Stand by Your Manhood (16 page)
Read Stand by Your Manhood Online
Authors: Peter Lloyd
Tags: #Reference, #Personal & Practical Guides, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Men's Studies
For years, men have been guilt-tripped over a gender pay gap that apparently sees women lose thousands of pounds in a salary disparity.
The great news? According to experts who actually understand it, it simply isn’t true.
I know, I know – that’s tricky to comprehend. A bit like when somebody first tells you about infinity. But stick with it because the claim has been debunked by some of the most world-renowned economists, including Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, both Economics Professors at Harvard University, not to mention boy-bashing Hanna Roisin (!) who all similarly rejected it on the basis that its calculation is socially and mathematically flawed.
‘The wage gap myth has been repeatedly discredited but it will not die,’ says Christina Hoff-Somers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and presenter of YouTube’s ‘The Factual Feminist’. ‘The 23 per cent gap is the difference between
average
earnings
for
all
men and
all
women, but it does NOT take into account differences in occupation, expertise, job tenure and hours worked. When it does, the so-called wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.’
Essentially, this means a woman who works as a primary school teacher isn’t going to be paid the same as a man who works as a brain surgeon. WHICH IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. This gap isn’t about black-and-white institutional bias based on gender, but category, profession and salaries structured on skill, difficulty and reward.
It also means that you’ve been lied to for decades.
It’s all down to life decisions. Young men at university tend to graduate in the top ten most lucrative subjects, whereas women populate the least profitable – social work or primary school teaching. All the evidence suggests that, although women have the talents for engineering and computer science, their interests tend to lie elsewhere. To say these women are helplessly enthralled into sexist stereotypes or manipulated into their life choices is divorced from reality – and insulting. If a woman wants to be a teacher, more power to her.
That’s not to say there still isn’t anecdotal evidence of it, of course – there are certainly some existing cases – but, ultimately, the issue isn’t real, so please stop
believing it so faithfully. Many women work fewer hours than men. Many choose comfortable, low-paying jobs rather than strenuous, dangerous and life-threatening ones. These naturally bring higher pay for men, but – according to the Office for National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health – also put male workplace fatalities at 94 per cent of the total.
Besides, it’s not always to the disadvantage of women. Ever seen Wimbledon? Men and women historically got paid different prize sums because they ultimately played for different periods of time: women less, men more. Now, women get exactly the same prize money as men – but aren’t asked to do the same work, which technically means they earn more per hour.
‘I’ve long argued from looking at UK pay figures that what we have is not a gender-based pay gap at all, but a motherhood one,’ says financial expert Tim Worstall.
Lesbians on average earn more than men, as do
never-married
childless women, but what ‘gap’ there is opens up around the age of thirty, which is also the average age of primagravidae – a woman’s first pregnancy. It was exactly my analysis of the problem that led to the introduction of shared parental leave in the UK. I can even introduce you to the political activist I convinced and the process by which it went from an idea to being on the law books.
Either way, it’s women – not men – who get to spend the majority of money that’s earned by households, which means consumption inequality runs entirely in women’s favour, so the issue is dead and gone.
In other words, with the exception of some real-but-rare cases on both sides, the pay gap is just spin, which is why it’s important to remember exactly where these messages originate from. Do they stem from an independent financial body – or a women’s society that needs to keep feminism relevant to justify their existence?
‘The basic proof it’s not all due to some evil patriarchy is that if businesses actually could pay women 77 cents on the dollar for the same work, they’d just hire women. There would be no reason to ever hire men, but that clearly isn’t what’s happening,’ says Isaac Cohen,
Forbes
journalist. ‘Businesses really, really want women. It’s great PR.’
Yep, according to the gender police, ‘Gamergate’ is the latest grievance against us, with claims the industry is inherently biased and fosters sexism.
This is despite the fact many computer games are made, and consumed, by women. So what’s the reality?
‘Modern feminists claim women are pigeon-holed into clichés which objectify them, but this an entirely negative, subjective interpretation,’ says online gaming guru George ‘Maddox’ Ouzounian.
These people have a laser-focus on whether women are treated like decoration or sexual objects in video games, but they ignore how men are maimed and slaughtered. In classic side-scrolling action games of the late ’80s, for example, such as Contra and Commando, the player kills male soldiers almost exclusively. Men are stabbed, shot with machine guns, lasers, flame throwers, grenades etc. at such an astonishing rate, it quite literally makes them expendable.
In Super Mario Bros none of the characters have any free agency, least of all Mario, who’s literally being controlled by players all around the world – both male and female. Mario has no free will and you can kill him over and over again if you want to. Does that dehumanise Mario? And what does it even mean to humanise a fictional object like Mario? Does it matter? Does it have a real-world impact? If so, how large of a contribution to this impact do these games have? And what evidence is there for this impact? These questions aren’t explored by feminists, which makes their criticism hollow at best, and disingenuous at worst.
Agreed. So, if male characters also get a rough ride, why are objectors causing such a stink?
‘It seems to be about relevance,’ he adds.
First-and second-wave feminism was so successful that it largely rendered the modern movement and its acolytes irrelevant.
Professors, authors and social critics feel the need to surface so-called ‘hidden’ sexism in the media we consume to make a case for their existence. Many people have made a good living from gender theory, and they may feel that their jobs are threatened.
The modern feminism movement is an amalgam of all three, but frustratingly, there is no consensus among them over what women should or shouldn’t do, how they should or shouldn’t be represented, and whether or not a perceived threat is indeed bad for women or just that: a perception held by a minority of women.
Oh, where to begin on this one!
First up, quotas. Vince Cable may have recently declared them tantamount to sexual discrimination
– and he’s right – but, actually, I quite like the idea. Then again, I also think they should be applied consistently and equally across the board. Not just in boardrooms where you get nice pay-offs and lots of power, but also on battlefields and oil rigs, coal mines and abattoirs. After all, people bemoan the number of men getting to the top of their game, but conveniently ignore the overwhelming number at the bottom, too.
Given that schools are failing boys but most of them are female-dominated, quotas for male teachers should also probably be introduced here. After all, most men won’t go near a primary classroom because they’re petrified of being branded sex pests. A little bit of formal encouragement would combat this rather nicely.
Outside the workplace, one-rule-for-all should still apply. Even if just online.
When the Women Who Eat on Tubes group sparked controversy for trending with 21,000 members last year, humourless haters claimed it encouraged people to ‘objectify and humiliate women’ who were unaware of their image being taken whilst masticating in public.
Typically, men were painted as perverts for laughing at a woman forcing down a fajita, yet the professionally offended ignored the fact that half of them were women – taking photos, uploading pictures, commenting. They also forget about the existence of TubeCrush: a website
which, for years, has encouraged women to upload pictures of attractive men using the London Underground and communally gush over them online.
When it launched in 2011 it was lauded as a peaktime pastime by everything from Pinterest to the
Evening Standard,
who wrote a fawning feature about it, saying:
Flirty females are using their smartphones to capture the dishiest of the Underground’s two million daily commuters, and uploading the unsuspecting men onto hit website TubeCrush.net. The cute commuters are then rated and commented on by admiring women – with surveys taken as to which Tube lines have the hottest men (so far, overwhelmingly, the Northern line is winning).
Disturbingly, some of the lads in the photographs didn’t always look old enough to be sixteen, whilst others – wearing shorts in the summer – were snapped sitting down as the material rode up their legs. Creepy, right?
Brilliantly, the solution is always simple: laugh, hysterically – then join in.
I was once travelling on the Northern line when a young woman was trying to surreptitiously take a photograph of a man in a suit. Hilariously, her flash went off – at which point he started photographing her, saying he
was going to put the pictures online – which caused her to scurry off at the next stop in shame and frustration.
That’s because what he did is exactly what the Women Eating blog does – it holds a mirror up to all the double standards, and levels the playing field. Which, after all, is surely what everyone wants. Especially with revenge porn, which – if applied fairly – will surely see the women who sold naked pictures of Leicester City striker David Nugent or
Made in Chelsea
’s Spencer Matthews to the press jailed and given a criminal record.
After all, fair’s fair.
Now for the
really
good news: we aren’t facing extinction.
For decades there’s been fear-mongering that our fundamental Y gene is weakening to the point of redundancy, which will eventually see men become extinct. Both scientists and cultural commentators, including Michael Moore in
Stupid White Men,
have been fantasising over the idea, predicting the collapse of men over an embarrassing five-million year descent into nullity.
Fortunately, it turns out – rather nicely – that it’s a complete myth.
A recent study conducted by boffins at UCL, Oxford University and the Swedish Agricultural University, published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
journal, found that we aren’t genetic wastelands after all. Instead, we’re here to stay.
Sorry, ladies, you’d better cancel that party bus.
A similar project in the USA, which looked at the genetics of rhesus macaque monkeys, found that whilst male DNA did shed some characteristics some time ago, it has since stabilised. Which means our clever Y chromosome simply decluttered.
Biology professor David Page, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said:
For the past ten years the one dominant storyline in public discourse about the Y is that it’s disappearing. Putting aside the question of whether this ever had a sound scientific basis in the first place, it was a story that went viral – fast. And stayed viral.
Yes, the Y was in freefall early on and genes were lost at an incredibly rapid rate. But then it levelled off – and it’s been doing just fine since.
His lab researcher, Jennifer Hughes, who previously found proof that the human Y chromosome has been stable
for at least 6 million years, added: ‘We’ve been carefully developing this clear-cut way of demystifying the evolution of the Y chromosome. Now our empirical data flies in the face of all the other theories out there. I challenge anyone to argue with it.’
Time to get the drinks in, then.
WHEN GILLIAN FLYNN’S
GONE GIRL
became a literary sensation – and, later, a global cinematic success – the illiberal left were furious that [spoiler alert!] its lead protagonist, Amy Dunne, was a woman who avenged her husband’s infidelity by framing him for murder, stealing
his sperm and lying about rape. Such characterisation, it seemed, deviated from the pre-approved script on what we’re allowed to think, say and feel – even about fictional people who happen to be female.
Television producer David Cox claimed it ‘revamps gender stereotypes – for the worse’,
The Guardian
’s Emine Saner questioned whether it was ‘misogynist agit-prop’ and one blogger decried it as ‘the crystallisation of a thousand misogynist myths and fears about female behaviour’. Not to be outdone, Vulture said ‘Yes,
Gone Girl
has a woman problem’, whilst Joan Smith waded into the fray, accusing the film of being a ‘disgusting distortion’ of truth whilst ‘recycling the most egregious myths about gender-based violence’ – specifically, that ‘it’s childishly easy to get away with making false [rape] allegations’.
Except, whilst they’re all entitled to their opinions, me thinks they doth protest too much – although it’s only art, it’s art that imitates life for countless men across the world. Thus, if there’s one area of modern manhood that demands a serious chapter in this book – above health, fatherhood, suicide and circumcision, all of which remain fiercely front-line – it’s the human right to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Currently, under British legislation, any man – me, you, your father, son, brother or best friend – can be accused of rape and named by every media platform in
the country, even before police bring charges. This might be acceptable if every allegation was legitimate, but, sadly, they are not. Hence, due process – and, in particular, pre-conviction anonymity – is crucial for preserving the credibility and humanity of justice.
This is particularly true when legal professionals themselves make false claims…
In June 2014, trainee barrister Rhiannon Brooker was jailed for three years after falsely accusing her former boyfriend Paul Fensome of rape and assault. He was held in custody for thirty-six days, including time on a secure wing after rumours circulated that he was a paedophile. He has since received £38,000 in compensation for the trauma.
In April 2012, Kent’s Kirsty Sowden, a former John Lewis shop assistant, was jailed for crying rape over a fully consensual encounter with a man she’d met online after advertising herself as a ‘BSDM princess’. He was arrested at his workplace in front of colleagues and detained in a cell, wasting 376 hours of police time to the tune of £14,000. The reason? She felt guilty for cheating on her long-term boyfriend.
Shortly after this, twenty-year-old Hannah Byron was spared jail after falsely accusing her ex-boyfriend of rape in revenge for breaking up with her. Then, Sheffield’s Emma Saxon was given a custodial sentence for her
second spurious claim against partner Martin Blood. He was held in police custody for fourteen hours and subjected to an intrusive medical examination – all because he’d stood her up.
Capping them all, Southampton’s Elizabeth Jones was finally jailed in February – but only after making her
eleventh
false allegation. Take note, Joan Smith.
Despite these countless cases – which, admittedly, aren’t the typical experience – there’s a steadfast belief that men deserve the stain of rape stigma, guilty or not, simply because they are male. Writer Julie Bindel once said that ‘a fair number of celebrities … have been accused of rape in the past and do not seem to have suffered longer-term. To say that an accusation ruins lives is perhaps a sweeping generalisation.’ (Then again, she also wrote a sister article in
The Guardian
entitled ‘Why I Hate Men’, so perhaps her judgement isn’t totally credible.)
Likewise, writing in the
New Statesman,
Willard Foxton denounced mutual anonymity because ‘the fashionable thing to do on being cleared of rape these days is to walk free from the courtroom or police station and loudly issue a public statement calling for those accused of rape to be granted anonymity by the courts because of your “ordeal”’.
Perhaps these people should speak to Reg Traviss, the former boyfriend of Amy Winehouse, who suffered a
malicious, fictitious claim in December 2012. Thankfully, he was acquitted, but only after his character had been publicly assassinated by the press, who sneered ‘there’s no smoke without fire’. During the case, London’s Southwark Crown Court heard that his accuser was ‘so drunk she couldn’t stand up or walk’ which many assumed to be true – until CCTV footage secured by Traviss’s brother (
not
the police) proved otherwise.
Then there’s Peter Bacon. In 2009, a jury cleared him of rape in just forty-five minutes after being falsely accused by a one-night stand. Yet, despite being exonerated, his name was dragged through the mud and – to this day – even the most half-hearted Google search reveals a virtual footprint he can’t escape. The nightmare was so traumatic he changed his name and left the country.
Yet, in spite of all this, nothing has been learned and all men remain at risk.
Oxford University students may be considered some of the most privileged young people in Britain, but Ben Sullivan – president of the university’s 191-year-old debating society – didn’t enjoy any such trappings when he was arrested at 6 a.m., detained for four hours in a police cell awaiting interview and publicly humiliated. He was just trapped.
For months he endured needless public suspicion before police sheepishly confirmed he wouldn’t face a
single charge. Not one. (Yet, for the privilege of it all, he still had to pay £15,000 in legal fees and, like Paul Weller or Bright Eyes singer Conor Oberst, have his life marred by a system that considers men’s innocence a bonus, not a baseline.) As the allegations unfolded, Sarah Pine, President for Women at Oxford University’s Student Union, spearheaded a campaign against him, even before the accusations were fully considered by police.
Typifying the way men are treated by so-called equality campaigners, she devised a boycott of scheduled guest speakers and called for Sullivan to resign. Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble, Norman Finkelstein and – rather worryingly – David Mepham, UK Director of Human Rights Watch, all conceded. Only Jennifer Perry, CEO of the Digital Trust and author of the UK guidelines on digital risks, resisted – and later spoke of how she felt ‘threatened’ and ‘intimidated’ by Pine’s gender-driven agenda.
An expert in cyber-stalking said she was subject to ‘an enormous amount of pressure’ by Pine, adding that she and her colleagues were asked ‘in very forceful terms’ to boycott Sullivan: ‘It became apparent that [Pine’s] agenda wasn’t about keeping women safe and I don’t want to be hijacked by someone else’s political campaign. They are tramping on due process.’
Hence, when it was finally over, Sullivan earnestly
appeared across national media to defend a man’s pre-conviction anonymity.
‘An individual’s identity should not automatically be revealed the minute they are arrested,’ he said.
There needs to be some happy medium where their identity is protected initially, until at least the conclusion of an investigation. These were utterly poisonous allegations against me. They were completely spurious, yet this was enough for an arrest. In cases like mine, everyone should have the right to anonymity as the inquiry is at a preliminary stage. The police and CPS should then be able to go to a judge and ask for the anonymity be waived, if they need it.
I understand why naming people is useful, but when inquiries are at such an early stage it is vicious, and it can be at a huge cost.
Once again, this terrifying case in point not only proves that pre-conviction identification doesn’t work, but reiterates a very pertinent question: why, in our best ever age of equality, are men still being denied the right to a trial first? It’s unjust and inhumane.
Originally, the law agreed. In 1976, the Labour government introduced rape trial anonymity for both the alleged victim and the accused. It operated this way until
1988, when guidelines were relaxed to help police investigations. At the time, the media was far less powerful, less global, less permanent than it is today. There was no internet, no slew of gossip magazines, no mobile phones with cameras, no social networking sites. Police techniques and technology were also less refined, so a lack of anonymity helped them.
Now, the landscape is different. Dramatically so. And – once again – the law should change to reflect this. Why? Because a not-guilty verdict is no longer enough to repair the planet-sized crater of damage caused by weeks of daily headlines across the globe.
Even Labour peer Lord Corbett, who introduced the 1976 law providing mutual pre-conviction anonymity, argued this until his death in February 2012. He told the
Evening Standard
in 2002: ‘Rape is a uniquely serious offence and acquittal is not enough to clear a man in the eyes of his family, community or workplace. He is left with this indelible stain on his reputation. The case for matching anonymity for the defendant is as strong now as ever.’
He was right in life and he’s right in death.
Maura McGowan, deputy High Court judge and chairwoman of the Bar Council, agrees. ‘Until they have been proven to have done something as awful as this – I think there is a strong argument in cases of this sort, because
they carry such stigma with them, to maintain the defendant’s anonymity, until he is convicted,’ she told BBC Radio 5.
But once the defendant is convicted then of course everything should be open to scrutiny and to the public … [But] not all of these [rape] accusations are true and the damage that can be done to somebody’s life … can be overwhelming if it isn’t true. These cases are peculiar unto themselves because the stigma quite often can do so much damage.
One such case was that of Linsey Attridge. To stop her boyfriend leaving her, the 31-year-old claimed two men broke into her home and committed rape whilst he was away playing football. She then punched herself in the face and ripped her clothes to make the story appear credible, before spending three days trawling social networking sites to find users she could ‘identify’ as responsible. The men were then detained by police, questioned and forced to undergo intrusive forensic and medical examinations.
Two months later, Attridge confessed that it was a lie – but only received 200 hours of unpaid community service as punishment, which is neither a fitting penalty nor a deterrent.
Yet, for all their protestations about film storylines
and media representation, not one person or rape charity has ever come forward to denounce the culture of false allegations. Not one. They scold authors for writing books about women who lie about rape –
but won’t get angry at the women who lie about rape,
which surely betrays real victims of rape more than pre-conviction anonymity ever could. Both the men and women who are attacked, and the men who are named and shamed regardless of conviction.
Sadly, it’s not just real-life equivalents of
Gone Girl
’s Amy Dunne who deceive, but women in positions of power, too.
In 2010, an official enquiry report led by Baroness Stern – a prison reform campaigner – ordered Harriet Harman to stop misleading the public about rape statistics. For years she’d been pumping out misinformation that only 6 per cent of rapists are brought to justice, when the reality is very different. Actually, the 6 per cent figure relates to reported cases.
The conviction rate for those actually charged with rape is nearly two out of three, higher than comparable figures for other violent crime.
A few weeks after Ben Sullivan’s charges were dropped, I bumped into him in Soho – minutes after stumbling across MP Nigel Evans (who was similarly accused – then acquitted – of rape). Yet, whilst I vaguely recall a brief exchange with them both, what
I vividly remember is wondering if women like Harman or Bindel have ever seen men so ashen, so exhausted and so utterly violated by a system that’s shaped by radical Marxist-based theories from the ’70s. I doubt it.
Then again, even if they did, I suspect they’d dismiss such cases as profoundly exaggerated delusions of persecution. The suppression of dissident views is saddening.
Yet, what conversely makes me smile about the politics around
Gone Girl
and its difficult subject matter is that the framework for response is strikingly similar to that of anti-Thatcherism. After all, one of the reasons Britain’s only female Prime Minister remains so passionately hated is that, like Rosamund Pike’s character, she revealed a damning secret about women which ruins their image – that they can be just as vile, just as evil, just as dangerous as men.
It’s as if these people make the issue about men v. women, rather than right v. wrong, which is both the epitome of those man-hating feminist clichés and, crucially, a dead-end path to justice – especially when rape victims can be of either gender. Statistics from America’s National Crime Victimisation Survey recently revealed 38 per cent of rape survivors in a 40,000 sample were men, whilst records from the Bureau of Justice Statistics noted half of these men reported a female attacker.
Besides, the benefit of mutual anonymity would serve
all, helping victims as well as conserving fair trials. For a start, it would deter anyone from making false claims out of spite, potentially seeing the accuracy of convictions rise – not fall. Secondly, it could make testifying easier for those who’ve come forward. Identifying the accused often inadvertently identifies the victim, which adds immense pressure for them. It’s all wrong.
This is common sense, but it’s also the view of the majority. When the subject was mooted in a poll on – funnily enough – the
Guardian
website, 71 per cent of readers supported pre-conviction anonymity. A similar survey by MailOnline showed that 67 per cent of readers feel the same.
