Gender politics is obscuring rather than
illuminating the problems facing young males today.
Journalists, authors and campaigners have been talking
of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ for at least 50 years. It’s become a running joke.
Every decade or so, a flurry of new books appear, interrogating the state of
men and boys. And we’re in the middle of one such cycle. In the wake of the
2008 financial crisis, it’s become common – at least in some, less thoroughly
feminist circles – to see men as the primary losers of the post-crash economy.
And this has renewed older concerns about the seeming decline of men as they
struggle to find their place in a post-patriarchal world.
As Hanna Rosin notes in The End of Men, the
crash hollowed out the American middle class, but affected men and women
differently; it sped up economic trends that appeared to blight men and benefit
women. Since 2000, the US economy has lost over six million manufacturing jobs.
While job gains in sectors such as education, healthcare and services made up
the difference, these are sectors almost entirely dominated by women. As a
result, Rosin writes, men have become ‘unmoored’ and women have been left to
‘pick up the pieces’.
The drawn-out decline of manufacturing industries goes
hand in hand with the rise of working women and the decline of working men – a
trend that is reflected in the UK economy, too. According to the Office for
National Statistics, between 1971 and 2013, the rate of women in work rose from
53 per cent to 67 per cent, while, for men, it has fallen from 92 per cent to
76 per cent. This, the ONS notes, is only partly the result of the reduction of
barriers to entry for women – the end of workplace discrimination and the
introduction of equal pay. Instead, it is the decline in male-dominated
manufacturing – beginning in the 1960s – that seems to play the most crucial
role in the fall in male employment.
But this is not just about the economy producing more
‘girl jobs’ as ‘boy jobs’ suffer. In the space of just a few decades women,
have stormed the traditionally male professions. According to the US Bureau of
Labor Statistics, as of 2011 women held 51.4 per cent of managerial and
professional jobs; 61.3 per cent of accountancy jobs; and about half of banking
and insurance jobs. Trends suggest that women will outnumber men in medicine
very soon. This reflects a phenomenon Rosin refers to as ‘Plastic Women’ and
‘Cardboard Men’, whereby women have been flexible, adaptive, seizing new
economic opportunities, while men have stayed still, and shown a reluctance to
change.
According to recent UK figures, women are now 35 per cent more likely to
go to university than men. And white working-class boys are the least likely of
any other demographic to attend, at just 8.9 per cent
The shift in Western job markets has created a higher
demand for university-educated workers – and yet, here, men notoriously lag
behind. According to recent UK figures, women are now 35 per cent more likely
to go to university than men. And white working-class boys are the least likely
of any other demographic to attend, at just 8.9 per cent. In the space of a few
generations, the gender bias in higher education has reversed. Now, some
administrators at US colleges have admitted to practising positive
discrimination towards male applicants.
Though women are still underrepresented in both the
boardroom and the corridors of power, the strides they have made have been
remarkable. As Rosin puts it, ‘given the sheer velocity of the economic and
other forces at work, these circumstances are much more likely the last
artefacts of a vanishing era rather than a permanent configuration’. And yet,
during this period, men’s position in work and the family has both remained
stagnant and withered. Women now work more and parent more. While men
work less and parent slightly more. ‘They lost the old architecture of
manliness, but they have not replaced it with any obvious new one’, concludes
Rosin.
Men’s rights
The predicament men now find themselves in has
accompanied a surge in interest in so-called men’s rights activism. Though it
has existed – in one form or another – since at least the 1970s, up until
recently it has been pigeon-holed as a cranky, embittered response to the rise
of feminism and the gains of women. Now, it is finding mainstream purchase. In
the UK, writer-cum-campaigners like Martin Daubney and Peter Lloyd are filling column
inches and gaining prime-time TV-news exposure. Even some MPs, like Philip
Davis, have begun to campaign on the plight of ‘men and boys’. Yet many of the
concerns of the much-maligned MRAs have remained pretty constant.
Men’s rights activism as we know it today grew out of
the work of Warren Farrell, a former feminist campaigner who once counted
Gloria Steinem among his political allies. The founding text for the movement,
Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power (1993), looked to redefine what were
previously considered indicators of male power as indicators of male
subservience. He turned the feminist consensus on its head, arguing that women
and the family’s reliance on men – who were forced to succeed, provide and work
all hours even as divorces surged – constituted a form of gendered oppression
that society insisted on ignoring.
- A gender prison Joanna Williams
- Mary Kenny interview Ella Whelan
- The fall of men Tom Slater
- Neurosexism Cordelia Fine
- Sex and censorship Helene Guldberg
- Transgenderism Naomi Firsht
For Farrell, men’s economic and social dominance was a
smokescreen. He defined power as control over one’s life. And though men were
nominally free to exercise their social and economic freedom, he argued they
remained socialised into accepting restrictive, self-destructive and
unfulfilling obligations to their families and to women in general. In one
bizarre passage, he pondered if men had become the ‘new niggers’: ‘Blacks were
forced by slavery into society’s most hazardous jobs, men are forced by a
socialisation into society’s most hazardous jobs… When slaves gave up their
seats for whites we called it subservience, when women give up their seats for
women, we call it politeness.’
Today, Farrell’s US acolytes orbit around A Voice for
Men, a website set up and run by former addiction therapist and trucker Paul
Elam. The site reflects a mixed bag of men’s issues ranging from reasonable
gripes, surrounding lopsided parental rules and the watering down of legal
standards in sexual-assault cases, to peculiar obsessions. One of which is the
fact that US men still have to register for the draft. Despite the fact there’s
vanishingly little chance they’ll ever be drafted, this, according to the
Farrell school of thought, is proof that men remain the ‘disposable sex’, the
only section of society that can wilfully be submitted for ‘genocide’. As,
apparently, does the fact that men still dominate professions – such as
construction – that have high on-the-job fatality rates.
Though old-guard MRAs are certainly more whacky than
their new, mainstream descendants, they all fixate on the most morbid sides of
male experience. The most salient of them all being the rate of male suicide –
which, on both sides of the Atlantic, accounts for the vast majority of the
total. This is held up as proof that an unfeeling society is ignoring, and
perhaps even feeding, a trend towards male self-destruction. If you point out
that the reason young men, in particular, are vastly more likely to die at
their own hands is that they’re unlikely to die at all – and that while men
more often succeed at committing suicide, women more often attempt it – you’re
just cast as part of the problem.
The men’s rights movement is often crudely depicted as
a misogynistic, basement-dweller backlash against feminism. Its critics have
shamelessly argued that it helped feed the murderous imagination of Elliot
Rodgers, the 22-year-old who killed six people and injured 14 in Isla Vista in
2014, leaving behind a ‘manifesto’ extolling his hatred of women and
minorities. MRAs like Elam certainly don’t help themselves – he once published
a ‘satirical’ article announcing ‘Bash a Violent Bitch Month’, and has insisted
that if he was ever on a jury in a rape trial he would acquit on principle. But
the movement as a whole remains far more therapeutic than furious.
In truth, men’s rights is the mirror image of feminism
In truth, men’s rights is the mirror image of
feminism. Over the course of the past few decades, the egalitarian demands of
women’s liberation have been eclipsed by a new feminism obsessed with painting
all women as victims. Not only do feminists today perpetrate myths about rape
culture and the gender pay gap, they insist on connecting the dots between
vast, unrelated issues – as if ‘sexist’ pop songs and tampon taxes are on a
continuum with domestic violence. If you go looking for signs of female
victimhood – if you disregard all other social factors and lump the experiences
of all women together – you’re going to find it. Men’s rights has just shown
that two can play that game.
Beyond the gender war
At a time when men in the West are facing economic and
social uncertainty, a recourse to male gender politics has, paradoxically, only
clouded the issue. If you tumble down the rabbit hole of men’s rights thinking,
you find precious little to help you navigate the situation that presents
itself. It’s not that MRAs are unconcerned about the fact that working-class
men have effectively being decommissioned, that they have vanishing job
prospects and are often unsure of their place in society as a whole. It’s that
their insistence on seeing these purely through the prism of gender blinds them
to the real forces at play.
In many ways, gender politics has always played this
obfuscating role. Though previous generations fought to level gender
inequalities, they recognised that these inequalities were economic, legal and
social in nature. But gender politics – with its dictum, the ‘personal is
political’ – recasts the challenges that affect either men or women in terms of
gender-specific victimhood and esteem. Hence questions about how men or women
are seen by society – how much they are valued – are suddenly hugely important.
As men’s rights campaigner Peter Lloyd puts it, ‘turn on any TV channel or
radio station and there’s a global conversation about men – sometimes disguised
as being about women – taking place without us. These all slowly influence our
worlds.’
The ultimate blind-spot of both the men’s rights
movement and feminism is class. This is why privately educated women, attending
Russell Group universities, feel comfortable calling working-class lads
‘privileged’. And the fact remains that it is not simply men and boys, but working-class
men and boys, who are finding their life chances most limited by accident of
their birth. If we want to grasp that nettle we need to work out how to replace
those millions of manufacturing jobs that have disappeared – to carve out an
economy and an education system that serves all. A men’s rights therapy session
won’t help that.
There are plenty of questions that remain unanswered.
Why have women adapted so well to this new, post-industrial world, while men
have lagged behind? Are women now destined to dominate higher education? But
one thing is clear. If men really are lost, gender politics is no way back.
Tom Slater is deputy
editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_
http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/the-fall-of-men#.WFV7kbRTHmK