This is one of these postings in which I begin going on about some pop song that you have not heard for ages but which irritates the life out of me whenever I hear it. Perhaps I should gather this one together with 'Red Corvette', 'One of Us' and 'Africa' on my own playlist of irritation. Anyway, in this case the song, 'All Rise' by the boy band 'Blue', released in May 2001, it seems so much more recent, still gets air play; I have heard it three times in the last fortnight and with a new comeback tour scheduled for 2010, I suppose it is time to get all my irritation about the song off my chest.
I take no particular offence to the group who are pretty similar to a lot of boy bands of the early 21st century. They had a reasonable amount of success as a group and on solo projects. What irritates me about their first and seemingly enduring hit (reached No. 4 in the UK charts) is the misogynistic nature of the lyrics. At a time when the media is acknowledging that feminism is under severe attack, it seems that this song is simply another element in that trend. The pushing of girls and women into ultra-feminine, often highly sexualised and always submissive roles and boys and men into muscular, violent, dominant roles is based on consumer goals of companies. By avoiding unisex clothing, toys, devices, etc. you can sell more. The price society pays is to push back the gains made by women since the 1960s and promote violence among young men and physical abuse and sexual exploitation of women.
So, what gets me so het up about 'All Rise'? The song uses a legal metaphor for the singers in the role of a young man to accuse his girlfriend of being unfaithful to him. Phrases from court like 'all rise', 'I rest my case' In addition he is bitter about the 'free rides' and the 'faking' she has been doing, presumably lying about the affair she has been having, though it could be read as him claiming she had faked orgasms. The concept might be fine and clearly the song is catchy and appeals to many listeners which is why it still seems to be on playlists nine years after its release. However, the tone is pretty aggressive: 'With your back against the wall/ Nowhere to run/ There's nobody you can call'. The worst is during the rap break: 'Step in my house you find that your stuff has gone/ But in reality to whom does the stuff belong?/ I bring you into court to preach my order/ And you know that you overstep the border'. So finding his girlfriend unfaithful he has taken back everything he has given her (and the suggestion is that it is natural that he has bought everything she owns because of course he is the economically-dominant male and she is the economically-dependent female) and has simply thrown it all out, despite the fact that 'the decision of the jury has not been spoken'. So, despite all this legal rhetoric to dress up the situation, the man goes ahead and makes his own decision and the punishment is for the woman to lose everything she possesses. If the fictional woman had been having an affair, then given the nature of her partner I would not blame her.
Now, you might say, 'well, why does all this matter? It is only a song.' However, at a time when there is a television campaign aiming to alert teenagers, particularly girls, to abuse in their relationships is it then fine to have a song which says to young men: 'suspect your girlfriend, you have the right to punish her if you think she is unfaithful' and includes backing her alone against a wall? The attitude sums up the worst in macho culture and its behaviour to women. This was why the concept of chivalry was invented to stop knights in brutal medieval times abusing women and others in society. These days such concepts have been thrown out and 'might is right' seems to apply in all cases.
We have all met those thuggish men who are incredibly jealous, often with no just cause, and keep the women around them in fear of retribution if they even look at another man. People in the UK complain that Middle Eastern husbands constrain their wives without seeing that many men in this country, particularly white men, behave in just the way that is condemned elsewhere, but it is acceptable as it is 'their own business' not anyone else's. We need far more positive messages in songs about what is really acceptable behaviour to young women, songs like this do harm. I was gladdened when I heard a new version of this song playing on a number of the 'Heart' radio stations across southern England in recent weeks that has, in particular, cut out the rap break and so toned down the misogynistic message of this song.
Showing posts with label gender equality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender equality. Show all posts
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Monday, 19 January 2009
Female-Male Household Chore Balance
I have mentioned before in passing how the song 'If I Was a Boy' by Beyonce which seems to have been on the radio for months is so unpleasant. All women pop artists seem to record at least one song about being cheated on and sometimes one about the experience making her stronger. I accept that for securing a female audience for their tracks this is a sensible thing to do. However, the impression it gives is that there are no decent men at all in the USA, that every man that even someone as independent as Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna or Christina Aguillera is ever going to meet is going to cheat on them, be lazy and probably steal from them.
Beyonce's is probably the worst in which she envisages herself being a man for a day and she portrays the life of a slob not bothering with his appearance, doing bad things he knows he will get away with and being inconsiderate to his girlfriend. The man portrayed has no redeeming features and because she speaks about it generically, not referrring to a particular man it is seen as an admonishment to men in general. She gives not chance for the man, 'because you're just a boy, you don't understand' and never will. It is interesting that the word 'boy' is used especially from a black US artist. Perhaps she has no knowledge of its history. You can photographs from the 1950s of black men with placards saying 'I am not a boy, I am a man', because 'boy' was used to denigrate black men in segregated America to make them seem inferior or at least juvenile. You still hear South Africans (and not just white ones) refer to their 'garden boy' or 'the boy who fixed the car' to refer to black men in menial jobs even this long after apartheid finished. I know that like the word 'nigger' in US culture, boy has to some extent been recaptured as a kind of knock-about phrase, see 'Boyz N The 'Hood' (1991), 'Bad Boys' (1995) and 'Bad Boys 2' (2003) for a young man. However, with one swoop Beyonce has almost reinstated it as a derogatory term.
That is sorted then, why not just go off and become a lesbian because clearly no man stands a chance with you Beyonce. Probably more accurately no woman would either, as a lot of what she is talking about is selfishness. There is a sense that if a partner is not in 100% agreement with what the princess wants then he is not listening properly. Has Beyonce (or her song writer - BC Jean, aged 21) ever actually been in a relationship? If they try to run them like this then they are doomed to failure. All relationships are about balance, however, by bringing up daughters to think they are princesses the balance is being shattered. A princess feels she deserves to have absolutely everything she wishes. Some find men who will comply, but the women in such situations become insatiable and a lot of the bad debt in the UK is caused by unsustainable demands in the average household because no-one is willing to say 'let's stop and think if we can afford it' or even 'no'. This is the crux of the matter. On Beyonce's basis any man saying 'no' is simply not listening. What is neglected entirely, is that as adults we can listen and yet still disagree with someone. I accept that people say 'no' sometimes on an irrational basis, but then if you think that you open up dialogue. The female attitude that every request/demand must be complied with or it simply proves that the message has not been heard is very unhealthy and helps wreck relationships. Relationships that succeed are a fine balance that needs constant work from both parties. If one side keeps simply demanding and will not accept any other opinion then it is as much fun as being on a see-saw with one side concreted to the ground.
Relationships are supposed to be about fun are they not? They may be hard work at times, but that hard work is put in so that you can get some fun out of it. If the man is simply fuelling a consumer furnace (or conversely the woman is simply fuelling an eating, sleeping one; I am not saying all men are blameless) then there will never be fun and you might as well not bother. Of course in our societies people may be dependent on others economically and so have fewer options, but basically if you are not having fun with your relationship, why bother? I will be interested to see what the forthcoming movie 'Revolutionary Road' about a couple in small town USA (played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio) triggers off on this issue.
Women, you have to accept that a man you enter into a relationship is a man, he is an adult and so can make choices. These choices may differ from yours but that does not make him necessarily selfish or deaf to what you are saying. Presenting the options is the basis for discussion, and dialogue and debate are the only ways modern day human interaction can prosper whether it is within your family or at work or on the road or in the supermarket or wherever. The problem is, that in contrast to my generation, people are not taught that 'you can't always get all you want', if you admit that these days you are seen somehow as a fool or weak, but it is in fact an eternal truth of humanity and a lot of dissatisfaction arises from not recognising it. Treat your man like a man and talk with him rather than at him. Most men struggle to give their partners everything they want but at times they cannot or disagree that it is the right thing. A different opinion is not a crime (of course US culture's attitude tends to view that differently too, which may be a root cause of a lot of this).
Now, there is one issue on which men do fall down and that is domestic chores. A lot of the statistics come from the USA but it does seem that in the past thirty years the amount of housework done by men has risen by only 15% and time spent with children has trebled. However, men still totally underperform in the household chores. Though women now make up 46% of the workforce in the UK (and about 53% of the total population, though they are far more numerous among the over-65s) they do an average of 3 hours housework per day compared to 1 hour 40 minutes by men. This does not include shopping and childcare. In Spain in 2005, the government introduced a law to compel men to do 50% of the chores in the house. In that country women do up to five times as much housework as men who in turn only spend 13 minutes per day with their children. Men with younger wives and from better educated and better paid jobs are far more likely to do housework than men from lesser paid jobs. When the man earns far more of the income than the woman he is also less likely to work in the home. To some extent this all cuts back to the long hours and low pay that many people are expected to tolerate, especially in the UK. However, it also returns us to the 1970s perspective that running a house is a job for which people should be paid by the state, especially if child rearing is involved. The internet age has helped and being able to order groceries online and shop 24 hours per day in superstores has brought some flexibility. Interestingly men reduce the amount of housework they do when they marry their partner (presumably they feel they have caught her and no longer need to impress her) and after children are born because additional work derived from child rearing is seen as purely the woman's job. Given the rise in women doing 'do-it-yourself' activities such as fixing and installing things, roles that were previously seen as exclusively male, the overall balance of what goes on in the house seems to be tipping even further back towards the women.
Now, many women make the mistake of setting up home with a man who has come straight from his parental home (36% of boys and 23% of girls do no housework while growing up which is a neglectful attitude from parents). It is far better to pick a man who has lived alone for a while. Of course if he lives in utter squalor then pass him by. However, most young men who live alone get themselves together sufficiently to vacuum clean, wash dishes and wash clothing not least so that their property is not a health hazard. Men who rent property have it checked, depending on the landlord/lady, once every 1-6 months so cannot let it get too bad or they will be evicted, something they usually try to avoid. Having found a man you want to live with, talk to him about domestic chores before you start living together. You may be in love with each other but you are also becoming housemates. This may be why better educated men do more housework as they have usually lived away from home (though this is declining in the UK) while at university and been compelled to do chores, often as part of a rota. Another good source of men who can do chores are the armed forces.
Too many women do not talk through these things when the moving in together is being discussed and instead somehow expect the man to know who is to do what. Of course, despite what women think, men are not mindreaders (nor are women) and then she gets frustrated. Do not accuse him of 'not listening' when in fact you have never raised the issue. Talking about washing and cleaning is not sexy, but it helps a relationship run more smoothly. Both US and UK researchers have concluded that women who see their man doing more housework feel they are being treated more fairly and are more likely to engage in sexual activity with that man. How hard is housework? It is boring yes, so put your ipod on or iron in front of your favourite DVD, then it is little different to if you were simply watching TV or listening to music. Also think it is liable to win you more sex too. For some light physical activity you get quite a lot of reward.
Successful, enduring, fun relationships often are founded upon hammering out quite mundane and tedious issues. There is no point starting assuming that the man is incapable of understanding what is needed, you might as well give up right away. Beyonce, labelling men as irredeemable every morning on my radio is not helping gender relationships. Let us have a hit song about a man and woman discussing what has to be done and then getting it on because they feel there is a balance, and above all discussion, not simply dictation, in their relationship. Let us have less 'If I Were A Boy' and more of McFadden & Whitehead's 'Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now' (1979): 'There's been so many things that have held us down/ But now it looks like things are finally comin' around/ I know we've got a long, long way to go/ And where we'll end up, I don't know/ But we won't let nothin' hold us back/ We're puttin' ourselves together, We're polishin' up our act, yeah./'
Beyonce's is probably the worst in which she envisages herself being a man for a day and she portrays the life of a slob not bothering with his appearance, doing bad things he knows he will get away with and being inconsiderate to his girlfriend. The man portrayed has no redeeming features and because she speaks about it generically, not referrring to a particular man it is seen as an admonishment to men in general. She gives not chance for the man, 'because you're just a boy, you don't understand' and never will. It is interesting that the word 'boy' is used especially from a black US artist. Perhaps she has no knowledge of its history. You can photographs from the 1950s of black men with placards saying 'I am not a boy, I am a man', because 'boy' was used to denigrate black men in segregated America to make them seem inferior or at least juvenile. You still hear South Africans (and not just white ones) refer to their 'garden boy' or 'the boy who fixed the car' to refer to black men in menial jobs even this long after apartheid finished. I know that like the word 'nigger' in US culture, boy has to some extent been recaptured as a kind of knock-about phrase, see 'Boyz N The 'Hood' (1991), 'Bad Boys' (1995) and 'Bad Boys 2' (2003) for a young man. However, with one swoop Beyonce has almost reinstated it as a derogatory term.
That is sorted then, why not just go off and become a lesbian because clearly no man stands a chance with you Beyonce. Probably more accurately no woman would either, as a lot of what she is talking about is selfishness. There is a sense that if a partner is not in 100% agreement with what the princess wants then he is not listening properly. Has Beyonce (or her song writer - BC Jean, aged 21) ever actually been in a relationship? If they try to run them like this then they are doomed to failure. All relationships are about balance, however, by bringing up daughters to think they are princesses the balance is being shattered. A princess feels she deserves to have absolutely everything she wishes. Some find men who will comply, but the women in such situations become insatiable and a lot of the bad debt in the UK is caused by unsustainable demands in the average household because no-one is willing to say 'let's stop and think if we can afford it' or even 'no'. This is the crux of the matter. On Beyonce's basis any man saying 'no' is simply not listening. What is neglected entirely, is that as adults we can listen and yet still disagree with someone. I accept that people say 'no' sometimes on an irrational basis, but then if you think that you open up dialogue. The female attitude that every request/demand must be complied with or it simply proves that the message has not been heard is very unhealthy and helps wreck relationships. Relationships that succeed are a fine balance that needs constant work from both parties. If one side keeps simply demanding and will not accept any other opinion then it is as much fun as being on a see-saw with one side concreted to the ground.
Relationships are supposed to be about fun are they not? They may be hard work at times, but that hard work is put in so that you can get some fun out of it. If the man is simply fuelling a consumer furnace (or conversely the woman is simply fuelling an eating, sleeping one; I am not saying all men are blameless) then there will never be fun and you might as well not bother. Of course in our societies people may be dependent on others economically and so have fewer options, but basically if you are not having fun with your relationship, why bother? I will be interested to see what the forthcoming movie 'Revolutionary Road' about a couple in small town USA (played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio) triggers off on this issue.
Women, you have to accept that a man you enter into a relationship is a man, he is an adult and so can make choices. These choices may differ from yours but that does not make him necessarily selfish or deaf to what you are saying. Presenting the options is the basis for discussion, and dialogue and debate are the only ways modern day human interaction can prosper whether it is within your family or at work or on the road or in the supermarket or wherever. The problem is, that in contrast to my generation, people are not taught that 'you can't always get all you want', if you admit that these days you are seen somehow as a fool or weak, but it is in fact an eternal truth of humanity and a lot of dissatisfaction arises from not recognising it. Treat your man like a man and talk with him rather than at him. Most men struggle to give their partners everything they want but at times they cannot or disagree that it is the right thing. A different opinion is not a crime (of course US culture's attitude tends to view that differently too, which may be a root cause of a lot of this).
Now, there is one issue on which men do fall down and that is domestic chores. A lot of the statistics come from the USA but it does seem that in the past thirty years the amount of housework done by men has risen by only 15% and time spent with children has trebled. However, men still totally underperform in the household chores. Though women now make up 46% of the workforce in the UK (and about 53% of the total population, though they are far more numerous among the over-65s) they do an average of 3 hours housework per day compared to 1 hour 40 minutes by men. This does not include shopping and childcare. In Spain in 2005, the government introduced a law to compel men to do 50% of the chores in the house. In that country women do up to five times as much housework as men who in turn only spend 13 minutes per day with their children. Men with younger wives and from better educated and better paid jobs are far more likely to do housework than men from lesser paid jobs. When the man earns far more of the income than the woman he is also less likely to work in the home. To some extent this all cuts back to the long hours and low pay that many people are expected to tolerate, especially in the UK. However, it also returns us to the 1970s perspective that running a house is a job for which people should be paid by the state, especially if child rearing is involved. The internet age has helped and being able to order groceries online and shop 24 hours per day in superstores has brought some flexibility. Interestingly men reduce the amount of housework they do when they marry their partner (presumably they feel they have caught her and no longer need to impress her) and after children are born because additional work derived from child rearing is seen as purely the woman's job. Given the rise in women doing 'do-it-yourself' activities such as fixing and installing things, roles that were previously seen as exclusively male, the overall balance of what goes on in the house seems to be tipping even further back towards the women.
Now, many women make the mistake of setting up home with a man who has come straight from his parental home (36% of boys and 23% of girls do no housework while growing up which is a neglectful attitude from parents). It is far better to pick a man who has lived alone for a while. Of course if he lives in utter squalor then pass him by. However, most young men who live alone get themselves together sufficiently to vacuum clean, wash dishes and wash clothing not least so that their property is not a health hazard. Men who rent property have it checked, depending on the landlord/lady, once every 1-6 months so cannot let it get too bad or they will be evicted, something they usually try to avoid. Having found a man you want to live with, talk to him about domestic chores before you start living together. You may be in love with each other but you are also becoming housemates. This may be why better educated men do more housework as they have usually lived away from home (though this is declining in the UK) while at university and been compelled to do chores, often as part of a rota. Another good source of men who can do chores are the armed forces.
Too many women do not talk through these things when the moving in together is being discussed and instead somehow expect the man to know who is to do what. Of course, despite what women think, men are not mindreaders (nor are women) and then she gets frustrated. Do not accuse him of 'not listening' when in fact you have never raised the issue. Talking about washing and cleaning is not sexy, but it helps a relationship run more smoothly. Both US and UK researchers have concluded that women who see their man doing more housework feel they are being treated more fairly and are more likely to engage in sexual activity with that man. How hard is housework? It is boring yes, so put your ipod on or iron in front of your favourite DVD, then it is little different to if you were simply watching TV or listening to music. Also think it is liable to win you more sex too. For some light physical activity you get quite a lot of reward.
Successful, enduring, fun relationships often are founded upon hammering out quite mundane and tedious issues. There is no point starting assuming that the man is incapable of understanding what is needed, you might as well give up right away. Beyonce, labelling men as irredeemable every morning on my radio is not helping gender relationships. Let us have a hit song about a man and woman discussing what has to be done and then getting it on because they feel there is a balance, and above all discussion, not simply dictation, in their relationship. Let us have less 'If I Were A Boy' and more of McFadden & Whitehead's 'Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now' (1979): 'There's been so many things that have held us down/ But now it looks like things are finally comin' around/ I know we've got a long, long way to go/ And where we'll end up, I don't know/ But we won't let nothin' hold us back/ We're puttin' ourselves together, We're polishin' up our act, yeah./'
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
The Hazards Of Post-Feminism Going Awry
Well, I hope 2008 is going well for you. Having paid a visit to the local accident and emergency department of my local hospital this morning (my flatmate had headaches and limb paralysis which seemed like getting worse; fortunately the diagnosis was stress rather than concussion after to a bang on the head earlier this week - cooker hoods are a nightmare if you are over 5'8" (1.70m)) I have found many of the town's residents with food injuries and gashes from tripping over on the way home from celebrations, they were still processing the 02.00 intake at 08.00 and the security guards were rushed off their feet dealing with violent patients, one of the guards is starting 2008 with a broken arm courtesy of one of the patients. So, in terms of Britain's binge-drinking culture and its consequences, the local report is 'no change'. I do hope for improvement in life in the UK and across the World. There are loads of things that could be done simply in the UK to make life better. We could start with just taking a more relaxed attitude. Anger at the moment causes so many problems: car crashes, injuries, stress (especially for retail sector workers), if everyone just slowed down a bit and did not feel they had to keep on asserting themselves at every occasion, especially when driving, then the life of the UK would improve immediately (and the hospitals could deal with real illness not the self-inflicted kind) and traffic would flow better if you were not having to slow up every 10 minutes to get past another 'shunt' caused by impatience and anger. Sorry, I am beginning to sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury and his new year message.
My posting today might seem an odd one to start off with. I find the break from work gives me lots of time to think and finally seeming to have shaken off the writing block I have been suffering I have been working on fiction and hopefully sometime by the Spring will be able to post my latest steampunk story. Having just watched 'The Rocketeer' (1991) which is kind of post-steampunk but similar anachronistic invention story (and 'The Shadow in the North' a TV dramatisation of a Philip Pullman novel set in the 1880s and featuring a train-mounted, steam-powered [literally the steam pushing out the bullets] machine gun for policing Russia), I suppose you could term it 'bakelitepunk' (after the brown early plastic of the 1930s used for radios and other high-tech items of the era), I feel quite inspired. However, the break also leaves me time to think about other issues that interest me, such as UK society. It was also partly inspired by the hospital visit and the fact that the A&E (Accident & Emergency; formerly Casualty) department was filled with people who seem to embody many of the problems I see with the gender balance in the UK today.
I have written before about how men feel ourselves to be pretty obsolete in the present day, with an ever greater emphasis on communication, group work and language skills that women excel in rather than more assertive, active skills of the past that men tend to be stronger at (whilst acknowledging many individuals go against any supposed tendencies of their gender). I have also commented on the over-feminisation of girls and in turn of women, with the 'princess obsession' so prevalent in the UK, pushed hard by the retail sector. Today I am going to look at what I see, and I emphasise this is a personal view, as at the heart of many of some current social problems. One is increased aggressiveness predominantly by men and the sense that you cannot be a 'real man' unless you drive a big car very fast, and swear and punch anyone else (whether male or female) who dares slur (or you feel slurs) your reputation. The other is the converse increased submissiveness of women, the emphasis on feminine styles but also what is perceived as feminine behaviour drawing on attitudes of the past (the irony here is people point back to the 1950s and also to the Jane Austen era of the 1820s and of course in both times, despite the possibly more feminine garb, in fact at the time a lot of women worked hard, in tough circumstances and would perceive many of their counterparts of the 2000s as failing womankind).
As is commonly known feminism grew out of the late 1960s movements for greater equality such as in terms of race. It increased in influence in the 1970s, leading in the UK, and other industrialised countries to gender equality legislation aimed at evening out the pay discrepancy and the restriction on opportunities for women. A lot has been achieved in the UK but we are still not fully there yet: women still are likely to earn less than their male counterparts and are often under-represented in many professions (though we now produce 12% more female law graduates than male ones each year, there are still very few female judges and women are heavily under-represented among members of parliament). Feminism is less visible as a movement now, though women's groups remain, there has been a tendency to move to 'post-feminism'. To some extent post-feminism grew from women who found much of the feminist movement to be a little too 'raw' even ironically too masculine for them and they wished to recapture some of the aspects of femininity; the stereotype was wearing a dress rather than a pair of dungarees. Many also, wrongly felt that feminism predicated against heterosexual relationships. It is true than in the 1970s and even today some strong feminists felt that fraternising with men was fraternising with the 'enemy'. Of course parallel to the feminist movement was the movement for gay rights (and of course 'homosexual' does not come from 'love of men' in that form of 'homo' as in homo sapiens, it comes from the same root as homogenous, in other words it means 'love of the same', and so is contrasted with heterosexual in the way homogenous and heterogenous are contrasted - sorry, a grammar point that irritates me when people get it wrong, I am being very pedantic at present) and lesbians have straddled the two strands confusing the perceptions of the two movements in the minds of many people.
I first encountered post-feminism in the late 1980s when on a college course. Women were in the large majority in English literature courses at the institution and the bulk of them came from well-off middle class homes in the South of England. Their tutors were of the woman's movement generation and so their take on literature was informed by that. They thought such an approach would excite their students and had a rude awakening when the students went on strike demanding an end to the 'Marxist feminist' attitudes that they felt were being peddled to them and wanted a return to 'the proper study of literature'. (Of course being the 1980s with Thatcherism very strong anything which was more liberal than Margaret Thatcher's New Right attitudes was seen as 'Marxist'). This was women bringing the attitudes back to what they saw as proper position and outlook for women. A couple of years later I was startled when on a holiday with friends that I had to fight with the two women present to be allowed along with a male friend to cook for the group. The two women who were in their 20s and self-employed seemed to feel it was improper for a man to cook when women were present. I felt as if I had gone into some time warp, but in fact I was arriving in post-feminist Britain. It did not need men to undermine feminism, women were happy to do it for themselves. The mistake being made is that to put on a dress, wear make-up, enjoy weepy movies, or whatever does not mean having to give up your rights to be treated equally. Somehow many ordinary women seem to feel that to have one it is compulsory to have both. I can accept the feminist line that dresses and make-up can be seen as the trappings of submissiveness anyway (and I accept that some women, like some men enjoy being submissive in a sexual way, but that typically is based on consent with someone who will dominate, with get out clauses and there are equally very dominant women in that context), but then surely it is up to the woman wearing the dress and make-up not to let herself be perceived as automatically subscribing to a servile role.
Part of the problem was that this rather twisted post-feminism was twisted further by the British political scene. All regimes face a challenge, many like the Nazis and Italian Fascists, seek to put women into a subservient, in particular baby-producing role; infamously the Nazis referred to the 'three Ks' for German women: Kinder, Kirche, Kuche (i.e. children, church, kitchen) and yet these regimes always really needed female workers. As we know women increasingly provide more of the workforce than men, especially in an information-focused, service-sector and unskilled workplace. Both the Thatcher and the Blair regimes suffered the same dichotomy. As I have noted before, Blair's outlook was terribly wrapped up in the views of the authoritarian Vichy regime of France and its emphasis on 'family, work, nation'. Like Thatcher he wanted mothers to get out and work (at low wages predominantly) yet he also wanted (partly due to the Catholic influence on his policies) them to have more children. Thus the emphasis was on fewer single-parent families and more two-parent families, which it was somehow assumed would permit child care (which is often too expensive to be in the reach of the average mother) and so allow the mothers to work rather than be dependent on the state (which was a standard assumption from the Thatcher years that all single mothers were on state benefits whereas despite the high teenage birthrate in the UK the majority were divorced middle class women). More maternity and paternity leave was granted (and I am not saying that is at all a bad thing) but with all this came the assumption that women should be tied up with men and by implication put up with any bad behaviour from the men (who, as I will outline below, are actually failing far more than ever to grow up to be decent husbands and fathers). I remember a single-mother journalist writing that when she had been unemployed in the 1990s almost being told this explicitly by the job centre staff she spoke to.
The 1990s did see the burgeoning of 'chick lit' which did seem to straddle being feminine without giving up equality and the ability to assert oneself. If you look at 'Bridget Jones's Diary' by Helen Fielding (1996; based on a newspaper column from 1995), probably the bestselling example in the UK, you do see a woman looking for romance, but not at any cost. She dumps the men who mistreat her and even her 'hero' she remains sceptical of. She has her own circle of friends not dependent on a man and she has a career and ambitions to advance it. She strives for a mature relationship with her parents. None of this stops her liking romantic things and being vulnerable at times, to be that is not to give up all the strong points of her life. All of us are weak and vulnerable at times, it is not a monopoly of women, and if we try to pretend that we are not those things periodically then we are denying our humanity. Of course what makes this interesting is that 'Bridget Jones's Diary' was an unashamed 'remake' of 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen (1813) who is the goddess of the post-feminist movement, even though many of her heroines would kick the average post-feminist in 2008 up the bum and tell them to be stronger and go out there and get what they want, however constrained by society they might feel.
So, where has this twisted form of post-feminism left us? Increasingly women feel they need to be passive, even submissive to men, to be perceived properly in society. They lap up the consumer products which simply reinforce this, hence the shift to everything in pink which is the one female colour par excellence (too little purple which was the feminist colour). Fashions that sexualise women have been common but these days they are combined with logos which push the woman wearing them in the role of almost being perceived as a prostitute. A female friend of mine says she shudders when she sees women wearing the local 'Criminal' (a UK designer brand, I believe) across the backs of their jeans. Hair is long, earrings are huge, jeans are tight, skirts very short (this brings me back to the women in A&E this morning). The attempt to combine female sexualisation with some female emancipation came in the short-lived form of 'girl power' especially fostered by The Spice Girls in the 1990s; look at the current counterparts, The Sugarbabes (though they manage a little female empowerment at times), The Pussycat Dolls (just look at the name) and despite their name, Girls Aloud (of course, they are actually women). It might seem bizarre but The Spice Girls reuniting might actually be good for young women in Britain, at least each member had an identity (however manufactured) and they were not simply replicas of each other, all offering themselves up sexually. So the twisted post-feminism has put women back in a position of effectively sexual servants. I know this is occurring all across the Western world, but in Britain, where it is unrestrained by the religion of the USA and the common sense and maturity of the Netherlands, it is having the most severe effect. Girls rush to dress like their mothers and elder sisters with no time to explore different aspects of being female only that of a sexual 'product' (note all the adverts for 'make-over' kits of girls which are terribly unnerving). I know that teenage pregnancies in the UK are slowly falling, but we still have the highest level in Europe and I imagine the fall will bottom out or reverse if society continues to emphasise that a woman is only to be (I was going to say 'respected' but in fact it is really the reverse) seen as legitimate if she is sexually appealing (within the mainstream definition which is incredibly narrow) and making babies. Of course there is nothing wrong with being sexually appealing when you are an adult, or in having babies, it is just when society makes that the only seemingly acceptable option or excludes you.
So, the twisting of post-feminism has done a lot of damage to the status of (young) women in UK society and provides an excuse for those who still wish to discriminate against them in the workplace and use sexual politics to manipulate them (rape convictions and successful sexual harassment cases still remain the exception rather than commonplace). I will argue it has also damaged the role of men in society. It is easy to blame rap culture for a lot of this, but for the average teenage boy this is one of the two prime sources of his information about aspirations and also, importantly, how to behave in society (for pre-pubescent boys there is WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) full of over-muscled men simulating violence (which to many of the boys looks real), shouting, being aggressive and surrounded by nubile women who often they fight over; this is barbarism made entertainment and packaged for 11 year olds). The second place is the internet. My mother who grew up in the 1940s said that the way young men and women found out what to do in a relationship was by watching movies. They saw how couples kissed and held each other and would often replicate it, literally right there in the cinema or otherwise later. Of course the limited portrayals of the era meant that there were a lot of unanswered questions especially once you have got beyond the kissing and cuddling. However, importantly it also showed 'sexual' manners, how to treat a woman properly. Men who were violent to women in movies always came off badly and did not 'get the girl' ultimately.
When I was a teenager in the 1980s access to pornography was pretty difficult and usually amounted to stuff found round the back of the newsagents or filched from fathers or older brothers. Nowadays not only every time you log on to your email account are you being offered up the stuff it is so easy to find free pornographic videos in seconds. I am staggered by how much stuff is out there. In addition, its spread is immense. When I was a teenager, you saw generally soft porn of a woman posing naked, occasionally playing with herself. However, on the internet you can see women of all kinds performing the widest range of acts available and things like sado-masochism seem normal. It is interesting to note that recently 'The Guardian' reported that many young women dislike the fact that their boyfriends ejaculate in their faces without asking permission yet they feel they are not in a position to protest as it is seen as 'normal'. That is because online pornography shows pornographic sex which is not about the participants as sex should be, it is about the audience. I imagine very few women like being ejaculated on their faces, but of course someone watching a pornographic video wants to see the so-called 'money shot' to prove the sex is 'real'. It is as if I sit down and watch 'Die Hard 4.0' or 'Bullitt' or 'The French Connection' and then go out and drive that way because I think that driving full speed through a city crashing into cars is the 'normal' way to drive. Crucially, due to the post-feminism, these young women are doing nothing to contest their boyfriends' behaviour or seemingly even discuss sex in a mature way. They have been given a submissive role by society and feel obliged to stick to it, however much they might protest about the consequences to other women.
So sexual knowledge for men (less so for young women who tend to read more and so probably get a wider experience from novels) comes from apeing a performance rather than actuality or any authentic portrayal (no movie I know shows the farts, burps, itchy skin, sudden cramp, need to urinate, difficulty getting on condom, etc. that normal sex involves). They are given the green light to use this performance sex on women by, in particular, music videos which generally show women in a half-dressed state shaking their bodies around provocatively whilst the man strides around boasting how he is better than everyone else, is so rich, has a big car and so on. The women fall into his lap, never contest his right to use their bodies and so on. Now, female artists do often portray a stronger role for women in their videos even if dressed in stunning outfits that make them look incredibly sexy; notably Beyonce and Christine Aguillera among others have done songs contesting violence towards women and Jennifer Lopez has appeared in a movie on the theme. Interestingly, though they do not contest sexual submissiveness, (I am hoping that Pink will release 'Don't Cum In My Face Without Asking' in 2008; 'U + Ur Hand' came close in 2007). For some reason these individual songs do not penetrate so strongly as the 'lifestyle' videos of male performers.
The twisted post-feminism, however, does not only cause problems in the sexual intercourse sphere but also in other aspects of men's lives. To complement submissive women, men increasingly feel that they have to be aggressive. This is no way going back to the Jane Austen era, when at a time when life could be lost easily, manners and respect reined in male aggression, but to some far more primitive time and even then I doubt the average caveman sought out someone to beat up in a car park on Friday night as he knew he had to be in a fit state to get up and hunt the next morning and an injury could kill him; plus alcohol had not been invented. I see fathers with sons at primary school (pre-11 years old) actively encouraging them to be aggressive in their toys even in their play. I accept that boys need to be tough, we all do in the modern world, but we now have aggression for aggression's sake, not to defend your family or your land or your life, but because somehow if you are not angry and aggressive you are somehow not male. Just as for girls, to be seen these days as not feminine, even not a princess (with all the traits of demanding things and service not simply being feminine) is the worst accusation for boys it is even worse to be seen as not being a man. Hence we have rising numbers of boys carrying knives and stabbing people. I live in a suburban area and we have a stabbing every fortnight and someone being kicked to death or into hospital once per month; other parts of the UK have many more and have shootings too, increasingly of school-aged boys. Fatherhood in itself is becoming perverted into ensuring that your son can kick to pieces anyone he fancies taking on and that your daughter will be standing on the sidelines applauding ready to offer herself sexually to the victor. The battle is everywhere, fighting to get at the front of the queue and in particular driving to push everyone off the road to assert your identity as a man.
This is not masculinity, this is barbarism. Look at less developed societies. You do not see tribespeople in the Amazon basin kicking each other to death or stabbing each other just because one has run in front of the other. They know what life costs and that violence and aggression have their place and that we have to draw limits or otherwise their society collapses. Back in the 1990s I heard Eric Hobsbawm speak on 'Barbarism: A Users' Guide' and he spoke about the problems of Yugoslavia breaking up. It was a developed country which had firearms around but also a framework of norms about how one behaved with them and how you treated your neighbours and how men treated women too. Then the war began and rather than adhering to common decency all the brakes came off and the situation was far more dangerous than in less developed societies. You ended up with the mass raping, the death camps, the snipers firing at market queues. This is where a society which has fallen back to the survival of the fittest; male strong-female submissive culture. Unless in the UK we can address this unhealthy imbalance between men and women which is triggering off so many other unpleasant consequences, and see that men and women are different, but neither side should be forced, cajoled, bribed, bullied, bought off into filling that assigned role to the utmost, then there is nothing to stop even worse things happening.
My posting today might seem an odd one to start off with. I find the break from work gives me lots of time to think and finally seeming to have shaken off the writing block I have been suffering I have been working on fiction and hopefully sometime by the Spring will be able to post my latest steampunk story. Having just watched 'The Rocketeer' (1991) which is kind of post-steampunk but similar anachronistic invention story (and 'The Shadow in the North' a TV dramatisation of a Philip Pullman novel set in the 1880s and featuring a train-mounted, steam-powered [literally the steam pushing out the bullets] machine gun for policing Russia), I suppose you could term it 'bakelitepunk' (after the brown early plastic of the 1930s used for radios and other high-tech items of the era), I feel quite inspired. However, the break also leaves me time to think about other issues that interest me, such as UK society. It was also partly inspired by the hospital visit and the fact that the A&E (Accident & Emergency; formerly Casualty) department was filled with people who seem to embody many of the problems I see with the gender balance in the UK today.
I have written before about how men feel ourselves to be pretty obsolete in the present day, with an ever greater emphasis on communication, group work and language skills that women excel in rather than more assertive, active skills of the past that men tend to be stronger at (whilst acknowledging many individuals go against any supposed tendencies of their gender). I have also commented on the over-feminisation of girls and in turn of women, with the 'princess obsession' so prevalent in the UK, pushed hard by the retail sector. Today I am going to look at what I see, and I emphasise this is a personal view, as at the heart of many of some current social problems. One is increased aggressiveness predominantly by men and the sense that you cannot be a 'real man' unless you drive a big car very fast, and swear and punch anyone else (whether male or female) who dares slur (or you feel slurs) your reputation. The other is the converse increased submissiveness of women, the emphasis on feminine styles but also what is perceived as feminine behaviour drawing on attitudes of the past (the irony here is people point back to the 1950s and also to the Jane Austen era of the 1820s and of course in both times, despite the possibly more feminine garb, in fact at the time a lot of women worked hard, in tough circumstances and would perceive many of their counterparts of the 2000s as failing womankind).
As is commonly known feminism grew out of the late 1960s movements for greater equality such as in terms of race. It increased in influence in the 1970s, leading in the UK, and other industrialised countries to gender equality legislation aimed at evening out the pay discrepancy and the restriction on opportunities for women. A lot has been achieved in the UK but we are still not fully there yet: women still are likely to earn less than their male counterparts and are often under-represented in many professions (though we now produce 12% more female law graduates than male ones each year, there are still very few female judges and women are heavily under-represented among members of parliament). Feminism is less visible as a movement now, though women's groups remain, there has been a tendency to move to 'post-feminism'. To some extent post-feminism grew from women who found much of the feminist movement to be a little too 'raw' even ironically too masculine for them and they wished to recapture some of the aspects of femininity; the stereotype was wearing a dress rather than a pair of dungarees. Many also, wrongly felt that feminism predicated against heterosexual relationships. It is true than in the 1970s and even today some strong feminists felt that fraternising with men was fraternising with the 'enemy'. Of course parallel to the feminist movement was the movement for gay rights (and of course 'homosexual' does not come from 'love of men' in that form of 'homo' as in homo sapiens, it comes from the same root as homogenous, in other words it means 'love of the same', and so is contrasted with heterosexual in the way homogenous and heterogenous are contrasted - sorry, a grammar point that irritates me when people get it wrong, I am being very pedantic at present) and lesbians have straddled the two strands confusing the perceptions of the two movements in the minds of many people.
I first encountered post-feminism in the late 1980s when on a college course. Women were in the large majority in English literature courses at the institution and the bulk of them came from well-off middle class homes in the South of England. Their tutors were of the woman's movement generation and so their take on literature was informed by that. They thought such an approach would excite their students and had a rude awakening when the students went on strike demanding an end to the 'Marxist feminist' attitudes that they felt were being peddled to them and wanted a return to 'the proper study of literature'. (Of course being the 1980s with Thatcherism very strong anything which was more liberal than Margaret Thatcher's New Right attitudes was seen as 'Marxist'). This was women bringing the attitudes back to what they saw as proper position and outlook for women. A couple of years later I was startled when on a holiday with friends that I had to fight with the two women present to be allowed along with a male friend to cook for the group. The two women who were in their 20s and self-employed seemed to feel it was improper for a man to cook when women were present. I felt as if I had gone into some time warp, but in fact I was arriving in post-feminist Britain. It did not need men to undermine feminism, women were happy to do it for themselves. The mistake being made is that to put on a dress, wear make-up, enjoy weepy movies, or whatever does not mean having to give up your rights to be treated equally. Somehow many ordinary women seem to feel that to have one it is compulsory to have both. I can accept the feminist line that dresses and make-up can be seen as the trappings of submissiveness anyway (and I accept that some women, like some men enjoy being submissive in a sexual way, but that typically is based on consent with someone who will dominate, with get out clauses and there are equally very dominant women in that context), but then surely it is up to the woman wearing the dress and make-up not to let herself be perceived as automatically subscribing to a servile role.
Part of the problem was that this rather twisted post-feminism was twisted further by the British political scene. All regimes face a challenge, many like the Nazis and Italian Fascists, seek to put women into a subservient, in particular baby-producing role; infamously the Nazis referred to the 'three Ks' for German women: Kinder, Kirche, Kuche (i.e. children, church, kitchen) and yet these regimes always really needed female workers. As we know women increasingly provide more of the workforce than men, especially in an information-focused, service-sector and unskilled workplace. Both the Thatcher and the Blair regimes suffered the same dichotomy. As I have noted before, Blair's outlook was terribly wrapped up in the views of the authoritarian Vichy regime of France and its emphasis on 'family, work, nation'. Like Thatcher he wanted mothers to get out and work (at low wages predominantly) yet he also wanted (partly due to the Catholic influence on his policies) them to have more children. Thus the emphasis was on fewer single-parent families and more two-parent families, which it was somehow assumed would permit child care (which is often too expensive to be in the reach of the average mother) and so allow the mothers to work rather than be dependent on the state (which was a standard assumption from the Thatcher years that all single mothers were on state benefits whereas despite the high teenage birthrate in the UK the majority were divorced middle class women). More maternity and paternity leave was granted (and I am not saying that is at all a bad thing) but with all this came the assumption that women should be tied up with men and by implication put up with any bad behaviour from the men (who, as I will outline below, are actually failing far more than ever to grow up to be decent husbands and fathers). I remember a single-mother journalist writing that when she had been unemployed in the 1990s almost being told this explicitly by the job centre staff she spoke to.
The 1990s did see the burgeoning of 'chick lit' which did seem to straddle being feminine without giving up equality and the ability to assert oneself. If you look at 'Bridget Jones's Diary' by Helen Fielding (1996; based on a newspaper column from 1995), probably the bestselling example in the UK, you do see a woman looking for romance, but not at any cost. She dumps the men who mistreat her and even her 'hero' she remains sceptical of. She has her own circle of friends not dependent on a man and she has a career and ambitions to advance it. She strives for a mature relationship with her parents. None of this stops her liking romantic things and being vulnerable at times, to be that is not to give up all the strong points of her life. All of us are weak and vulnerable at times, it is not a monopoly of women, and if we try to pretend that we are not those things periodically then we are denying our humanity. Of course what makes this interesting is that 'Bridget Jones's Diary' was an unashamed 'remake' of 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen (1813) who is the goddess of the post-feminist movement, even though many of her heroines would kick the average post-feminist in 2008 up the bum and tell them to be stronger and go out there and get what they want, however constrained by society they might feel.
So, where has this twisted form of post-feminism left us? Increasingly women feel they need to be passive, even submissive to men, to be perceived properly in society. They lap up the consumer products which simply reinforce this, hence the shift to everything in pink which is the one female colour par excellence (too little purple which was the feminist colour). Fashions that sexualise women have been common but these days they are combined with logos which push the woman wearing them in the role of almost being perceived as a prostitute. A female friend of mine says she shudders when she sees women wearing the local 'Criminal' (a UK designer brand, I believe) across the backs of their jeans. Hair is long, earrings are huge, jeans are tight, skirts very short (this brings me back to the women in A&E this morning). The attempt to combine female sexualisation with some female emancipation came in the short-lived form of 'girl power' especially fostered by The Spice Girls in the 1990s; look at the current counterparts, The Sugarbabes (though they manage a little female empowerment at times), The Pussycat Dolls (just look at the name) and despite their name, Girls Aloud (of course, they are actually women). It might seem bizarre but The Spice Girls reuniting might actually be good for young women in Britain, at least each member had an identity (however manufactured) and they were not simply replicas of each other, all offering themselves up sexually. So the twisted post-feminism has put women back in a position of effectively sexual servants. I know this is occurring all across the Western world, but in Britain, where it is unrestrained by the religion of the USA and the common sense and maturity of the Netherlands, it is having the most severe effect. Girls rush to dress like their mothers and elder sisters with no time to explore different aspects of being female only that of a sexual 'product' (note all the adverts for 'make-over' kits of girls which are terribly unnerving). I know that teenage pregnancies in the UK are slowly falling, but we still have the highest level in Europe and I imagine the fall will bottom out or reverse if society continues to emphasise that a woman is only to be (I was going to say 'respected' but in fact it is really the reverse) seen as legitimate if she is sexually appealing (within the mainstream definition which is incredibly narrow) and making babies. Of course there is nothing wrong with being sexually appealing when you are an adult, or in having babies, it is just when society makes that the only seemingly acceptable option or excludes you.
So, the twisting of post-feminism has done a lot of damage to the status of (young) women in UK society and provides an excuse for those who still wish to discriminate against them in the workplace and use sexual politics to manipulate them (rape convictions and successful sexual harassment cases still remain the exception rather than commonplace). I will argue it has also damaged the role of men in society. It is easy to blame rap culture for a lot of this, but for the average teenage boy this is one of the two prime sources of his information about aspirations and also, importantly, how to behave in society (for pre-pubescent boys there is WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) full of over-muscled men simulating violence (which to many of the boys looks real), shouting, being aggressive and surrounded by nubile women who often they fight over; this is barbarism made entertainment and packaged for 11 year olds). The second place is the internet. My mother who grew up in the 1940s said that the way young men and women found out what to do in a relationship was by watching movies. They saw how couples kissed and held each other and would often replicate it, literally right there in the cinema or otherwise later. Of course the limited portrayals of the era meant that there were a lot of unanswered questions especially once you have got beyond the kissing and cuddling. However, importantly it also showed 'sexual' manners, how to treat a woman properly. Men who were violent to women in movies always came off badly and did not 'get the girl' ultimately.
When I was a teenager in the 1980s access to pornography was pretty difficult and usually amounted to stuff found round the back of the newsagents or filched from fathers or older brothers. Nowadays not only every time you log on to your email account are you being offered up the stuff it is so easy to find free pornographic videos in seconds. I am staggered by how much stuff is out there. In addition, its spread is immense. When I was a teenager, you saw generally soft porn of a woman posing naked, occasionally playing with herself. However, on the internet you can see women of all kinds performing the widest range of acts available and things like sado-masochism seem normal. It is interesting to note that recently 'The Guardian' reported that many young women dislike the fact that their boyfriends ejaculate in their faces without asking permission yet they feel they are not in a position to protest as it is seen as 'normal'. That is because online pornography shows pornographic sex which is not about the participants as sex should be, it is about the audience. I imagine very few women like being ejaculated on their faces, but of course someone watching a pornographic video wants to see the so-called 'money shot' to prove the sex is 'real'. It is as if I sit down and watch 'Die Hard 4.0' or 'Bullitt' or 'The French Connection' and then go out and drive that way because I think that driving full speed through a city crashing into cars is the 'normal' way to drive. Crucially, due to the post-feminism, these young women are doing nothing to contest their boyfriends' behaviour or seemingly even discuss sex in a mature way. They have been given a submissive role by society and feel obliged to stick to it, however much they might protest about the consequences to other women.
So sexual knowledge for men (less so for young women who tend to read more and so probably get a wider experience from novels) comes from apeing a performance rather than actuality or any authentic portrayal (no movie I know shows the farts, burps, itchy skin, sudden cramp, need to urinate, difficulty getting on condom, etc. that normal sex involves). They are given the green light to use this performance sex on women by, in particular, music videos which generally show women in a half-dressed state shaking their bodies around provocatively whilst the man strides around boasting how he is better than everyone else, is so rich, has a big car and so on. The women fall into his lap, never contest his right to use their bodies and so on. Now, female artists do often portray a stronger role for women in their videos even if dressed in stunning outfits that make them look incredibly sexy; notably Beyonce and Christine Aguillera among others have done songs contesting violence towards women and Jennifer Lopez has appeared in a movie on the theme. Interestingly, though they do not contest sexual submissiveness, (I am hoping that Pink will release 'Don't Cum In My Face Without Asking' in 2008; 'U + Ur Hand' came close in 2007). For some reason these individual songs do not penetrate so strongly as the 'lifestyle' videos of male performers.
The twisted post-feminism, however, does not only cause problems in the sexual intercourse sphere but also in other aspects of men's lives. To complement submissive women, men increasingly feel that they have to be aggressive. This is no way going back to the Jane Austen era, when at a time when life could be lost easily, manners and respect reined in male aggression, but to some far more primitive time and even then I doubt the average caveman sought out someone to beat up in a car park on Friday night as he knew he had to be in a fit state to get up and hunt the next morning and an injury could kill him; plus alcohol had not been invented. I see fathers with sons at primary school (pre-11 years old) actively encouraging them to be aggressive in their toys even in their play. I accept that boys need to be tough, we all do in the modern world, but we now have aggression for aggression's sake, not to defend your family or your land or your life, but because somehow if you are not angry and aggressive you are somehow not male. Just as for girls, to be seen these days as not feminine, even not a princess (with all the traits of demanding things and service not simply being feminine) is the worst accusation for boys it is even worse to be seen as not being a man. Hence we have rising numbers of boys carrying knives and stabbing people. I live in a suburban area and we have a stabbing every fortnight and someone being kicked to death or into hospital once per month; other parts of the UK have many more and have shootings too, increasingly of school-aged boys. Fatherhood in itself is becoming perverted into ensuring that your son can kick to pieces anyone he fancies taking on and that your daughter will be standing on the sidelines applauding ready to offer herself sexually to the victor. The battle is everywhere, fighting to get at the front of the queue and in particular driving to push everyone off the road to assert your identity as a man.
This is not masculinity, this is barbarism. Look at less developed societies. You do not see tribespeople in the Amazon basin kicking each other to death or stabbing each other just because one has run in front of the other. They know what life costs and that violence and aggression have their place and that we have to draw limits or otherwise their society collapses. Back in the 1990s I heard Eric Hobsbawm speak on 'Barbarism: A Users' Guide' and he spoke about the problems of Yugoslavia breaking up. It was a developed country which had firearms around but also a framework of norms about how one behaved with them and how you treated your neighbours and how men treated women too. Then the war began and rather than adhering to common decency all the brakes came off and the situation was far more dangerous than in less developed societies. You ended up with the mass raping, the death camps, the snipers firing at market queues. This is where a society which has fallen back to the survival of the fittest; male strong-female submissive culture. Unless in the UK we can address this unhealthy imbalance between men and women which is triggering off so many other unpleasant consequences, and see that men and women are different, but neither side should be forced, cajoled, bribed, bullied, bought off into filling that assigned role to the utmost, then there is nothing to stop even worse things happening.
Saturday, 24 November 2007
Men: Obsolete in the UK by 2030
A serious of recent media reports in the UK have been indicating how obsolete men are becoming in this country. The fact that there are more female than male workers in the country has been a fact of life since the 1970s, partly because women are far more likely to fill part-time and temporary jobs and to have more than one job. The 1970s saw the growth of the feminist movement in the Western world, and in the UK it had some benefits for women, with anti-gender discrimination legislation coming in the mid-1970s and added to incrementally over the past three decades. The latter phase under Blair owed more to his very pro-family agenda but did mean some additional benefits for mothers in terms of tax breaks and maternity (and paternity) leave, despite other contrary policies which tried to get even more women to work. Despite over thirty years of such legislation women on average in the UK earn 16% less than a male counterpart in the same role. However, a third of women over 40 are now the main earner in their household (partly this is due to the increase in single parent families as a result of a divorce rate of over 150,000 per year in the UK) and in 25% of all households a woman makes all of the decisions about the main purchases - i.e. house, car, holidays, furniture, electrical goods, etc.
So, given the gains, but the fact that we have not yet attained gender equality, you might ask on what basis I argue men will become obsolete by the time I retire. The key reason stems from education. Girls have been doing better at age 11 since the end of the Second World War, but this has now extended further down the age range and they are streaking ahead of boys from the minute they start school, these days on average at the age of 4. Interestingly, in South Africa the starting age is 7; in Sweden it is 6 and a later start actually benefits boys. The move to 'reception' classes for 3-4 year olds becoming increasingly common actually disadvantages boys even further. Boys and girls learn in different ways. Boys always tend to be more physically restless especially below the age of 11. All primary schools in the UK have a large majority of female teachers and many of them have no male teaching staff at all. This stems from the status of primary school teachers and men considering the profession worrying they are going to be accused of paedophilia. The balance is currently shifting backwards, but certainly in the 1990s and 2000s there has been a real shortage of male school teachers; consequently things such as reading books are seen as exclusively female activities. In addition, female teachers, unsurprisingly, despite all their training, think like women, which means an emphasis on communication, consensus and group activity rather than the activity-driven, often quite individualistic focus of boys' preferred forms of working. I am not saying boys should be taught by men and girls by women, but certainly boys would benefit from a range of staff in their primary schools.
As boys find it difficult to engage at the start of their schooling, they now particularly suffer in the very target-driven approach to schooling with exams at age 7, 11, 14 and so on (the test at 7 has been dropped in Scotland and Wales but not England where 83% of the UK population lives). I would be interested if any other government has issued targets for children under the age of 5, as the UK government has done. Doing poorly in such tests disheartens boys and so distances them from any interest in learning. Both sexes are increasingly attracted by the other, easy ways to success in the UK - crime and celebrity, but these stand out a little less for a girl who is doing well at school than they do for boys, who are likely to have a tendency to petty crime anyway (the two most common youth crimes are vandalism and shoplifting and girls engage in shoplifting as much as boys), especially that which involves violence or the destruction of property. So, from the moment they start school, boys are liable to be lagging behind girls, a position they never recover. The disheartening nature of failing every couple of years and the lack of a clear position in society must be a contributing factor in the high level of suicides among men and boys in the UK.
The National Curriculum was introduced to UK schools in 1992. It was the first time in British history that the government outlined what schools had to teach (bar religious education which was the only subject to have been made compulsory previously, in 1944), what skills they expected pupils to gain and issues they had to cover. This means that any person who is 20 years old or younger will have gone through this system for all of their school life and any person 31 or younger will have at least experienced it during their secondary education. The consequences are already apparent in the gender imbalance in universities. Again, I am not arguing it was wrong for the position of women to improve, but it seems now that they are pushing far ahead and we will soon see a gender imbalance which mirrors (i.e. in reverse) that of the 1950s. There are currently over 330,000 more female students at university than male students. The balance is 56% female to 44% male and the female share is increasing. Some subject areas such as engineering and certain science subjects are holding on to a male majority. However, other traditionally male subject areas such as medicine (to become a doctor) and law now have 6 women students for every 4 men and again this level is increasing. You may say, well, that is only university students, but in contrast to the early 1980s when only 6% of the population went to university the level is now not far off the government target of 50% of the population under 25. Of course, also, people with degrees tend to fill the best jobs. Men are more debt-averse than women, so again the move towards students (or their families) paying up to £3000 (€4290; US$6210) fees has just increased the tendency of men not to go to university and to seek work, adding to the fact that because of their lagging in study right throughout school they lack the grades to compete against women.
So it is clear that in the next decade women will be the majority in terms of graduates entering the labour market. This is why I said it will take 25-30 years for the impact to be felt, because in that time those men appointed in the preceding circumstances will retire and in many cases will be replaced by women. For example, female lawyers are still a minority but the force of numbers will change this in the next decades as it already has in senior positions in the police service. The female dominance at all levels of education will be reinforced. Women have already made great gains in the number of female doctors and this trend will increase or even accelerate as the current batch of students and their successors begin to qualify (the shift to a female majority in universities occurred in 2000, so with 5-year medical courses you will expect to see women from that majority position appearing in hospitals and surgeries now).
One factor that will accentuate the simple numerical pressures is that the skills women have are those now demanded in the workplace. Think how often you see the requirement for good communication and presentation skills, balancing conflicting demands and team working, just the skills that women excel at from the moment they start school. Things like leadership and manual skill (and in the technological age even the ability to fight) that men were seen as good at are no longer wanted. In the global marketplace, languages are also at a premium and this is an area in which women have always been stronger than men.
Socially men have long been redundant. Single-parent families, which generally means the mother and child(ren) is predominant in many areas of British society, no matter whether it is a working class or middle class context. Often these are multi-generational female-only families with grandmother/mother/daughter sharing childminding. Boys in such circumstances seem out of place and have no positive male role model, though their understanding of the female psyche may be strong. In these common family patterns men come, they produce a child, then contribute some money (or not) and they go again. The number of divorces which happen while the children are at primary school is very high and of course this signals to girls that men are not needed and in fact cause upset and argument. Men are not even needed sexually. In common with other European countries, notably Germany, sex toys are now available in high street shops, even department stores are branching out into them. Whilst male 'escorts' lag in number behind the female variety they are on the increase and it is clear that women in the 2010s will not have to bother with the pain of having a man around the house, they can simply hire one when they feel they need one. Of course they can buy sperm if they want to create a child without even having to have sexual intercourse with a man.
Men will clearly not disappear. As on average in the UK 1056 boys are born for every 1000 girls, they will be in the majority numerically. Women are balancing against their longer life expectancy with their increased consumption of alcohol and drugs, so exacerbating this discrepancy. The issue is what will these men do with themselves? They will be semi-skilled manual workers but lacking the physical and mental abilities to even gain the kind of skills that are needed for high paid, responsible jobs. They will have minimal role as fathers and certainly none as bread winners as even those who marry are likely to earn less than their wives and will probably only be kept on until the woman tires of them. Multiple female families with a couple of mothers (not living in a lesbian relationship, simply in an economic one) and their children may be the common pattern of homeowners in 2030. Men will be the cleaners and the shop assistants (they are already losing their status as bus and train drivers and the number of women truckers is rising quickly too). Boys will have little to aspire to except roles like these or the military or a life of unemployment. The UK will never get to the stage where families will want to abort male foetuses, but there is an issue of what to do with all these men with little hope.
One model is the USA. In the 1980s one saw the rise of the male movement trying to capture a role for men in a changing society. It came in step with the closure of much manufacturing, engineering and related employment in the USA (the UK too) and little success in these regions in creating replacement work. Women were the ones needed for the light engineering, service sector and ICT industries which appeared. The men's movement has never really penetrated the UK, possibly because the gender-specific unemployment was lost among the mass unemployment (4 million+) of the 1980s making it less apparent than in the USA. The future for British males is already becoming visible from the USA - prison. The USA currently has more than 1 in every 100 of its population in prison and the large majority are men. The UK is now at the limit of its prison spaces (around 80,000 compared to over 2.5 million in the USA; population 65 million - UK to 256 million USA), but it is clear that with its prison expansion programme these places are going to be filled by men with no other option bar suicide. By 2030 prison will become the main career route for any UK man who cannot stomach taking his own life or taking a McJob.
So, given the gains, but the fact that we have not yet attained gender equality, you might ask on what basis I argue men will become obsolete by the time I retire. The key reason stems from education. Girls have been doing better at age 11 since the end of the Second World War, but this has now extended further down the age range and they are streaking ahead of boys from the minute they start school, these days on average at the age of 4. Interestingly, in South Africa the starting age is 7; in Sweden it is 6 and a later start actually benefits boys. The move to 'reception' classes for 3-4 year olds becoming increasingly common actually disadvantages boys even further. Boys and girls learn in different ways. Boys always tend to be more physically restless especially below the age of 11. All primary schools in the UK have a large majority of female teachers and many of them have no male teaching staff at all. This stems from the status of primary school teachers and men considering the profession worrying they are going to be accused of paedophilia. The balance is currently shifting backwards, but certainly in the 1990s and 2000s there has been a real shortage of male school teachers; consequently things such as reading books are seen as exclusively female activities. In addition, female teachers, unsurprisingly, despite all their training, think like women, which means an emphasis on communication, consensus and group activity rather than the activity-driven, often quite individualistic focus of boys' preferred forms of working. I am not saying boys should be taught by men and girls by women, but certainly boys would benefit from a range of staff in their primary schools.
As boys find it difficult to engage at the start of their schooling, they now particularly suffer in the very target-driven approach to schooling with exams at age 7, 11, 14 and so on (the test at 7 has been dropped in Scotland and Wales but not England where 83% of the UK population lives). I would be interested if any other government has issued targets for children under the age of 5, as the UK government has done. Doing poorly in such tests disheartens boys and so distances them from any interest in learning. Both sexes are increasingly attracted by the other, easy ways to success in the UK - crime and celebrity, but these stand out a little less for a girl who is doing well at school than they do for boys, who are likely to have a tendency to petty crime anyway (the two most common youth crimes are vandalism and shoplifting and girls engage in shoplifting as much as boys), especially that which involves violence or the destruction of property. So, from the moment they start school, boys are liable to be lagging behind girls, a position they never recover. The disheartening nature of failing every couple of years and the lack of a clear position in society must be a contributing factor in the high level of suicides among men and boys in the UK.
The National Curriculum was introduced to UK schools in 1992. It was the first time in British history that the government outlined what schools had to teach (bar religious education which was the only subject to have been made compulsory previously, in 1944), what skills they expected pupils to gain and issues they had to cover. This means that any person who is 20 years old or younger will have gone through this system for all of their school life and any person 31 or younger will have at least experienced it during their secondary education. The consequences are already apparent in the gender imbalance in universities. Again, I am not arguing it was wrong for the position of women to improve, but it seems now that they are pushing far ahead and we will soon see a gender imbalance which mirrors (i.e. in reverse) that of the 1950s. There are currently over 330,000 more female students at university than male students. The balance is 56% female to 44% male and the female share is increasing. Some subject areas such as engineering and certain science subjects are holding on to a male majority. However, other traditionally male subject areas such as medicine (to become a doctor) and law now have 6 women students for every 4 men and again this level is increasing. You may say, well, that is only university students, but in contrast to the early 1980s when only 6% of the population went to university the level is now not far off the government target of 50% of the population under 25. Of course, also, people with degrees tend to fill the best jobs. Men are more debt-averse than women, so again the move towards students (or their families) paying up to £3000 (€4290; US$6210) fees has just increased the tendency of men not to go to university and to seek work, adding to the fact that because of their lagging in study right throughout school they lack the grades to compete against women.
So it is clear that in the next decade women will be the majority in terms of graduates entering the labour market. This is why I said it will take 25-30 years for the impact to be felt, because in that time those men appointed in the preceding circumstances will retire and in many cases will be replaced by women. For example, female lawyers are still a minority but the force of numbers will change this in the next decades as it already has in senior positions in the police service. The female dominance at all levels of education will be reinforced. Women have already made great gains in the number of female doctors and this trend will increase or even accelerate as the current batch of students and their successors begin to qualify (the shift to a female majority in universities occurred in 2000, so with 5-year medical courses you will expect to see women from that majority position appearing in hospitals and surgeries now).
One factor that will accentuate the simple numerical pressures is that the skills women have are those now demanded in the workplace. Think how often you see the requirement for good communication and presentation skills, balancing conflicting demands and team working, just the skills that women excel at from the moment they start school. Things like leadership and manual skill (and in the technological age even the ability to fight) that men were seen as good at are no longer wanted. In the global marketplace, languages are also at a premium and this is an area in which women have always been stronger than men.
Socially men have long been redundant. Single-parent families, which generally means the mother and child(ren) is predominant in many areas of British society, no matter whether it is a working class or middle class context. Often these are multi-generational female-only families with grandmother/mother/daughter sharing childminding. Boys in such circumstances seem out of place and have no positive male role model, though their understanding of the female psyche may be strong. In these common family patterns men come, they produce a child, then contribute some money (or not) and they go again. The number of divorces which happen while the children are at primary school is very high and of course this signals to girls that men are not needed and in fact cause upset and argument. Men are not even needed sexually. In common with other European countries, notably Germany, sex toys are now available in high street shops, even department stores are branching out into them. Whilst male 'escorts' lag in number behind the female variety they are on the increase and it is clear that women in the 2010s will not have to bother with the pain of having a man around the house, they can simply hire one when they feel they need one. Of course they can buy sperm if they want to create a child without even having to have sexual intercourse with a man.
Men will clearly not disappear. As on average in the UK 1056 boys are born for every 1000 girls, they will be in the majority numerically. Women are balancing against their longer life expectancy with their increased consumption of alcohol and drugs, so exacerbating this discrepancy. The issue is what will these men do with themselves? They will be semi-skilled manual workers but lacking the physical and mental abilities to even gain the kind of skills that are needed for high paid, responsible jobs. They will have minimal role as fathers and certainly none as bread winners as even those who marry are likely to earn less than their wives and will probably only be kept on until the woman tires of them. Multiple female families with a couple of mothers (not living in a lesbian relationship, simply in an economic one) and their children may be the common pattern of homeowners in 2030. Men will be the cleaners and the shop assistants (they are already losing their status as bus and train drivers and the number of women truckers is rising quickly too). Boys will have little to aspire to except roles like these or the military or a life of unemployment. The UK will never get to the stage where families will want to abort male foetuses, but there is an issue of what to do with all these men with little hope.
One model is the USA. In the 1980s one saw the rise of the male movement trying to capture a role for men in a changing society. It came in step with the closure of much manufacturing, engineering and related employment in the USA (the UK too) and little success in these regions in creating replacement work. Women were the ones needed for the light engineering, service sector and ICT industries which appeared. The men's movement has never really penetrated the UK, possibly because the gender-specific unemployment was lost among the mass unemployment (4 million+) of the 1980s making it less apparent than in the USA. The future for British males is already becoming visible from the USA - prison. The USA currently has more than 1 in every 100 of its population in prison and the large majority are men. The UK is now at the limit of its prison spaces (around 80,000 compared to over 2.5 million in the USA; population 65 million - UK to 256 million USA), but it is clear that with its prison expansion programme these places are going to be filled by men with no other option bar suicide. By 2030 prison will become the main career route for any UK man who cannot stomach taking his own life or taking a McJob.
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Drop the Princess Obsession
While I can claim no credit as a child psychologist, I did train as a teacher in my youth and was a volunteer at a primary school in the 2000s (there were no male teachers and boys were seeing reading as something only girls and women did, so a number of men from my company were invited to come and read one lunchtime a week to show that men read) and now I sometimes take my housemate's son to primary school when it is raining, so I can claim some knowledge of schoolchildren. However, my posting today, though starting there spreads out into the adult world too. If you live in the UK you probably have noticed how pink everything is these days. When I was a boy, girls would sometimes wear pink, but also lots of other colours too, especially denim blue. These days they often turn out in pink shoes, dresses, tops, trousers and coats and quite often are dropped off by mothers driving pink cars (I must say shocking pink cars, a couple of which are in my neighbourhood and another passes me on the road each morning are slightly alarming). Okay, so pink is in. However, it is part of wider trend, one you can see emblazoned across the back windows of many cars not only these pink ones: 'little princess on board'. Some even have little tiaras fitted to their seats. The supermarkets are filled with stationery and lunch boxes and drinks holders all echoing this theme. I know parents are now afraid to let their children out of their sight and in the UK we are growing up with a generation who can do very little for themselves and are frightened of the real world, but this princess obsession goes further. By default it is saying that her parents are king and queen. I know people should be proud of themselves, but we also need to be grounded. There is nothing wrong with girls pretending to be princesses, but what we are seeing is overload. Why cannot she sometimes pretend to be an astronaut or a doctor or a warrior? The pricness overload also says to girls, that the only legitimate way for a woman to be is, as my housemate's son calls it 'a girly girl'. This is a very male chauvinist attitude towards women and is not a healthy one for boys to adopt. It is as if the whole feminist campaign going back to the 1900s and certainly since the 1970s has been overturned and the only role model for girls that is presented by the media and retail sectors and collaborated in by parents is as a pampered princess unable to act for herself, having her every whim fulfilled and only valued for her prettiness, no other attribute.
Now, you might say, it is just a phase and girls grow out of it. However, this is where the difficulties creep in. I have seen some of these 'little' princesses grow into women and yet their attitudes remain juvenile. They expected to get whatever they want just as they did when they were 5. They find it difficult to leave home and even when they do, the demand support, both financial and practical, from their families. They run up huge credit card bills and getting into vast debt is a common problem in the UK today. In 2006 over 90,000 people filed for personal bankruptcy and many more are in difficulty, partly because their parents never said 'no' or 'you have to wait until Christmas' or 'save up for it' or 'get a paper-round and earn the money for it'. Instead they say 'yes and do you want the rest of those in the series?' This pandering to every demand does not only have financial implications but physical ones too, 23% of UK women (and 25% of UK men) are now obese. Much of this is motivated by the consumer industry as women given this mindset make far better consumers than slim women who save and analyse what they really want rather than constantly being driven by fashions.
I remember clearly one example of a woman who grew out of all this princess merchandise into being a spoilt adult, sitting in her flat with her family buzzing around her as she commanded them to move items to her new flat. In the hours this took, she contributed absolutely nothing to the effort. Her parents were on hand to praise how skilful she was in selecting which commands to throw out. I had been brought in as a friend of her fiance's and someone with removals experience and I remember abandoning the task after about three hours when she complained that we had not hefted all the expensive furniture fast enough (despite the difficulty of very narrow doorways) and I remembered I was not being paid for this job and insults cost in my book. Having married my friend she decided she also wanted a lover to live in the house and imported him from South America. You might say that my friend should have left but as you know from these posts, getting a house, getting out a mortgage is very difficult in the UK so he is locked into a house with his separated wife and her lover who lives rent free while my friend pays the mortgage. This is where the princess obsession ends up. You might say 'good on her', but I would say she is not a strong woman, she is a parasite.
So before you go out and buy another item of pink clothing or a sign saying 'princess on board' for your daughter, niece or grand-daughter, think twice. Think about doing something that will enable her to be an independent, strong woman of the future who can handle money and know the true value of things both financially and in human terms. Start now and buy her some dungarees or a football or a book on amphibians. Ultimately she might turn her nose at not having her princess-side pandered to still more, but she will lead a better life as a consequence.
Now, you might say, it is just a phase and girls grow out of it. However, this is where the difficulties creep in. I have seen some of these 'little' princesses grow into women and yet their attitudes remain juvenile. They expected to get whatever they want just as they did when they were 5. They find it difficult to leave home and even when they do, the demand support, both financial and practical, from their families. They run up huge credit card bills and getting into vast debt is a common problem in the UK today. In 2006 over 90,000 people filed for personal bankruptcy and many more are in difficulty, partly because their parents never said 'no' or 'you have to wait until Christmas' or 'save up for it' or 'get a paper-round and earn the money for it'. Instead they say 'yes and do you want the rest of those in the series?' This pandering to every demand does not only have financial implications but physical ones too, 23% of UK women (and 25% of UK men) are now obese. Much of this is motivated by the consumer industry as women given this mindset make far better consumers than slim women who save and analyse what they really want rather than constantly being driven by fashions.
I remember clearly one example of a woman who grew out of all this princess merchandise into being a spoilt adult, sitting in her flat with her family buzzing around her as she commanded them to move items to her new flat. In the hours this took, she contributed absolutely nothing to the effort. Her parents were on hand to praise how skilful she was in selecting which commands to throw out. I had been brought in as a friend of her fiance's and someone with removals experience and I remember abandoning the task after about three hours when she complained that we had not hefted all the expensive furniture fast enough (despite the difficulty of very narrow doorways) and I remembered I was not being paid for this job and insults cost in my book. Having married my friend she decided she also wanted a lover to live in the house and imported him from South America. You might say that my friend should have left but as you know from these posts, getting a house, getting out a mortgage is very difficult in the UK so he is locked into a house with his separated wife and her lover who lives rent free while my friend pays the mortgage. This is where the princess obsession ends up. You might say 'good on her', but I would say she is not a strong woman, she is a parasite.
So before you go out and buy another item of pink clothing or a sign saying 'princess on board' for your daughter, niece or grand-daughter, think twice. Think about doing something that will enable her to be an independent, strong woman of the future who can handle money and know the true value of things both financially and in human terms. Start now and buy her some dungarees or a football or a book on amphibians. Ultimately she might turn her nose at not having her princess-side pandered to still more, but she will lead a better life as a consequence.
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