talk show guests endlessly discuss the men who can’t find themselves. Phil Donahue listens to women describe all the reasons they’re “fed up with men,” and then to the men the women are fed up with. These men prefer work to women, sex to commitment, hedonism to being husbands.

One man who has been seeing the same woman for 14 years isn’t sure why. Sally Jessy Raphael introduces several black women who have one thing in common: They’ve all had husbands who cheated on them with white women. These women think they know what these men want, and they don’t like it.

Even Woody Allen has changed focus. Now he’s interested in what men want too. He once directed movies that asked the question, “What do women want from Woody Allen?” But in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” his latest film, he realizes that women don’t want anything--from him. He’s angry and perplexed, depicting only female stereotypes: the conventional wife, the hysterical mistress, the girl who chooses to marry for money and life in the fast lane. Where is Annie Hall now that we need her?

Allen, like most other mortal men, rediscovers the wheel of male (mis)fortune and concludes that what men want are dutiful wives, silent mistresses, money, success and immortality. They don’t much care how they get them. What else is new?

Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today and the former chairman of the Gannett newspapers, agrees with Allen. He says a man needs to be an “S.O.B.” if he wants to get to the top. In his autobiography, he includes chapters written by two fed-up former wives, both of whom say that he got the epithet of the title right.

Not all men are so Machiavellian. Certain prime-time television producers think it’s the season for kinder and gentler male stars. Jackie Mason, in the now-canceled “Chicken Soup,” preferred social work to selling pajamas, even though it cost him a bundle on pay day. All he really wanted was a nice shikse, and he didn’t mind if he barely came up to her neck in his stocking feet. Hugh Wilson as “The Famous Teddy Z,” surrounded by cut-throat Hollywood agents, wouldn’t hurt a flea. He even saves a job for an over-the-hill monkey. But Teddy Z isn’t old enough to shave.

M, which calls itself the magazine for “The Civilized Man,” says our society has spawned a New Sissy, men such as Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy, Ed Koch, Newt Gingrich, Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera, to name just a few. M wants a new definition of macho. The New Macho Man is somewhere between Cro-Magnon and Neo-Wimp, exhibiting qualities of low-key firmness, unaggressive self-confidence, hanging tough without talking tough (and certainly not “doing” tough). If these definitions of post-modern masculinity are elusive, so are the models of the New Macho: George Bush, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, C. Everett Koop and Margaret Thatcher.

Some companies think that if they find the answer to what men want, they’ll know what men will want to buy. They turn around the Henry Higgins query to ask why a man can’t be more like a woman. Cosmetic companies are tirelessly seeking ways to sell them moisturizers and skin softeners, but one anti-wrinkle cream for men failed because it was too feminine in its appeal to vanity. Not many men want to talk about crow’s feet or flabby chins.

If upscale companies and the media have trouble defining what men want, so do the gurus of the counterculture. Some say that men are so confused about what they want that the search for male self-awareness has spawned a national industry.

The founder of this movement is Minnesota poet Robert Bly, who four years ago announced that men had grown soft, that they had lost their sense of the “deep masculine” just as women spread their wings and soared.

Bly inspired men to go into the woods for weekend retreats, to wander around on all fours, hooting, howling, bleating and sniffing like animals to rediscover their wild, mythic origins.

But staging mock pagan rituals with cheering and chanting in a forest with or without traditional dress is what men do at the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive men-only club for the rich and famous in California.

Boys, of course, will always be boys. But what do men want?