Ben Fogle Is Worried

Photo by amin mlk on Unsplash

Ben Fogle is worried. In The Times, he said boys need heroes, and so he shared his. There was a photo of him bare-chested in between David Hasselhoff and Mr T.

He, and his wife had never been gender-specific, he said. They’d raised their son and their daughter to wear the same clothes, do the same things, have the same opportunities. But as Ludo, 15, became an adolescent, he felt a responsibility to gently guide him through masculinity, and what it is to be a man.

“It is more important than ever to allow a healthy distinction between sexes,” he said. “Just as femininity can be celebrated, so can masculinity. We don’t all have to be unisex”.

“The importance of male figures in our youngsters’ lives cannot be underestimated. A recent survey suggests that 25% of this age group think women belong in the kitchen. What went wrong?” he added.

To correct this, Ben reckoned we needed to get back to the role models of his youth. In the 1980s, a man was someone strong. They were fearless and successful. “Hasselhoff talked to a car, saved lives and was surrounded by pretty, strong women. It seemed like a good goal,” he said. He wanted Ludo to be as masculine as he chose to be. He could work out and have bulging biceps, grow a big beard and get tattoos as long as he was also compassionate and kind. He’d helped him along on his journey a bit by taking him to Norway where they’d pulled sleds and camped out in minus 30 degrees. In our increasingly fractured society, Ben suggested assembling an A-Team for 2025 and hitting the schools with his eclectic band of men. These included explorers and endurance athletes and former Royal Marines and someone called Ed Stafford. They had a particular aesthetic, these men. “For me the body should be a tool not an ornament,” said Ben who was also worried about the increase in hairlessness. He called it chest alopecia. “If I were 15 years old, I’d be really confused,” he said.

I was really confused. If this was the strategy to release women from the kitchen, I wasn’t that sure about it. We didn’t need someone who could make fires and drink their own urine and chop their fingers off with a bandsaw, who was brave with a touch of compassion but never around. Someone who helped with the dishes would probably suffice.

My personal trainer is working on her revenge body. I reckoned there was something up when she cancelled our session after I’d already arrived and was warming up at 5.5 on the treadmill. She’s not feeling well, said the receptionist when she came to find me.

I think she’s had another break-up, I told my husband. And it turned out when we debriefed over our next set of deadlifts that instead of spending ten days off having a holiday, she’d spent it playing sad songs. He was the third one in less than a year who didn’t want a serious relationship. But he was still messaging and that seemed well … hopeful. Now he was going away for nine weeks, something to do with pyrotechnics. She, of course, looked like she did fitness for a living, but as a form of retaliation, she planned to look even better by the time he returned.

My personal trainer is tall and financially independent and can lift heavy things and do her own MOT. “Are you sure you need a man?” I said. I knew this tactic wasn’t the answer. There was one thing she had noticed about all the men who had dumped her. They were in their forties but still lived at home with their mothers.

After over two months since its release, my book still wasn’t appearing in an Amazon search, not even when I included the full title and my full name. All I got was Dolly Alderton. It must be the algorithm, I said. It can take a while to get picked up in the database. Or maybe it’s because I don’t have many sales. Or any reviews. Or a ranking. I’d done lots of googling but hadn’t come up with any answers. “Let me look at it,” said my husband. And so, I logged into my account and handed him my laptop. “What are you doing?” I said as he started to type at speed. “I’m talking to Abdul,” he said. After a few minutes, he announced that Abdul had got to the bottom of it. “It’s not appearing,” he said, “because it’s got explicit content in it”. And for one moment, my 52,000 words flashed before my eyes, and I thought about how I’d mainly been worried about the chapter on religion, but never this, and what on earth had I said that had got me banned. But it turned out it was just the settings – a box erroneously ticked during the publishing process advising it was only suitable for over 18s. And I wondered how Fifty Shades of Grey had managed to slip through this net. I was pleased to eventually be visible even though I’d needed to get a man in to fix it. But then, this was a man who had cared enough to ask for online help on my behalf.

I was at a meeting recently, a gathering of not a revenge but an administrative body where representatives from the congregations in a district discuss their business. A man was handing out fliers, advertising a lunch for ministers’ wives. It had been organised by his wife, and this reminded me of when my dad took the Avon catalogue into his office to help me with my sales in the 1980s and years later, I wondered whether this had emasculated him, carrying in bags of cosmetics but he’d never mentioned it as an issue. And besides marvelling at why women who had nothing in common other than their husband’s profession would want to eat together and what other sector this might occur in, I’d already complained about this before, this problem with using the word spouse. As the man handed a leaflet to the two males either side of me, he looked at me like I was an unexpected item in his missional area. “I don’t have a wife,” I said. “And you’re not a minister either,” he said, “so you fail on two counts”. And I wondered what he was saying here. Was it that I needed to be him to be successful?

Recently, someone noted that I never write about the menopause, and I said maybe it was because it had been done enough. Women’s health had progressed from awareness-raising to commercialisation, and sometimes it seemed exploitative, and I felt somewhat validated in thinking this when I saw that Mariella Frostrup is bringing out a cookbook called Menolicious for those navigating the challenges and changes of midlife. But I also said it was because I didn’t think I was qualified to comment because I hadn’t any specific symptoms unless you counted my hardened attitude and occasional rage about entitled men.

I wasn’t sure if I was a feminist. If being a feminist meant believing in intellectual equality, then I probably was. If it was about putting diesel in my own car, then I probably wasn’t. If was about calling out sexism, then I probably was. If it was about attaching the cables to my own computer, then I probably wasn’t because lots of my male colleagues had spent time under my desk doing this for me. If it was about advocating for mutual respect, then I probably was. If it was about being unisex, then I probably wasn’t. I was all for healthy distinction…

…Like giving my husband man jobs to do on a regular basis. Like WhatsApping a list and pinning it to the top of the chat and unpinning it when all tasks are complete, kind of like a reward. “I’ve dusted behind the radiators,” he said after a month and a half. He hadn’t completed the longest Everest climb in history by swimming the Channel, cycling to Nepal, then walking to the summit like Ben Fogle’s favourite man crush, Mitchell Hutchcraft. But he’d been to B&Q to see if there was a specialist tool for cleaning the outside of Velux windows as an alternative to climbing on the roof.

“That is the kind of man I want my son to aspire to,” Ben said about Mitch Hutchcraft who has a dog who sometimes accompanies him on his adventures. It seemed having a golden retriever, but no other responsibilities made him kind.

Could Ben Fogle save us? I was worried now. I was worried that he thought this was what it is to be a man. Because just somewhere in his manifesto on muscles and beards and ultra-living, I’d love to have seen some mention of role-modelling how his son should treat women.