I’ve been thinking a lot about gender recently, since reading the excellent Becoming Drusilla. It’s a book by Richard Beard, in which he untangles his own reactions to the news that his burly mechanical engineer friend, who worked in the bowels of a P&O ferry, with whom he went on annual hiking and camping trips with away from their wives and children, was transsexual, and planning a sex-change operation. It’s one of the most enlightening and brave books around on the issue, because not only does he write a sensitive and subtle biography, exploring what it has been like for her to be born in the body of the “wrong” gender, he also deconstructs his own ideas and assumptions about himself, and what it means to be a man. Along the way, he gives us profound insights into the nature of friendship itself, and how gender affects it.

The nature versus nurture argument, when it comes to the differences between the sexes, is one that will never be “proven” one way or another, unless some mad scientifically minded commune does the necessary experiment: raising lots of children from infancy to adulthood, where the roles expected of them as girls and boys were reversed. But in order for it to be of any use, the children would have to be brought up in isolation by robots or wolves or Baloo the bear, but not real men and women; because children pick up so much on how they should behave from their parents and other adults around them, from film, TV, the media, the entire community. It really is a chicken and egg question.
So, the best we can do to appreciate the astonishing variety that is homo sapiens is acknowledge how diverse, even alien we are to each other. But it’s never in the way we expect, or in ways that make it easy to split us into male and female. Drusilla, the subject of Beard’s biography, is a woman who was born in the wrong body, but also happened to like boys’ things – as, of course, many girls do. She didn’t start knitting and baking the moment she started taking oestrogen.
For those that like girls’ things, watching the film of Sex And The City is a treat. It is an exercise in entering the world of women; more specifically, the culture of women, especially Western women in one of the most wonderful cities in the world, who are enormously wealthy and good looking. It’s about the multi-billion dollar industry of fashion. It’s about romance, marriage, sex, children, fidelity, friendship, betrayal, forgiveness, but most especially love. This is a movie that is intelligent, emotionally literate, funny, and not at all as frothy as one might expect from a TV series spin-off. It sustains its feature-film length and has its moments of darkness and loss, as well as laughter, and at least twice I was wiping away tears from my face. I realise I’ve grown very fond of these characters over the years, much to my surprise. And this film does them justice.
But of course, you see, I’m not a real man, a real man would never cry at a chick flick. Heterosexual men are famously averse to the series, perhaps because of the way that they are portrayed; the tables have been turned, and when men are objects, of love, sex or affection, it can make them feel very uncomfortable. (To which many women I know would say: and about time too.) And yet, in this film, there is a touching compassion and understanding of men that makes it a very humane story. There are no bad guys, or bad girls; just people doing the best they can to find love and happiness.
The one character who behaves most recognisably like a cruising gay man, Samantha, in her celebration of sex and her liberating lack of shame, had, I once thought, been purely the invention of Darren Star, the gay man who adapted Candace Bushnell’s column for the TV series. And yet so many women I’ve talked to about her tell me flatly that that’s just my sexism; they do know women like her. In the film, towards the end, she makes a decision about a relationship that is achingly familiar to me as a man, which I won’t reveal because it’d spoil it; but because it’s a choice that I intuitively feel is more male than female, does that mean that a woman can’t make it? Of course not. We are individuals first, and our lives and choices can be based on nature, nurture, or sheer bloody-minded individualism.
At the other end of the spectrum, as far from Vivienne Westwood and Vogue as you can get, the Bingham Cup is coming to Dublin this month, the largest biennial amateur 15s rugby tournament in the world. Teams of men are going to compete from all over the planet, batter each other to pieces in the mud trying to grab hold of a slippery ball, get pissed and play silly games afterwards, often taking their willies out. Named after Mark Bingham, one of the heroes of Flight 93 on 9/11, he played for the San Francisco Fog RFC, who became the first winners of the tournament in 2002. One could not imagine a more “masculine” event, nor a more “macho” hero to give his name to it. And yet, unless I’m very much mistaken, I bet that each one of those beer-swilling brutes will have already seen what happens to Carrie and Mr Big, for themselves, and cried big nelly tears, just like me.
It’s a gay thing.
Or, à la Ms Bradshaw herself: “Is the defining feature of a truly sexy man his emotional illiteracy, so a woman can show him how to love?”