The Way of Men

Essentially, a bit of a dud and hard to grasp.

According to Jack Donovan, men need to take back a world conquered in recent decades by women, who now dominate and betarize us poor fellas into submission by giving us too much sex and turning us into withered slaves.

This is more like bad sci-fi than self-help and could be renamed Plan 9 From Outer Space or something equally non-functional.

I appreciate what Jack Donovan is trying to say - men have become too soft and need to take back control of their lives - but this book is borderline misogynistic in places, plus corrosive, hard to read and not very entertaining. Too militaristic.

However, I'm giving this book three stars for the amazing chapter called the Bonobo Masturbation Society, which I enjoyed. It explains how Bonobo ape clans are run by females who have relationships with any ape they want, even other females, while the males sit in the background and have no power. It's accuracy? I have no idea, but rather interesting because of how culturally different bonobos are to chimpanzees as much closer to humans than apes.

At the end of the day, no-one really cares what gender you are or whether the next president is a man or woman. One day we'll all be androgynous anyway and probably making babies with ourselves. We've gone far too LGBT+ for all of that.

Although the sentiments within are often interesting, especially at how outlooks can becoming increasingly unbalanced between men and women in modern society, the book feels a bit hysteric, archaic and rather too old-fashioned and Marlboro man for me.

As literary enjoyment it's rather turgid, overly regimental, quite badly written and hard to comprehend.