When I agreed to take a look at some books about men for these pages, I confess I had no idea what I was taking on. I suppose I thought I’d be engaging with a selection of writers urbanely reflecting on the consequences of our culture listening to the reasoned voices of women and men together, as we have for more than a century now.

Not so. Whichever way I turned, I encountered plaintive and anxious voices. They represent an interesting moment in the history of gender relations, when some men clearly feel a yearning for a more comfortable, familiar world they believe they’ve lost.

This sudden outpouring of books on men strikes me as rather odd, not to mention, curiously late in the day. Decades ago now - in the early 1970s - books began to be published that ”discovered” women’s history and women’s voices. These volumes put women back into the story as agents of the way western European society has evolved. Around the millennium it looked as if those new voices and stories had been thoroughly assimilated. We could begin to look at our culture and society with an ungendered eye.

These new books on men represent a kind of rearguard action - a last effort on the part of some anxious, disorientated males to put themselves back uncomplicatedly at the centre of things. This is most obvious in the case of Manliness, by Harvey C. Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University. Mansfield - what a fitting name - bemoans the disappearance of the term manliness, and the concept, from our ”gender neutral society”. He defines the concept as ”confidence in the face of risk”, though his fuller ruminations stress components such as ”assertiveness” and ”ability to command” as characteristics of the ”manly man”. This might sound pig-headed, but Mansfield maintains that manliness has a valuable part to play in the social process, and is now denied, maligned and misunderstood.

Mansfield is a well-known neo-con, and his paean of praise for ”manliness” is, in effect, a plea for a return to a time when men were men (in charge) and women were women (in their properly subordinate place). Indeed, the loss of ”manliness” in western culture is, according to Mansfield, all the fault of ”feminists”.

We don’t need to dwell on this part of his argument, since his ”feminism” is a straw man (”straw woman”?), and combines cod versions of the arguments of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. That the notion of manliness is now ”unemployed” is deplorable, Mansfield tells us, as manliness is what makes governments tick. Manliness ”seeks to be theatrical, welcomes drama and wants your attention”, it ”favours war, likes risk, and admires heroes”. In this respect, Margaret Thatcher, almost uniquely among women, says Mansfield, was ”manly”: he cites with admiration her warning to George Bush Sr. on the eve of the first Gulf war: ”Don’t go wobbly on me, George.”

”Going wobbly” allows me to segue seamlessly from Mansfield’s implausible celebration of ”manliness” into Angus McLaren’s new book, Impotence: A Cultural History.

My own favourite literary version of male non-performance is Aphra Behn’s poem ”The Disappointment”, written in the early 1680s. Having initiated a sexual encounter, the poem’s male protagonist unaccountably cannot perform: ”In vain he toils, in vain commands; / The insensible fell weeping in his hands.” Thoroughly annoyed, the woman leaves; he is left to insist that it was really all her fault: ”He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars, / But more the shepherdess’s charms; / Whose soft bewitching influence, / Had damned him to the hell of impotence.”

McLaren offers a sweeping study of impotence. Viagra is only the latest in a long line of medical remedies offered to men as a solution to ”sexual failure”, now known as ”erectile dysfunction”. In the age of Viagra, any man can be ready for penetrative sex at any time - just pop the little blue pill and he’s up for it. Has McClaren written his treatise now because the invention of Viagra supposedly heralds the end of impotence - the end of history as we know it?

This seems a curiously limiting position. In the age of Viagra, as McLaren points out, there is apparently no place on the male sexual agenda for a version of masculinity that isn’t preoccupied with penetrative performance. Forget caring relationships, or tackling psychological issues that might make an individual fearful of failure in or out of bed.

But what struck me about McLaren’s survey was how little has changed since antiquity in terms of discussion, explanations and remedies for impotence. Fixed on that final ejaculation, men through the ages have agonised over the mechanics with little concern for the social and interpersonal issues behind the malfunction. For 2,000 years, impotence has been treated as a guilty secret.

In Manliness, Mansfield contends women are to blame for the decline of male power. This is nothing new. McLaren shows men have always found somebody else to blame for impotence, usually women. Perhaps potency is the history of men, then - and impotence the history of men’s attitude to women.

Which brings us to sexual fantasy. Recourse to fantasy is, according to psychotherapist Brett Kahr’s book Sex & the Psyche, one of the ways men anxious about their ability to perform in bed are able reliably to get an erection.

I admit that I’m a Nancy Friday girl. Through reading Friday’s My Secret Garden in the 1970s, I found out that other women - lots of them - shared my own most secret sexual fantasies. The Hite Report on Female Sexuality uncovered what women liked to do in bed; My Secret Garden disclosed what we thought about while we did it. Thirty-five years after Friday, young people routinely exchange their innermost fantasies over the internet. Our late-20th-century reticence seems positively quaint. Yet apparently little has changed in the illicit-thought department. Kahr views confessions concerning sexual fantasies as ”true” symptoms of buried inner states of mind. What is depressing about Kahr’s ”data” - full of derivative scenarios, tapped into the computer in secret, in response to ”the largest ever [online] survey of its kind” - is how solitary and onanistic they are.

Of course, thanks to Nancy Friday, women are now allowed to have sexual fantasies too - Kahr’s survey is assiduously even-handed (so to speak). Yet the fantasies here reflect those of a certain type of man trying to put back in place the landscape and scenery of a certain type of masculinity. They conform almost entirely to the ”lads’ mag” versions of what women do or say they want to do.

Over hundreds of pages classified according to ”type”, we see the most banal kind of Playboy-style soft porn - solo masturbation fantasies and fantasies for those who can persuade their partner into remaining silent during coitus so that they can pretend they are doing whatever they are doing to someone or something else. They are supposed to (and do) leave us cold.

Kahr’s discursive ”analysis” of the fantasies also underplays how disturbing a journey sexual fantasy can be. Those questioned do not comment on the inevitable prospect of failure that accompanies all sexual fantasy -- the longed-for pleasure will always be beyond reach. After the fantasy comes the reality - but the reality will always fail to live up to expectation. So, like Manliness and Impotence, Kahr’s discussions bring us back to the same place: male disappointment, blamed on women.

Which brings us to swimsuits. Sarah Kennedy’s new book, The Swimsuit, is full of luscious photographs of women with perfect hourglass figures wearing garments that get ever-smaller with the passage of time. Although it has text and a narrative, it is really a book to leaf through for the gorgeous pictures of women who manage to look divine, even when clad in a shapeless piece of garishly coloured knitwear.

It was the invention of Lycra spandex in 1959 that transformed the swimming costume from a covering for the female body, convenient for beach activities, into packaging for the female body as an object of desire. The arrival of Lycra also opened up endless possibilities for fetishists to clad the body in far from decorous garments - and stimulated a whole genre of erotic fantasies.

Fashion swimsuits do not, apparently, contribute to these. Even the most recent of the photos of lean, long-legged beauties in suits so scanty as to defy gravity, are determinedly ”decent” - no stray nipples here. These images are aimed at women; they reassure them that they too could look like that. My own fairly haphazard survey of attitudes towards the pictures in Kennedy’s book found that women are captivated by them while men are not. Men’s fantasies - as seen in Kahr’s book - include scantily clad women. But it’s partly about context. And when there’s nothing suggestive - as here - men simply aren’t interested.

Where does this leave my attempt to find out more about 21st-century men and masculinity? Just as I was reaching this point, a news item brought me to a halt. In Istanbul, swimwear manufacturers had been refused permission to display pictures of women in swimsuits or bikinis on any outdoor advertising space in the city. Apparently, ”even those showing the most modest swimsuits” were deemed ”immorally provocative”.

In some parts of the world, we have not come very far since professional swimmer Annette Kellerman, clad in the demure knitted one-piece suit she wore for her daring diving routines in 1907, was arrested on a beach near Boston for indecent exposure. This compels me to end with a rather more serious point than I originally intended.

Even where we disagree with their conclusions, these recent books signify that much has changed in the gender debate. But in places in which women’s participation in the world beyond the home is severely curtailed, their men-folk can presumably remain comfortably immune to anxiety about their ”manliness”, and the trope that uncontrolled female sexuality incites men to lust (or dampens their ardour, causing impotence) can continue to be taken seriously.

By contrast, a society such as our own, in which women compete equally with men and are entitled to appear on a beach wearing whatever they fancy, may make some men unsettled and uneasy about themselves. But I have to believe that their unease lies somewhere along a vector pointing ultimately towards a balanced, mutually sustaining and supportive society, and a world we would all - women and men - in the end wish to belong to.

Lisa Jardine is centenary professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

Manliness
by Harvey C. Mansfield
Yale University Press ₤18.50, 304 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤14.80

Impotence: A Cultural History
by Angus McLaren
University of Chicago Press $30, 350 pages

Sex & the Psyche: Revealing the True Nature of Our Secret Fantasies From the Largest Ever Survey of Its Kind
by Brett Kahr
Allen Lane ₤25, 656 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20

The Swimsuit: A Fashion History From 1920s Biarritz and the Birth of the Bikini to St Tropez and Sports Illustrated
by Sarah Kennedy
Carlton Books ₤19.99, 304 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤15.99