Start the Week

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Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday

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Start the Week: Bullish masculinity

Bullish masculinity

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Bullish masculinity

Helen Lewis with Fiona Benson, Ivan Jablonka, Nina Power and Angelica Malin.

Fiona Benson, Ivan Jablonka, Nina Power and Angelica Malin discuss male power with Helen Lewis.

The award-winning poet Fiona Benson retells the Greek myth of the Minotaur, upending the legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth. In a series of poems in her new collection Ephemeron we hear from the bull-child’s mother – the betrayed and violated Pasiphae. Benson tells Helen Lewis she wanted to explore male and female desire, and the extraordinary cycles of violence and abuse of power in the Greek myths.

The cultural historian Ivan Jablonka has taken his native France by storm with his history of Masculinity – From Patriarchy to Gender Justice, translated by Nathan Bracher. In it he asks what it means to be a good man? Using examples from the past he explores the origins and structure of male dominance. He argues that it’s time that men took more responsibility and fought harder for genuine equality. 

The political philosopher Nina Power is more circumspect about the demonisation of men, which she believes is now rampant in today’s society. In What Do Men Want, Power looks at what happens when men feel beleaguered and retreat to the ‘manosphere’, and she explores ways in which men and women can live together more harmoniously. 

The number of people living alone has increased over the last decade, but it’s still a path that goes against what society expects, according to the entrepreneur and Founder of the lifestyle magazine, About Time, Angelica Malin. She became single at the beginning of lockdown and has now brought together 30 women to explore what single womanhood means in the modern age, in Unattached.  

Producer: Katy Hickman

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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