"Almost every woman knows what it is to be desired, in a way that hardly any men ever do. I remember talking to the actress Kathleen Turner about this; on a good day, she said, she knew she could have nine out of 10 men in the room. I pointed out that there are only a few men who could say that, on a good day, they could have one out 10 women. And, of course, most of them are gay, and don't want to have any.

The rest of us are just... baggage. Young men now seem to have reached a sort of affable affectionate ease with women that escaped earlier generations. They share beds happily and chastely. They are best friends. They talk about their feelings. But lust and libido and passion seem strangely absent. They're dreadfully held-in-check, and prey to the body dysmorphias that for so long in the Age of the Image have victimised women. They go to the gym endlessly; they buy magazines devoted to the abdominal muscles; they gel and tan and sack-back-and-crack, vogue and pose, fret and pump iron, eat cabbage leaves and nibble on dry biscuits... but unlike women, who hope that this horror will end with them being desired, the young men just hope, I suspect, to be forgiven. If they can make themselves nice enough, in a parody of manual-labour masculinity plus beauty-salon pubescence (body hair a no-no), it might not be so terrible that, at the end of it all, they are still men. "

michael bywater _ the independant