Heart of Maleness

French philosopher Liogier makes his English-language debut with an incisive critique of the Western cultural construct of “maleness.” He traces ideas of virility and its “negative corollary,” femininity, to the archaic practice of “measuring a man’s status by the number of women he possesses,” and argues that in order to solve gender inequality society must break down the “fantasy” of male dominance. Classifying serial abuser Harvey Weinstein as an example of “Don Juanism” (the systemic denial of women’s free will and right to pleasure), Liogier calls on readers to assign a “transcendental value, unquestionable a priori” to a woman’s consent, rather than accepting the Hollywood stereotype that she can never fully express her own desires. He believes that the patriarchal system is in its “death throes,” and offers French president Emmanuel Macron’s marriage to a woman 25 years his senior as an example of a liberated relationship in which feminine and masculine identities are “transvalued,” rather than erased. Liogier doesn’t address how activism might help to enact the wholesale social changes he believes are necessary, and some philosophical concepts could be better defined. But as a call for men to reexamine the ways they’ve “been conditioned to view and desire women,” this short book achieves its goals. (Jan.)