In the current debate and indeed concern about men and boys in western societies most male commentators are keen to avoid blaming women – in contrast to the Andrew Tate’s of this world – insisting that we can have gender equality and men can thrive too.
But what if the recent questioning of men’s role in society and their reported unease and confusion has got something to do with women’s progress? Women have been taking their place in the public world that used to be the sole preserve of men and men are being asked to move over and give up some of their power. And perhaps consciously or unconsciously they don’t like it and feel threatened – that would be perfectly understandable. Since time began men have dominated societies by oppressing women and preventing opportunities for them – much of it veiled to appear the natural order of things. The past one hundred years has seen much of this dominance begin to unravel in the West. It is a very different story in other parts of the world where patriarchal hold over societies is still very strong.
It is important to locate what is happening today in gender relations in some kind of historical and social context. Someone who attempted to do this twenty five years ago was the psychiatrist and broadcaster Dr Anthony Clare who sadly died in 2007. He was famous for his radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair.
I came across his book, “On Men: Masculinity in Crisis’ the other day quite by chance and decided to read it. He sets out the topic he examines in the book like this:
“Now the whole issue of men – the point of them, their purpose, their value, their justification – is a matter for public debate”
I was particularly interested to see whether Dr Clare’s analysis had stood the test of time and I think that current commentators on men and masculinity would find a lot of useful information here.
Dr Clare had the advantage of writing at a time when the huge social change that was women gaining footholds in the public sphere had really begun in earnest. And he maintained that it was this shift of women from the private to public realm that had caused men to founder.
What he noted and today’s commentators fail to do is that women have made these gains through their own struggles. I cannot think of any freedoms won by women over the last one hundred years that haven’t been hard fought for, and then legislated for.
“But phallic man, authoritative, dominant assertive – man in control not merely of himself but of woman – is starting to die, and now the question is whether a new man will emerge phonic-like in his place or whether man himself will become redundant.” (Clare 2000)
We don’t hear quite so much of the ‘new man’ as we did twenty odd years ago. What we are hearing now is that a lot of men aren’t very happy with the status quo and require some kind of support.
Women have moved into the public sphere, gaining positions in most professions, workplaces and politics and are better educated and more economically independent than ever before. But instead of women’s educational achievements being praised by men, it is very often positioned as a problem for men,,, there must be something wrong with the curriculum which has been declared as too feminised, boys are failing, girls are outstripping them, there aren’t enough male teachers. They aren’t enough male role models… I find this one quite puzzling as men are still at the top of almost all our political and business institutions. Why aren’t they role models?
Decades ago the writing was on the wall for the type of workforce that was going to be needed in the West. We moved from being an industrial economy to a service economy where soft skills are more in demand. If men have failed to learn them whose fault is that? A quick glance at other more highly prized sectors of work, like tech, hedge funds and private equity will tell a different story – women there are few on the ground. And we know that AI is highly dominated by men so women are left behind there.
Perhaps we can concede that to a certain extent men have lost their hold on women and therefore some of their power. Some would say that men like colonists don’t like seeing their empire crumble – but Clare points out that it is hardly crumbling. Men still occupy the vast majority positions of power throughout the world, The colonists he says are very much still in command. And that is still true twenty five years later.
The changing economic and social landscape resulted in men being asked to improve their emotional skills, demanded by the workplace as well as by women, their partners. Five years before Dr Clare’s book Daniel Goleman wrote a game changing book called Emotional Intelligence. Without specifically stating it this book was aimed at men in management.
Here we had emotional skills, expected from women ‘naturally’ and often unacknowledged and therefore unrewarded (The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild is a brilliant analysis of this) packaged up as a management skill to be learned via training.
This was difficult territory. Emotion in the workplace had been actively discouraged for decades with women often being considered ‘too emotional’ for a senior role. But empathy was now a requirement of good management, particularly as the workforce was now made up of so many different types of people. Men were in a bit of a bind as they were/are being asked to embrace something that previously they have scorned.
Clare doesn’t just just address the problem of men and masculinity through the lens of social roles.
He tackles the problem of male violence (and acknowledges men’s mental health, although this has emerged as a public issue in more recent years).
“Throughout the world developed and developing, antisocial behaviour is essential male. Yet for all their behaving badly, they do not seem any happier.” (Clare)
Clare even takes a stab at trying to understand why men have hated women in such numbers in every country throughout history. It is this misogyny, which informs all feminism that men, even decent men find hard to acknowledge. But they must. The evidence is there. Violence towards women is still unacceptably high in western societies too. Clare also discusses male violence, sexual violence, rape, prostitution pornography … all the ways in which men oppress women and to use a de Beauvoir phrase ‘second sex’ them.
On looking at the reasons for male violence towards women Clare says “it is at one and the same time a demonstration of how that power has failed and how violence is the ultimate resource available to men who wish to control and dominate women!’
And he insists that any theory which attempts to explain male violence against women needs to take account of misogyny in its most foul and lethal form.
Clare and many second wave feminists believe that the root of misogyny is that men fear women. They are born from women’s bodies, and depended on them for several years. They see women’s creative role in procreation and that apart from conception women have little need for men to bring new life into the world.
“Women represent everything that men do not have – their rootedness in the realities of life, creation” ( Clare 2000)
Fear and even envy led to the need to control and dominate (Women’s Creation by Elizabeth Fisher)
But for several decades now that dominance has been challenged.
Few men today can talk about this – especially with other men. It doesn’t mean that all men today feel this way, of course not, but men must discuss explanations of their historical control of women.
Since the publication of Dr Clare’s book, the march to increase female presence in public life has for the most part continued. Whilst women have made great inroads into public sphere, men have not been so keen to do the same into the private sphere of home and family.
Their lack of presence in female dominated sectors is presented as a puzzling problem that can be solved by some encouragement in the same way as women were encouraged into STEM topics. But the two situations couldn’t be more different. Women were responding to historical barriers, men have had no such barriers apart from the fact that certain sectors have always been dominated by women. And as such they are not valued, the pay is poor. Kat Banyard in her book, The Equality Illusion notes that women are concentrated in the 5 C’s: cleaning, caring, clerical, cashiering and catering. Many of these jobs are considered ‘women’s work’ i.e. perhaps work they traditionally may have done in the home and for which they are thought more suitable.
Indeed this video clip of a discussion about how hard it is to bring up a boy today shows interviewer Peter Crouch laughing when Russell Kane asks how could he could possibly ask his son to be a nurse or a primary school teacher – as if the very thought of it was absurd. This tells you everything you need to know about how women’s caring role in and outside the workplace is trivialised and goes unrewarded
Have men stopped and thought about the social changes and their own changing role in the way Clare hoped? No,not really. The recent concern over men’s health and well-being particularly emotional and mental health is to be welcomed. But their neglect of both is nothing new. What is new is the certainty over their role.
These are difficult topics. Fifteen years ago I trialled a workshop on gender differences and power but it didn’t go down well. If I stuck to stereotypes and our bias that was ok but bringing in power made both the men and women in the room uncomfortable and defensive – particularly the men.
One can read the reluctance to engage with patriarchal history, feminism and women’s history as evidence of a lack of respect for women or perhaps it is guilt. Young women themselves do not know their history as it isn’t taught in schools. What I took from Dr Clare’s book is that any discussion of masculinity, men, men’s social roles, men’s emotional wellbeing etc. has to include some history of relations between men and women over the past century as well as the continuing sexual violence and sexualisation of women.