This
is about establishing men’s identity today, where upbringing, culture and
events affect how men are. There are
more men about now than there have been at any time in the last century when so
many lives were lost in wars. Men also live
longer because of the decrease in manual labour. Men were brought up with the possibility that they might die for
their country. Women were cast in the
role of non-voting mothers.
Women
increasingly gained political and sexual rights. It wasn’t until the 1960s that they seriously began to pose a
threat to the male hierarchy, without the distraction of war.
Men
were always the beer-drinking aggressors, patriarchs, legislators, politicians,
breadwinners, industrialists, cannon fodder, labourers, craftsmen, shop floor
worker. Sexually, men’s purpose was to
stick their manhood into an available orifice; women’s was to provide an
opening if required to do so, and occasionally to choose their own. Men had the upper hand.
The
older world that men of a certain age were told about by their families and
their schooling when they were small has changed. Some still live in a world they governed by those early
influences but others will have embraced the changes in society over the
post-war years.
Whilst
it might seem that those in the latter group have a better overview, it is they
who have more difficulties: by being part of the vanguard of the new they
suffer the privations of the conservative past. In aspiring to a contemporary level of understanding, many of the
inclinations inherent in their upbringing are called into question, and a
vacuum has developed in their psychology.
With their minds they applaud without question the rationale of
equality, but their bodies might seem to drag behind: as a result they are
neither attractive to women nor considered truly men. They do not fall between two stools, they simply have nowhere to
sit.
It
might be attractive to argue that loutish, inconsiderate and insensitive men
have no place in the new society, and that we can all move forward without them
and create beautiful babies, living in peace and harmony. However, apart from this idea creating a
place dull beyond belief, it firmly remains an ideal and is far from reality. Men need to realise that they can at the
same time be potent and reasonable.
This is, however, given our recent history, a tall order.
We
might characterise men as inhabiting a broad spectrum between Anxious Man and
Aggressive Man, and, whilst there may be women who differ wildly in their outward
characteristics, there are unifying factors that distinguish them from the
disparate scene modern man presents.
Feminism
never achieved its stated goals and never could, but it did what an inspired
marketing campaign seeks to do: ask for everything and then get a good
percentage. Unlike marketing, feminism
was not about shifting units but changing habits, and to do that requires
co-operation. However, it raised the issue,
which was a start, but women still struggle to achieve equal pay, and, more
importantly, equal respect.
The
missing part of the equation – the one which changes habits – was men. Men held the positions of power and men
controlled the money. Without the
co-operation of men, women were not going to achieve equality unless they tried
to behave like men, defeating the point.
Men had to be part of this social shift, but were not invited, causing
disharmony and resentment. Men were put
on the back foot, increasing their anxiety, and not brought up to share this
anxiety amongst themselves, they worked harder to be more successful at home
and at work. Divorce, increased
disharmony, competitiveness, stress and corporate strategies grew. And men were further from each other as
ever.
Men
herded together. In the pub after work,
at the football; they would engineer brotherhood by a complex mesh of ersatz
rights of passage, fending off any real communication with each other through
rituals drawing from anything between Norse legend to Star Trek chains of
command and Dad’s Army. Men of the UK
were essentially stuffed. Unable to
turn, they resorted to increasingly fabulous inventions such as renaming the
First Division the Premier League and replacing sexy plcs with sexy dot coms. Where could they go next?
Feminism
needed to happen, but a high percentage of women need men just as a high
percentage of men need women. The
sexual revolution really needed to happen from both sides. Women are still coming to terms with
everything feminism talked about and some men still don’t understand it. Far from men being unable to get in touch
with their feminine side, they need to get in touch with their masculine side
first. Peace has proved to be a testing
time for men: with no recourse to dying for their country, a chasm of
bewildering open-endedness has opened, and questions have been asked of their
worth. They are beginning to have a
poor attention span for marriage; depression and suicide are becoming more
common, and their infertility is giving way to donor pregnancies.
Men
need to do what women were able to do to raise their consciousness. Men need the kind of confidence and shift in
their conception of sociability women can have
to enable them to express themselves without the anxiety of having to
prove themselves. They need to be able
to talk to each other and express emotion to each other if they feel a need.
A
recent startling statistic has shown that men who visit prostitutes tend to go
more for relaxation than for aggression; to play the passive role and be done
unto rather than to do. For men to
realise that they don’t have to be macho requires a shift in male consciousness
as well as a shift in the perception of the male by women and society.