FOUR decades of feminism have turned middle-class French men into miserable creatures who are intimidated by women and losing their way in an increasingly matriarchal society, a study says.

Men aged 20 to 45 believe that they have paid a heavy price for the social, legal and professional empowerment of women since the onset of the Pill and women’s liberation in the 1960s, according to the analysis for Elle, an upmarket women’s magazine.

“Men of all generations are suffering,” it said. “They feel diminished, devalued in a society where things feminine are perceived as positive and all-powerful values.”

Men under 35 in particular felt that they were being treated as sexual objects by predatory young women.

Elle was surprised by the sense of victimisation and the anger of men towards women — especially among the younger generation — revealed by the Centre de Communication Avancée study. “They think women have gone too far, too quickly, without setting any limit to their demands or ever questioning themselves,” Elle said.

Modern men see women as “castrating, vengeful, power-hungry and obsessed by men’s sexual performance”.

The study, based on interviews with four 12-man focus groups of urban professionals, was commissioned to mark International Women’s Day tomorrow. The findings echoed the refrain of male grievance familiar over the past decade in France and across the Westernised world.

While sounding a concerned tone for men, Elle noted that French women were still paid 30 per cent less than men, still performed

80 per cent of household chores and remained the main victims of domestic violence. It might have added that France still has fewer women in senior executive roles or high positions in the professions or politics than most EU states.

Men, the survey said, were driven to distraction by the conflicting demands of modern women. They were paradoxically being encouraged to adopt feminine traits while women still expected them to be virile. “Masculinity is in crisis . . . there is no longer a model for building a masculine identity. Man no longer exists,” the magazine said.

“Being a male today is a nightmare. The male identity feels battered by the paradoxical demands of women . . . and a society that is going their way, from law, morality to advertising and techiques of reproduction . . . One gets the impression that a new war of the sexes is emerging, with the former dominated becoming the dominatrixes”.

Men blamed advertising and the media for treating them as useless or sexual objects. They had suffered various phases of “destabilisation”. In the Sixties and Seventies they had experienced the moral revolution and the doctrine of female equality.

In the Eighties they had faced “implosion” through an explosion of models, from Golden Boys to gays and the Rambo type. In the Nineties they had been stressed by unemployment, aids, globalisation and the failure of the “masculine” technocratic model of society that had prevailed in France.

Younger men were said to be more unhappy than their elders. The 25-35 group felt that women “consume men and abuse them sexually”. The saddest group seemed to be those aged 20-25, who the magazine defined as “subjugated and feminised”.

“It is not rare that they cultivate a gay image in which they find a model for acceding to femininity. Behind the abandonment of their virility there lies another odd ideal: that of ‘homosexual fusion’ with the woman, a loss of differentiation between sexes.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?