Stand by Your Manhood (15 page)

It’s a mathematical fact there aren’t enough hours in the day for anyone, male or female, to work sixty-hour weeks, all year, raise children and run a house full-time. So the idea that it should be split down the middle to prove some political point might sound right-on, but – in reality – it’s the cause of so much unnecessary marital conflict.

Instead, let’s be realistic. Whether it’s an unwelcome truth or not, most new mothers like to nurture the baby they’ve been carrying for nine months, whilst fathers typically return to work and help bankroll it.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY OK.

Think about it: women carry life. That’s the ultimate. We can’t compete with that, so our purpose is to provide
for
that life. That’s our identity as fathers and what we bring to the table. It’s been this way since time immemorial because it’s cost-effective, practical and sensible. Recent legislative changes tried to rewrite this fact when the coalition brought in extended paternity leave in 2011, taking it beyond the standard two weeks, but it failed
miserably. Fewer than one in fifty used it. In fact, for various reasons, a quarter of new fathers took no leave at all.

THIS IS ALSO ABSOLUTELY OK IF IT’S WHAT EACH HOUSEHOLD WANTS.

Eventually, in every relationship, somebody will need to take the bulk of one responsibility, whilst the other manages the rest. Personally, I don’t care who assumes the traditional breadwinner role, but unless you can afford a nanny (or manny) to do it for you, you’ll need to face the prickly modern dilemma of parental roles.

Whatever the outcome, just remember: it’s a toss-up between you and your partner,
not
a coin-flip adjudicated by topless banshees from FEMEN. I say this because whenever working fathers are discussed in the media, the insinuation is that they don’t pull their weight.

Actually, the opposite is true: aside from proving we can multi-task just fine, research collated by the Fatherhood Institute shows British dads work the longest hours in Europe – an average of 46.9 hours per week, compared with 45.5 hours in Portugal, 41.5 hours in Germany and 40 hours in France. Around one in eight UK fathers work excessively long hours – 60 or more – whilst almost 40 per cent graft more than 48 hours each week, so – contrary to popular opinion – we don’t leave the house every morning to ride the Venga Bus and shag our secretaries.

In fact, we’re spending more time with our children than ever.

In the late 1990s, dads of children under five were devoting an average of two hours per day on child-related activities, compared to less than fifteen minutes in the mid-1970s.

Today, fathers’ time spent with their children currently accounts for one-third of total parental childcare, so there.

For decades therapists have listened to people blame their parents for their own mentalisms – because it’s easier to abdicate personal responsibility and blame a more powerful presence.

On a much bigger, more pernicious scale, that’s exactly what modern society does with men and theories of The Patriarchy™. But, hang on, does it even exist?

‘We have never really lived in a “patriarchy” the way feminists have historically defined it,’ says
VICE
magazine-featured activist Karen Straughan.

In other words, even if we do live in a patriarchy, it’s a gynocentric one that prioritises the care of women. After all, they may have fought for the vote, but men still have it taken away if they don’t sign up for military draft.

Just when you think you’ve heard the last truly absurd idea, another appears right before you – like the cognitive equivalent of a corrupt MP (or his equally corrupt wife).

Believe it or not, the latest brain fail is the campaign for all women’s prisons to be closed. Yep, you read that correctly. In 2007, Frances Crook, the director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, was quoted in
The Guardian
as saying: ‘For women who offend, prison simply doesn’t work. It is time to end the use of traditional prisons for women.’

Since then, the debate has continually rambled on – which is impressive considering it doesn’t actually have any merit and we’re all supposed to be equal.

Apparently, in her eyes, jailing violent offenders – you know, murderers, paedophiles and arsonists – is utterly counterproductive if they have a penchant for Meg Ryan films. Instead, female felons should be free-range, purely because they’re women. WHICH ISN’T REMOTELY SEXIST OR GENDER PROFILING, of course.

Personally, this theory alone might be worthy of a custodial sentence, not least because we already know it doesn’t work.

In the early 1970s London’s Holloway Prison was completely demolished and rebuilt after hardcore feminists asserted that women only commit crimes because of a) men and b) momentary mental illness – which could be cured with lots of hand-holding and group therapy.

So, at an estimated cost of £6 million, a new hospital-like prison was opened in 1977 to lead the future of correctional reform for female offenders. Except it was all bollocks and – forty years on – there are more Holloway inmates than ever and the building is a dump. Awkward.

Yes, it’s very unfortunate that people end up in jail, but they’re generally in there for a reason. Besides, these institutions make our lives better by keeping scary people off the streets, including – at one point – Martha Stewart, which further proves my point. Have you seen the American version of
The Apprentice?
She’s terrifying.

Besides, without women’s prisons we wouldn’t have
Orange Is the New Black
– which would be a shame. OK, maybe I’m not selling this, but what I am saying is: prisons are democratic. Nobody is above the law. Not by class, race or sex. That’s the whole point.

More pertinently, what exactly are these campaigners worrying about? Few women are jailed anyway – unlike men. Last October, during a House of Commons debate on the topic of female sentencing, MP Philip Davies
delivered a rapid-fire critique of the way UK courts frequently go easy on women.

A transcript of the debate, which can be found online at parliament.uk, is fourteen pages long and lines up false assumptions like beer cans on a fence, which he shoots down – bang! – with fact.

Specifically, he found that more men were sentenced to immediate custody in every offence group, in every court, in every part of the country – for
exactly
the same crimes. The figures, compiled and verified by the Home Office, show that 34.7 per cent of male offenders were sentenced to immediate custody for offences involving violence against a person compared to only 16.9 per cent of women.

Similarly 44.9 per cent of men went straight to prison for committing a burglary compared to 26.6 per cent of women, as well as 61.7 per cent of male robbers compared to just 37.7 per cent of female robbers.

One of the excuses for this is that women are so controlled by men they only break the law because we tell them to – a bit like ASBO Stepford Wives. Not only is this seriously undermining a woman’s brain power and autonomy, but – if it were true – we’d also be saying that men are responsible for all the terrible things in the world, which can’t be true when you consider the Falklands War,
Loose Women
and Mumsnet.

All equally devastating, all led by women. Enough said.

Who knows what happened in that lift? No, seriously, who knows? I want the details. Now.

Not just to satisfy my morbid curiosity, but so I can write a huge take-down piece on Solange Knowles, who clearly still hasn’t understood what she did wrong.

It’s perhaps ironic that Beyoncé’s little sister can’t score a hit in the charts, but can on her brother-in-law – then again, he was an easy target, being both male and in an enclosed space. Fortunately, if her music career does continue to flounder, at least she has a future in comedy, because, apparently, the whole incident was H-I-L-A-R-I-O-U-S!

Camilla Long, journalist at
The Times,
wrote on Twitter: ‘HA HA HA. I love the way he grabs her foot, as if that’s somehow going to power things down.’ Meanwhile, Caitlin Moran added: ‘I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS VIDEO … Her shoe comes off in his groin. She’s going for it.’

I check myself over and – no, sorry – still not laughing.

Perhaps
The Observer
’s Barbara Ellen will show me the light. She’s always fun. ‘It’s important to note that what happened in the lift was
not
domestic violence,’ she asserts unconvincingly. Not least because a) that’s exactly how she defined Charles Saatchi grabbing Nigella Lawson’s
neck and b) the Home Office themselves describe it as: ‘Any incident or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse (psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional) between adults who are or have been intimate partners or are family members, regardless of gender or sexuality.’

Oh. But I have faith. With a Jerry Maguire-type voice in my head I think, ‘Come on Barbara. Show. Me. The. FUNNY!’ and read on. ‘Some females might have periods in their life when they get “slap-happy”, primarily when socialising, maybe when attention-seeking, usually when drunk (guilty!),’ she continues.

No, still not laughing. Instead, my instinct is to close all the windows in my house and scream very loudly into a cushion that Barbara Ellen is the c-word, but I refrain: purely because I doubt she has the depth or the warmth.

What I do decide would be more productive is to detail precisely why there’s no punchline – ever – in men being their partner’s punchbag. Especially when up-to-date, verified numbers from the Office for National Statistics, courtesy of charity Mankind, show that:

• 38 per cent of domestic abuse victims are male: for every five victims, three will be women, two will be men.
  
• More married men suffered from partner abuse in 2012/13 than married women.
  
• Of those, more men suffered from severe force than women.
  
• 21 per cent of men and 21 per cent of women suffered three or more incidents of partner abuse in 2012/13.
  

To be fair, it’s not just Caitlin, Camilla and Babs who promulgate this attitude: it’s endemic. When footage of the infamous Met Ball assault leaked, the internet was flooded with memes making light of the matter, each compiled on major news sites around the world as light entertainment, when actually it was just offensive. Especially when we consider that it’s long been known that men are almost equal victims of domestic violence and any difference in physical strength between men and women can easily be neutralised with either a weapon or the element of surprise.

Maybe Erin Pizzey was correct when, during an interview in her London home about the academic and industry-wide deceit that has long gone on around domestic violence, she told me: ‘This is a huge, million-pound industry and those women who control it are not willing to share it.’

Then again, maybe I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps I’m just suffering a severe sense-of-humour failure and need to lighten up. You know, see the funny side. To
check this, I watch the infamous, grainy footage online and concur that, yep – sorry gentlemen – the girls were right about this one. It turns out the entire incident was a laugh-out-loud scream.

Just like when Chris Brown hit Rihanna, right?

Along with ‘man up’ or ‘grow a pair’, the term ‘man flu’ is officially our enemy in a cold war.

Sure, it’s just a lark which happened to raise one forced chuckle, once, ten years ago, but now it’s becoming a standard seasonal misery.

Firstly, it’s not funny. Secondly, and more importantly, people who use it aren’t laughing
with
us – they’re laughing
at
us. It’s the snide suggestion that men are big babies for feeling the physical effects of a virus which might make carrying 200lb of muscle and fat a bit trickier. And, according to experts, it does.

Neuroscientists have proved we suffer more acute forms of cold and flu than women because of our preoptic nucleus and extra temperature receptors in the brain, or something.

Besides, it’s not man flu. It’s not even real influenza. What you have is a cold.

Seriously, I respect anyone who works hard and is solvent, but what do these people expect – a medal? For being self-sufficient? THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE INDEPENDENT. FOREVER.

It’s called adulthood.

Are you a fictional character? No. Are you a male human being aged eighteen or over? Yes. Congratulations, you’re a real man.

Never a cheery subject, war gets even grimmer when you realise it almost completely skipped the equality drive.

Hillary Clinton once said – remarkably, with a straight face – that women have ‘always been the primary victims of war’, not the men who get their legs blown off on the battlefield in Iraq. Or Libya. Or Sudan.

‘Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat,’ she continued. ‘Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.’

Er, with all due respect, Hillary, this does not a primary victim maketh.

Indeed, she has a point that everybody is affected by conflict in one way or another, but let’s keep it real here: it’s men who bear the brunt of warfare, both in action and in administration.

Despite the slew of equality legislation which has passed in recent years, American men are still forced – by law – to register for military conscription or face punishment, whilst women are not. Here in Britain the debate on whether females should serve on the front line also persists, even though I’m not sure what there is to discuss. We know women are equal to men and that a grenade is going to hurt no matter who throws it.

One argument that’s regularly presented is that women shouldn’t serve because they might have children – or, at some point in the future, go on to have children. I sympathise. But, then again, I tend to think anyone dying for somebody else’s war is unfortunate, especially parents, so surely the solution is simply to draft both men and women on the condition they’re
childless. Currently, Norway is the only European country to agree this is fair.

This aside, men frankly deserve a break. We’ve been at it since about 3000 BC and it’s still going on. OK, a lot of it was started by men, but only to protect the rest of the world from a greater threat. Veterans didn’t sign up because the trenches looked like those log cabins in Centre Parcs. They had no choice. Plus, women used to give young lads a white feather as a symbol of cowardice if they hadn’t ‘done their duty’ and been shipped off. Think slut-shaming, but in reverse – and with death as the alternative.

That said, we don’t help ourselves. Men everywhere still have this weird instinct to be chivalrous about war. Our steeped-in-instinct hearts haven’t caught up with our modernised brains. When singer Bryan Adams diverted from pop into photography and made a coffee-table book called
Wounded: The Legacy of War,
he held a launch at the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Featuring a number of disabled soldiers, it definitely wasn’t bedtime reading – in fact, it was in-your-face, distressing, naked combat reality. Some of the featured soldiers had legs missing, others arms blown off. One was blinded when shrapnel from an explosion ripped through his eyelids, whilst another suffered head-to-toe burns so severe he was left unrecognisable to friends and family.

All of them were present at the party, which it made it very emotionally charged. At one point I had to leave the room when I thanked a veteran – Sergeant Rick Clement, 1st Battalion Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment – for his service. He was just thirty years old when he lost both legs in Afghanistan, where he was on a two-pronged mission: first, to disrupt the Taliban from their training and, secondly, to help local communities with teaching and education.

‘It was a normal morning and we were going out on patrol,’ he recounts in the book.

His story is gut-wrenching. Just like all the other men featured in the book. And, with the exception of one brave woman, it’s exactly that: all men. Just like the Great War which saw TEN MILLION MEN die (yet the recent BBC coverage of the 100-year anniversary devoted countless time to ‘women’s contribution’). However, when I ask Bryan what he thought of it all – the loss, the bravery, the ratio of men to women and whether this would ever change – he didn’t have the balls to admit that, even in terms of the injured and fallen, war is primarily a major, ballistic men’s issue.

It’s. A. Fact.

Yes, ideally there would be no war, and, yes, there are women who suffer and contribute invaluably, and, yes, it’s mainly men with bad ideas who start wars in the first place – but the main victims have historically been – and largely remain – young, innocent lads.

The same guys who are the worst-performing demographic in UK schools. Half of these lads, who are constantly told they’re privileged despite not actually having anything, aren’t turning down managerial jobs at Barclays in favour of signing up. They’re choosing it because their only other option is a ‘career’ with a tabard in a supermarket.

And, let’s be honest, how many men get laid saying they work in ASDA?