Ahoax has been perpetrated on society: the idea that men's psychology is simple and transparent compared to women, who are incomprehensible. Let's review some facts. We know women emote constantly, gossip about everything and cannot keep a secret. Men stonewall. We know women purchase 90 per cent of all self-help books, most of which attempt to explain what men want, how we can attract them, whether we should live without them, how we can get them to talk -- and are they really from a different planet? Not since the Rosetta stone has there been such a concerted effort to decipher a code. Not since Alan Turing's cracking of the Second World War Enigma machine has so much rested on the result.

Men may be confused about their identities, but women are in for a shock. For four decades, we have redefined ourselves. In the 1960s, women migrated from the kitchen onto campuses, from where we soul-searched for decades, moving loudly through every political and cultural permutation possible. Today, many young women want back into the kitchen. But now that we've swept away Father Knows Best, who comes home in his place?

The book opens with Boner and Nothingness, by David Macfarlane, which grabbed me from the title onward. But Ian Brown's grainy stories of strip clubs made me retreat; his palpable love for a disabled son drew me back. Bert Archer's graphic description of male-on-male orgasm gave far more information than I needed . . . or did it? J. M. Kearns's How Men Choose Women may well be the most insightful 11 pages I've encountered on that subject. Russell Wangersky's Heroes was so vivid in describing the instances of CPR he administered as a fireman that it was difficult to read; yet it is the one part of the anthology's first section to which I know I'll return.

In short, the narratives collected in the anthology's first section, entitled Body, evoke a gamut of emotions, not all of them pleasant. Some made me nervous. (Was this the way men reacted to the first "feminist anthologies," in which women described their raw sexuality and other closet realities?) The second section, Mind, is, perhaps predictably, more thought-provoking. There, Martin Levin offered an entirely plausible answer to the plaguing question: Why do men run "from not just the act but the very thought" of commitment? Russell Smith's embrace of sado-masochistic sex play left me wondering if women should be similarly reluctant; it also left me with some understanding of that practice from a man's POV. In revealing his father's dark secret (which readers should discover for themselves), David Hayes painted with delicate strokes the portrait of a man who defined maleness for his son without being able to define it for himself.

Any anthology of articulate and successful men (or women) is not going to represent large segments of the sex. What I Meant To Say attempts to bridge the barrier between elite literary voices and the average man by dwelling on themes common to both. Rather than discuss "how I made my first million," it explores the relationship of father to son. Rather than political analysis, it examines fear of commitment. Rather than classical music, raw sexual response.

This book should have been better organized. The section divisions are artificial, and the placement of narratives throughout is clumsy. Some themes (memories of fathers, sexual musing) become repetitive; others (the labour of writing, the sorrow of divorce) cry out in their absence. In short, don't worry about the order in which you read this collection. But read it you should.

What I Meant To Say may well be the best book that most women won't altogether like reading this year. It definitively dispels the somewhat comforting hoax that we are the complicated sex, that we are the ones with rich, dark corners to explore. It shifts the ground of discussion onto who men really are, and away from what we want from them.

Frankly, I like my men (or, more accurately, my man) to be less complicated than those who speak out in What I Meant To Say. But if the choice of straightforward doesn't exist any more, then the next best thing is to know what really is out there.

Wendy McElroy is the author of several books on feminism, including XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography, and editor of the website ifeminists.net. She lives on a farm in rural Ontario with her wonderfully straightforward husband.

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