Man-wrangling with Peta

MARION VAN DIJK/The Nelson Mail

PETA MATHIAS: For men, it's quite important for them to have a partner, but women can be perfectly happy without one.

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Writing a book about men has changed Peta Mathias's views of what she thought she knew about them.

When Peta Mathias wrote a book about women, it proved a hit. When her publisher told her she would have to do a follow-up on men, she wanted to run a mile.

But any misgivings the chef/media personality/writer had about delving into the masculine world have long since been laid to rest, and on Tuesday, Mathias will be back in Nelson as the star attraction at a fundraising evening for the Nelson Women's Centre.

In Just in Time to be Too Late: Why Men are like Buses, she sets out to describe what it means to be a man in the 21st century, and explains some of the fundamental differences between men and women. The springboard was last year's hugely successful book, Can We Help It If We're Fabulous? which celebrated womanhood.

"It was meant to be a one-off," says Mathias, who until then was better known for her books on food and travel.

"The book about women was such a wild success the publisher said: `You know what you have to do now . . .'

"I said I couldn't write a book on men. I thought it would be too nasty, and if that was going to happen, then why bother."

Mathias says the challenge she set herself was to write something uplifting, when most of what she had read on men was "so sanctimonious it made me want to throw up". She has achieved what could be described as a more academic analysis of her subject than her homage to womanhood, and she has even surprised herself with some personal discoveries along the way.

"By the time I had written it I had a big shift in attitude. I think now that perhaps I could have been more patient with men instead of screaming, `What a jack! Get outta here'."

She did a lot more research for this book because she had to write about things she knew nothing about, like sport, without falling asleep from the boredom.

"I'm only qualified to have done this from the perspective that I've been around a long time," says the recently turned 60-year-old. "When I started the research I found it hard to find good books on men. I only found one book that was witty, entertaining and uplifting and which made men feel good about themselves without being patronising."

Just in Time to be Too Late might also be a disclosure of a latent love of wanting to help and please people. Mathias, a trained nurse and counsellor, would, in her early days of nursing, sometimes get "bad reports" which said: "Peta is not interested in the day-to-day work of nursing. All she wants to do is talk to people and make them feel better".

The book explores what makes men cry, why bad boys are apparently irresistible, the point of sport, to what extent a man's self-worth is connected to his job, and what men look for in relationships.

There is plentiful advice: in the chapter on relationships and "how to talk to a man", Mathias writes that a man has a quota of about 3000 words a day, and once they're said, that's it. By comparison, a woman has up to 8000 words she must get rid of.

A hot tip on "useless ways to punish a man" is sulking. "This is his No1 dream – silence and peace," she says.

While it is aimed at women, judging by the number of men who read her book on women, she believes there's a deep pool of male readers waiting to take part in a little self-analysis.

"Publishers tell you you're writing largely for a female market but I have male friends who read voraciously."

Mathias believes men have been "bashed up a lot emotionally". Stoking that fire was the recent release of Australian anthropologist and author Peter McAllister's book Manthropology, which proclaims modern man is the worst in history – "the sorriest cohort of masculine homo sapiens to ever walk the planet".

Mathias says that during her research it was evident that some men struggle with the notion they are perhaps the "disposable sex".

"Men are not necessary as companions to women," says Mathias, who has been a wife, and who adores her father, three brothers, a brother-in-law and five nephews.

She's had many relationships and flings with men and is currently without a partner. It's not what makes her happy in life.

"For men, it's quite important for them to have a partner, but women can be perfectly happy without one."

Mathias is already on to her next project – a book of essays exploring random topics, like the colour red. She might one day look at writing about the elderly.

"I was on the bus the other day watching the behaviour of elderly people who can be so manipulative and I thought, `I might write a book on old people'."

Just in Time to be Too Late by Peta Mathias (Penguin Group NZ, $35).

An evening with Peta Mathias in support of the Nelson Women's Centre, Tuesday, November 3, 5.30pm, Rutherford Hotel. Tickets: $25 from Everyman Records and Paper Plus.