Men. Real Men. Real, real men.

A guest weekend dispatch from The Wife (needless to say, I beg – but in a manly way – to differ): (PS: The fine figure of humanity in the picture below is not The Wife.)

Of course we know that men in the West are oppressed (poor things). They are underrepresented in politics and administration, they have a hard time making it into high-quality, responsible jobs (and if they do make it they are usually underpaid while forever fending with the patronising benevolence and straightforward dismissiveness of the matriarchs) and, because of their proverbial lack of driving talent, they are forced to pay higher car insurance premiums.

Well at least German men now have a TV-programme of their own to help take their minds off the sorrow and the pity. It is called DMAX, it advertises itself as putting variety first and uses the ingenious slogan “Neue Männer an die Macht” (power to new men) to garner eager and regular viewers. As we haven’t poisoned our lives with cable or satellite, I am sadly unable to while away my free time with this exciting new feature, but the website is itself revealing to the point of being offputting.

There is the picture of a man jumping across a canyon, by the looks of it. (It might be a photoshop job, but who knows these days.) The schedule features programmes on monster houses, mega cars and big bucks. [Nothing small in these pants. -- Ed.] There is a fast-cut trailer displaying masculinity in different shades and colours (no, actually, come to think of it, not different colours): Ewan McGregor à la Obi Wan with a vicious (by Ewan standards) snarl, Louis Theroux being indecently assaulted by a massage master, a professional playboy on a yacht, an obese team of scrapyard owners (who’ve already had plenty of media exposure in Germany) and, by way of an antidote, Morgan Spurlock trying to get rid of some of the excess weight put on during his notorious fast food experiment. (Click on 'Trailer ansehen' to have the pleasure.)

It not only shows boys but also their toys: plenty of more or less shiny metal with two or four wheels, sledgehammers and wheelbarrows and, somewhat mystifyingly, an exploding portable toilet. And then there are brief references to archetypal settings of the male quest for identity, a dusty desert, a splish-splashing ocean and somewhat more mundane but no less treacherous building sites.

Now I wonder what makes these men new: they’re silly, they love fast machines and they play pranks on each other.

What hath Fight Club wrought?

For the best example of truly new manhood in that bunch, I’d pick Louis Theroux though: