NONFICTION - Feb. 23, 1992

THAT’S HOW MEN ARE: Men Reveal What They Really Think About Women, Love, Sex, Other Men, and More by Mark Baker (Simon & Schuster: $22; 258 pp . ). Does the sensitive, gentle, enlightened mien of progressive men these days tell the whole story? One suspects not, for most of these guys matured at a time when the role model--silent, tough, domineering--was altogether different from the one they are expected to assume today. Since the pressure to be Socially Correct can be so intense, however, we rarely get a chance to see their recidivist side. As its warts-and-all title suggests, “That’s How Men Are” gives us this chance. A writer specializing in portrayals of your average Joe, Mark Baker assembled these telling, anonymous confessionals (styled along the lines of his previous books, “Cops” and “Nam”) after scaling the series of walls that surround most men.

Behind the first wall lies “bar talk”: warming-up banter and bravado, exaggerations and lies wherein one man takes the measure of the other while trying to entertain him. Behind the second is “buddy talk”: The more serious conversation conducted while smoking cheap cigars or tending the glowing embers of a barbecue grill--and only if men “like each other and are not in direct competition for a woman, a job, or the attention of an audience of other men.” Behind the final emotional wall lies what Baker calls “man talk,” the usually dark secrets guys rarely reveal even to friends. “The assumption is--particularly among women--that men live zestful, unencumbered lives full of choices, that they can do what they want to do, the way that they want, when they want to do it,” Baker writes. “Men deny that supposition with startling bluntness.”

While we do meet the occasional, chillingly domineering Cro-Magnon Man, the vast majority of Baker’s subjects seem the submissive kind seen in Nancy Friday’s recent book, “Women on Top.” Thankfully, though, there are a few affirmative voices to prevent this from becoming a thoroughly emasculating session. “Guys have all this wild initiative and salesmanship,” says one carpenter. “It’s kind of cool, the ‘Let’s build-the-pyramids’ kind of thing. There might be fewer toxic-waste dumps and Styrofoam cups if women ran things, but there would probably be fewer pyramids and Empire State buildings, too.”