     Xoogsade | Saturday, October 28, 2000 - 11:10 am
For a long time I suspected that the ladies have left us so far behind we might as well be dead and buried. So why do they keep saying "It is a man's world" when all the evidence points to the fact that they have already left us toiling the in the rear.
This article from the BBC homepage is presented for yuor consideration:
They used to say it’s a man’s world but, over the last couple of generations, men have found that the ground they thought secure has been shifting. At home men sometimes live with partners who earn more; as fathers they have been found emotionally wanting and even, with reproductive technology, redundant. At work men have been learning to cope with female bosses and finding their traditional male skills increasingly less employable; while at school boys are seen to be performing less successfully than girls.
It’s been tough for the boys. Survivors of the first wave of feminism feel undervalued and plagued by masculine disappointment, but has feminism really contributed to the emasculation of modern man? Over the next four weeks Men Now will examine how men are making sense of this new world as it seems that men everywhere are facing challenges to their old ideas about their place in the world - as fathers, sons, colleagues and partners.
Norman Mailer, that archetypal male writer who named his manhood ‘the avenger’, celebrated his 75th birthday a couple of years ago by anticipating a female-dominated world. In the future, he said, there would only be 100 surviving men whose function would be to act as ‘...slaves to a planet of women’.
Things may not quite turn out the way Mr Mailer anticipated, but modern woman is certainly ready to take over, should his prediction come true. In fact, it could be said that many of us are caught up in a rather energetic dress rehearsal. Girls in Europe are overhauling and overtaking boys at every stage of education and in every subject. The new jobs are about tapping keyboards and liaison with people and it turns out that women are better at these tasks than men.
If one of the crucial questions of the early 20th century was Freud’s ‘what do women want?’ then perhaps one of the crucial questions at the end is Mailer’s ‘what are men for?’
Susan Faludi, the feminist who produced the best seller Backlash, has recently come round to argue that men are the new oppressed gender in her latest work Stiffed – The Betrayal Of The Modern Man. She explains:
‘The more I consider what men have lost – a useful role in public life, a way of earning a decent and reliable living, appreciation in the home, respectful treatment in the culture – the more it seems that men of the late 20th century are falling into a status oddly similar to that of women at mid-century.’
Faludi continues:
‘The 50s housewife, stripped of her connection to a wider world and invited to fill the void with shopping and the ornamental display of her ultrafemininity, could be said to have morphed into the 90s man, stripped of his connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultra-masculinity.’
Former poster boy and icon of masculinity Sylvester Stallone concurs:
‘The guy with the 18-inch arm is, for the 90s, the woman with the triple-E cup.’
But the difficulty of being a man in the 1990s goes beyond locker-room strutting. Men lack power and authority and struggle to define their role in today’s society.
Rosalind Coward, the British author of Sacred Cows says:
‘After 20 years of fighting hard for women’s rights, it dawned on me that I felt more concerned about what was happening to boys and men. The old roles are gone and my son and his peers are thrashing around in a new world in which they feel demoralised, the second sex. Modern woman,’ she continues, ‘has an in built moral superiority from which men are excluded: she works, has her family, does everything in the home.’
Coward continues:
‘By dismissing men and living on their own, they are separating sex and love, giving men up as partners and just having sex with them in the way men have traditionally done, like relieving an itch. If there were real fertility problems in the future, I can’t see what would keep the sexes together.’
Feminism was always about women taking responsibility, about having choice. The crisis that men face today should also be about choice: they no longer need to be the monolithic creatures that patriarchy demanded. At the moment, struggling out from their shells, they may feel raw, tender and self-pitying, but this change – presented everywhere as apocalyptic, sperm-count reducing and suicide inducing, with men redundant in every way in a culture that celebrates and rewards work and fame – is also a challenge for them.
Men are tired of feeling like the only things they are good for are DIY and sex. The political and personal legacy of feminism has confused them; they feel trapped in a dichotomy of emotion and argument, as they embrace the daughters of the first-wave of feminism. Women enter relationships with intellectual and financial independence now which, in turn, provides men with a freedom many struggle to deal with.
Perhaps men need a ‘crisis’, an impassioned outburst of some sort that finally forces the rest of us to understand just how tough it is for men who are locked into the patriarchal role of provider. It seems it’s much tougher though, to be locked out of it. |
| Amadeou | Saturday, October 28, 2000 - 06:52 pm
xoogsade,
That was scary, antimidating and chilling to the bones,yet truth and damn reality---Amadeou.
Anon,
Please sis/bro, I AM DOWN ON MY KNEES, let it rain!. i mean stop born-to-dictate attitude. If you don't like the whole article then just skip it. i do agree with you long articles are boring but i gues it is *only* and *only* when you are having debate with someone and you are suppose to answer that person's arguement.but what is the point of complaining a plain article like this one other than being dictator?. if you don't like don't read it--just scan it or skip it.
It is just making me sick to see how we are lacking diversity of opinion and even diversity of taste.This social dictating which our culture advocates make us Uniform. many times when i read somalinet postings, i kind of think that many people are same person. And the reason is we became uniform. we act same, use same words, wear same shoes, wear shirts, wear skirts, eat same food, walk same, talk same, sleep same.And that is why we are whole Goddamned and borring society which ise lacking free thinking, variety of voices, styles and creativity.
Please sis/bro remember these somali words " waxa caynba cayn looga dhigey ha is cajibiyeene" which roughly means " variey is the spice of life". please have my apology of nailing you in advance.Believe me i don't have anything against you as i don't know you personally. It is only the idea of dictating to others that made me mad. again nothing personal. |
