Men in crisis! It's everywhere you look. Men are at sea, lost, uncertain what to do now they no longer rule the world with quite the absolute and unquestioned power of old. Of course they do still rule the world - otherwise everyone wouldn't be so anxious about them, poor souls, even while they still occupy virtually every powerful position. Luckily we have the eminent and eminently sensible Professor Anthony Clare to guide us through in a remarkably wise and thoughtful series on Radio 4, called, of course, Men in Crisis (Tuesday).

It's a zeitgeist thing, a moral panic of our times and an awful lot of nonsense. It goes like this. Women's liberation has emasculated men. Women have marched ahead with a baby under one arm and a briefcase and Amex gold card under the other, having it all. They have reached the top in every sphere - wherever you look, women are making money and babies more or less on their own. So what is there left for men to do and be? Crisis!

The answer is quite simple - all men need to be is human beings, as women are human beings. The mirage of sexual, gender and genetic predetermination is stripped away in this elegant series. It discusses violence and men's tendency towards it, fatherhood and most men's lack of much understanding of it, power and men's automatic expectation of it. The attentive listener will be left in no doubt - there is no caveman genetic predisposition to any of these things. It is almost all learnt behaviour, nowadays unacceptable behaviour, and there is nothing men can do but unlearn the bad lessons of the centuries. The best geneticists (themselves male) are here recorded stripping away the old props that decree men must be as they always were, or that they have an inherent right to dominate.

What are men to do? Like white South Africans born to what they imagined was a super-race with flotillas of servants, they suddenly find the servant class is proclaiming its equality. Women will not cook and clean and rear children for men, but only equally with men. If men can't or won't share, then increasing numbers of women prefer to do it on their own. Women who work and raise families may get exhausted, but they also have a growing sense of their own competence in both spheres. They can be more like men at work and more like women at home. So why won't men do the same?

At the moment men are finding it difficult to adapt. Why? Probably because they don't see any advantage. Life was so much better in the fifties, when today's young man's grandfather was raising his family. Little wifey nurtured and admired and nourished him. Why should he give all that up?

How working women nowadays must sometimes wish they had a wife. Instead, they still come home having to do almost everything themselves. Studies constantly show how very little time men still spend on cooking and children, compared with their wives, though they do a little more than they did, and a little more if their wives work full-time. They spend virtually no time on cleaning and ironing, and they have a great deal more genuine leisure time in the week than their working wives who spend every spare moment on guilt-ridden quality time with their children. These same studies show that men imagine they do a great deal more than their fathers, when it's only a bit more, and imagine they do a lot because they simply don't perceive how much more their wives do.

What is a father? This series concludes that he is no more and no less than a co-parent. Two parents are better than one if he's a good father. But he does not need to be a person of extra authority or discipline, simply the other loving and close person. Fathers who change nappies, who are physically close, loving and intimate with children from first babyhood are very unlikely to be violent with their children ever, whereas those who are remote are more at risk. Early bonding is just as important for men. There was a problem with the old role - that distant authoritarian who came into the house and expected everything to revolve around him, remote, unaffectionate and alarming.

Modern fatherhood is a lot more demanding. There is no easy role to slip into. There are all the difficult things mothers do: caring, nurturing, listening, being there and understanding, as well as guiding, teaching and sometimes admonishing. Above all it takes time and sensitivity, attuning yourself to your child. It demands men put aside their assumption of superiority. They have to join in family life on equal terms.

So their "crisis" is only imaginary. They have as important a role as ever, but it no longer includes automatic power, a power that leads too often to violence. This crisis talk is only the whine of the toppled despot. Goodbye to all that, and hello, we hope, eventually, when they've stopped sulking, to New Man, who will be more civilised and companionable. If not, women may not choose to live with him as a companion.

Copyright Radio Times, August 5th-11th 2000.