I have never been a feminist, but I cannot remember a time when I was not a masculinist. Liking men and appreciating their masculinity (not in an overtly sexual way, though I’m not averse to the occasional muscled thigh) is such an alien concept, we don’t even have a word for it. And, as with fish and bicycles, why would we need one? Women have long been conditioned to suspect male motives. Now it seems men are too. Michael Buerk got it wrong last year when he complained that we live in a woman’s world, as a brief glimpse at the statistics shows.

But the hare Buerk set running was the way men have been sidelined in society. They are no longer feared and respected as they were in the 19th century or hated as they were in the latter half of the 20th century, when the women’s movement vented its wrath. They are mocked and denigrated; good for taking the tops off jars, but otherwise an anachronistic joke.

For more than two decades the backbone of British television comedy — One Foot in the Grave, Men Behaving Badly, Black Books, Father Ted, Only Fools and Horses — has been predicated on the incompetence and narcissism of men. The stereotypical Hollywood hero has gone from Cary Grant, a sophisticate whose easy masculinity fitted him as comfortably as his impeccable suits, to Arnold Schwarzenegger, a pastiche of violence and invincibility.

Now Dada’s Boys: Identity and Play in Contemporary Art, an exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, aims to show that men are more than the sum of their chromosomes.

Curated by David Hopkins, a professor of art history at Glasgow University, it traces a link from Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp to the Young British Artists (YBAs) such as Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst through the exploration of male identity in their work.

“It’s a theme that is very current,” says Hopkins, “but it hasn’t been looked at in this way before. A great deal has been done on female identity and I felt it was time to look at male identity. It’s a personal thing, too.

“I grew up under the shadow of feminism. One had a fairly secure idea of male identity until the age of about 10. Then it was thrown into dispute.”

Hopkins, a boyish 50, said that by the time he reached his late teens he felt “under attack”. As recently as 1999, Germaine Greer, in her book The Whole Woman, wrote that to be male was to be “a kind of idiot savant, full of queer obsessions about fetishistic activities and fantasy goals”.

Dada’s Boys, Hopkins says, “is part of a process of talking again about what it means to be a man”. This conversation employs some unusual vocabulary, however. Conventional images of male strength, vulnerability and sexuality are missing from the exhibition. In their place is an altogether more subtle, thoughtful body of work — from Lee Miller’s 1929 portrait of Man Ray Shaving and Francis Picabia’s Voilà Elle, through Jeff Koons’s Fishtank Basketball and Zungul Lord of Indoors, to Douglas Gordon’s 1996 Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe.

What sort of reaction has the exhibition engendered? “People are quite sympathetic,” he says. “I’m not sure they would have been so sympathetic 10 years ago.” What has changed in the meantime? “I don’t know. It’s a good question. Feminism has reached certain problem points and is happy to stand back a bit and let men be part of the dialogue.”

What Hopkins may have identified is a change in the zeitgeist. The high priestesses of feminism, Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin, are dead. Fay Weldon has said that the pendulum has swung too far. The brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden have just published The Dangerous Book for Boys, which unashamedly reclaims for a new generation the male stereotypes of yesteryear.

Norah Vincent’s book Self-Made Man, in which the American journalist passed herself off as a man called Ned for 18 months, became a socio-literary sensation when it was published earlier this year. A lesbian and a feminist, Vincent had expected to uncover a secret world of rampant sexism and chauvinism. Instead she found men genuine, sympathetic and uncompetitive, albeit struggling to find their place in the world.

“Something is genuinely out of joint in manhood,” writes Vincent. “There is no denying the very real dysfunction in many men’s lives.”

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