In recent years, as activists in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere have utilized the internet to organize popular movements and demand social and political change, the importance of technology in Middle Eastern societies—long regarded by many as fundamentally resistant to “change” and far removed from all things “modern”—has received much attention. Marcia Inhorn's The New Arab Man richly documents another facet of a very modern Middle East that has received far less attention: the explosion of reproductive technologies to address high rates of male infertility, which was “[o]nce regarded as a source of male shame” but has been “reclassified as a biomedical disease category, with recognized causes, precise diagnostic techniques, and new technological fixes” (p. 26). In an accessible and engaging account of ethnographic research collected over a period of several years with more than 300 men in four countries (Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States), Inhorn argues that the increased availability of reproductive technologies in the Middle East and widespread changes in how infertility is understood have led to the emergence of a “new Arab man,” who embodies a kind of masculinity that simultaneously challenges Orientalist stereotypes of Arab men as terrorists and “Middle Eastern” norms that associate masculinity with virility and the patriarchal domination of women. Working to counter the essentialism in both of these narratives of Arab masculinity, Inhorn draws attention to the “nuanced and constantly evolving responses” of ordinary men to “their changing social worlds and physical bodies” (p. 62). Ultimately, however, the book is a more effective exercise in storytelling than social–cultural analysis, and the new Arab man turns out to be little more than an equally one-dimensional inverse of his patriarch/terrorist counterpart.

To be sure, the story Inhorn tells is a fascinating and important one that will come as news to many readers. According to Inhorn, for reasons having primarily to do with genetic conditions associated with consanguineous—or cousin—marriage, “male infertility is especially common in the Middle East” (p. 68). This is especially problematic in the Middle East—a broad category that Inhorn never interrogates and seems to use much like the “culture areas” of an earlier generation of anthropologists—because Middle Eastern men “are expected to have children . . . [and] acquire social power . . . through the reproduction of offspring” (p. 70). As a result, infertile men “in this region of the world . . . may be deemed weak and ineffective” for their failure to conform to the “masculine reproductive imperative” (p. 70). But as Inhorn explains, infertility—including male infertility—is often a treatable condition. The introduction of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to the Middle East in the 1990s skirted the problem of popular and religious resistance to what was until then the most common form of in vitro fertilization, donor insemination, which presents difficult questions for paternity—the core principle of Middle Eastern social structures, according to Inhorn—and is considered a form of zinā by many Muslims and regarded ambiguously, at best, by most Arab Christians. (Jews and Judaism are not part of Inhorn's Middle East.) Through the “micromanipulation” of sperm, ICSI increases the chances for “otherwise sterile men [to] father biogenetic offspring” (p. 27). An incredibly expensive procedure that does not always succeed, ICSI's advent has, nonetheless, facilitated the medicalization—and, to some degree, destigmatization—of male infertility. This development, Inhorn argues, has allowed Middle Eastern men to rethink the relationship between masculinity and reproduction and created a context in which “Middle Eastern patriarchy today is being unseated by Middle Eastern men themselves” (p. 15).

If this all sounds a little romantic, it is perhaps because The New Arab Man is, in many ways, more romantic than it is critical. Inhorn's entire theoretical apparatus relies on a ho-hum quote from Raymond Williams about the “emergence”—which is to say, the dynamism, instability, and constructedness—of social forms (like “masculinity”) and a critique of R. W. Connell's theory of “hegemonic masculinity,” which made a significant contribution to understandings of masculinity when it was developed in the 1980s but has not been much debated since. Indeed, what is most striking about The New Arab Man—a recent ethnography of gender and sexuality in the Middle East—is its complete lack of engagement with any of the major debates and theoretical developments in gender and sexuality studies over the last twenty years. This oversight makes sense when one considers that the book is, as Inhorn explains, a mea culpa for her earlier work, in which Middle Eastern men were either “regarded as imponderable and forbidden research subjects” or as straightforward agents of patriarchy (pp. 13, 15). Hinting that her own scholarly representations of Middle Eastern men were informed by—or contributed to—Orientalist discourses of Arab/Muslim men as “always patriarchal, hypervirile, brutal, and religiously fanatical,” Inhorn works hard—and with, no doubt, the utmost sincerity—to uncover a new Arab man (p. 54). And what constitutes this man—what distinguishes him, above all, from the old Arab man (the patriarch/terrorist)—is his capacity to love his wife and children.

“It is fair to say,” Inhorn tells us, “that Middle Eastern culture [sic] is imbued with hubb [love]” (p. 95). Moreover, “[t]he Middle Eastern IVF setting is imbued with hubb” (p. 110), and the IVF industry itself would not exist “if Middle Eastern men did not love their wives” (p. 110). When the technologies fail, it is love that forces Middle Eastern men to stay with their childless wives. And in those rare cases where Middle Eastern men—whom Inhorn anoints as “moral pioneers” (p. 280)—reject social and religious mores against adoption and donor insemination, they do so out of love. It appears even that the anthropological encounter is imbued with ḥubb, as Inhorn explains that, despite all this proof for the existence of loving Middle Eastern men, she “can only adequately express Middle Eastern men's love of children by referring to [her] own family's experiences” in the field, where men constantly doted over her two young children (pp. 295–96).

“Love,” of course, is a legitimate and important object of social scientific study. The problems with Inhorn's reliance on it as a master concept to explain everything are that it is not entirely clear what she means by “love,” why she finds its presence in the Middle East so remarkable, and whether it means the same thing for the Middle Eastern men who are ostensibly defined by it. Furthermore, whatever love really means—for the anthropologist and for her subjects—Inhorn's need to find it everywhere prevents her from asking a host of other questions that The New Arab Man might have explored. To what extent, for example, is the medicalization of male infertility—and its normalization as a manageable condition—a symptom of the consolidation of biopower in Middle Eastern societies? Are the “tragic” stories, endlessly recounted by Inhorn, of men who expend enormous resources in unsuccessful efforts to become fertile really—or only—about their “love” for their wives? And is the emergence of “infertile subjectivities” a straightforward story of “infertile men . . . speaking truth to . . . injustice” (p. 82) and resisting power/patriarchy, or is it a more complex story of the production and management of gendered bodies, subjectivities, and populations under changing regimes of power?

These are just a few of many important questions raised by The New Arab Man, a compassionate and well-documented study of a timely issue that has received too little attention, but the answers it provides may, in the end, tell us more about the anthropologist than her new Arab man.