Stand by Your Manhood (2 page)

Suspiciously, this formula misses a sole, independent sense of self that sees men determine for themselves what masculinity is. One that’s free of women’s approval and isn’t dogged by fears of whether she’s faking it. Which begs one very important question: is this a
Sex and the City
version of being a man – one that hangs our identity on a thumbs-up from the opposite sex – or is it the real thing?

Fortunately, there’s a better acid test to determine our credentials as modern men. And it’s this: on top of DIY, Sunday-league football and being able to evict unwelcome spiders, can we rationally, respectfully, intellectually defend the brotherhood when it’s under fashionable
attack – even if our voice shakes? Because if we cannot, who can – and who will?

Those who don’t generally sell out for sex. And although this sounds good, it rarely ends well. Just ask bestselling author Esther Vilar. In 1971, she wrote her trailblazing book
The Manipulated Man.
In it she noted that, contrary to popular belief, women in industrialised countries aren’t simply oppressed by all men, all the time, but – rather – it cuts both ways. We manipulate each other. Upon publication she received death threats from ‘Gal-Qaeda’ extremists – or is it Shehadists? – all over the world, proving that it’s not always easy to stand your ground, even if you’re making a fair point. Nineteen years later, when Neil Lyndon wrote
No More Sex War
in 1992, a virtual peace treaty between the genders which suggested feminism needed to soften and consider men as allies, not aggressors, little had changed. In fact, the hostility was so irrational that one critic from the
Sunday Times
suggested he must’ve been motivated by a small penis complex. Charming.

But as Winston Churchill once said, ‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.’ And his words remain true. Almost five decades after her book hit the shelves, Vilar said in reflection: ‘If I had known then what I know today, I probably wouldn’t have written this book. And
that is precisely the reason why I am so glad to have written it.’

Amazingly, after decades of so-called solution feminism, virtually everything in it remains unchanged. Men are conscripted; women are not.

Naturally, this is all our fault. In 2013, British Labour MP Diane Abbott made a damning speech about Britain’s men and boys – smugly announcing that masculinity was ‘in crisis’. The shadow Public Health Minister – who, rather brilliantly, was later sacked from the front bench by Ed Miliband after failing to toe the party line – declared that male culture is ‘a celebration of heartlessness; a lack of respect for women’s autonomy and the normalisation of homophobia’. Even for the millions of men who are gay, apparently.

She added that men ‘find themselves voluntarily creating an extended adolescence’ by living at home with their parents – which has absolutely
nothing
to do with rising house prices, but everything to do with being ‘resentful of family life’.

The speech, which made no reference to women’s identikit behaviour, might’ve been funny if it weren’t so tragic, so I couldn’t help but address it when we met at a charity fundraiser in the V&A museum. There, she admitted that her entire theory came from a chat with a ‘handful’ of male friends. Hardly a credible, detailed study. Fortunately, the one good thing her rant did do was get people talking. Years ago, such a speech would’ve gone unchallenged in a bid to be seen to ‘get’ feminism. But contemporary conversations are a tad more balanced now. The erudite Tony Parsons, who is a total lad, made a blistering retort in his
GQ
column, whilst actor Jude Law told me at the Groucho Club that ‘men are no more in crisis than women’. Very true. You see, men don’t need focus because they’re faltering, but because parity is a two-way street. Thus, if air-brushed images of models make young girls feel bad, then articles entitled ‘Why Are Middle-Class Men Useless?’ by Janice Turner are crushing for boys. Yet that exact headline appeared on the front page of
The Times
.

This kind of stiletto sexism – popularised by the likes
of Julie Burchill, Suzanne Moore, Sarah Vine and Barbara Ellen – isn’t traditionally something men have had to deal with, so they let it go, hoping it’ll pass. But here’s a secret I’m willing to share: it hasn’t and it won’t. Hence this book.

If you become a father to twins – one girl, one boy – current data proves that your son will die younger, leave school with fewer qualifications and be less eligible for work than your daughter.

Statistically, she’ll graduate university, but your son will be lucky to make it past the application stage. FYI, women now dominate further education at a rate of one million for 700,000 men, with one London university, the Royal Veterinary College, formally identifying white guys as an under-repesented group. In fact, across the Russell Group of institutes – Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial College London, Leeds, Liverpool, London School of Economics, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, University College London and Warwick – only three have a majority of male students.

This means your son will more likely join the ranks of the unemployed … the majority of whom are now – yep, you guessed it – men. The Office of National Staistics noted that, for May–July 2014, 1,147,511 British men were out of work compared to 887,892 women.

The same is happening in the USA, where 80 per cent of the 5.7 million jobs lost by Americans during the financial crisis between December 2007 and May 2009 were held by men. The same men who, at eighteen, were forced to sign up for military service – risking death and injury – or face five years in jail or a $250,000 fine. Currently, non-compliance makes all men ineligible for various federal benefits including employment, financial aid, citizenship, loans, voting and job training – men, but not women.

Psychologically, your son will be more likely to suffer from depression and attempt suicide than his sibling, but there’ll be less support in place to save him. More than ten men a day kill themselves in England and Wales; it’s by far the biggest cause of death for young men in the UK. If he survives this temptation, he’s more likely to endure everyday violence than women, with the Crime Statistics for England and Wales 2011/12 noting that two-thirds of homicide victims were men. The same report also recorded 800,000 cases of domestic violence against males, but awareness campaigns and shelters still only target females. This isn’t a simple oversight, but an entire culture that’s been cultivated for years.

A lack of respect in wider society will make gang culture appealing, but your son will be blamed for wanting affirmative peers when he joins one. He’ll then spend
years worrying over his body and sexual ability, because he’ll be told that penis size matters, whereas your daughter will be told she’s beautiful in every guise. Then, if he’s seduced by his female teacher, she’ll leave court with a slapped wrist thanks to a legal system which is frequently lenient with women (see the Everyday Bullshit chapter), but if your daughter has an affair with her male maths tutor he’ll be chalking up numbers on a prison wall.

By the time your son’s eighteen he will probably believe you’re less valuable than your wife in terms of parental need – that fathers in families are an added bonus, not a crucial cog. Then, when he grows up, he might start his own family – maybe or maybe not by choice – but if his relationship doesn’t last, he’ll become one of the four million UK men who have no access to their children, but are forced to fund them.

To cap it all, he’ll be progressively neglected by British healthcare, despite being more likely to get – and die from – cancer. Yet NHS funding will pump more money into women’s healthcare than men’s. Oh, and if he sits next to a child on a commercial airline such as Virgin or British Airways, he’ll be moved in case he sexually abuses them. Your daughter won’t, even if she has previous form.

At best, a lifetime of this leaves our boys deflated, dispirited and disenfranchised. At worst, it pathologises them. It encourages a suspicion of our sons and nephews,
sealing their fate before they’ve even started. It also tells women they’re justified in holding a lazy, dim view of us and can forever do no wrong.

Sadly, like most guys, he’ll accept this because, historically, it’s what we do. In a bid to support women’s emancipation, in a bid for peace, in a bid to maximise our chances of getting laid, we say nothing – we allow jokes to be made about our intellectual ability, our emotional intelligence and our capacity for commitment, without saying a word. But it hasn’t worked. The gender war is still a bloody mess.

One reason for this is that nobody ever taught our sons to be part of the balance. Instead, they’re told that men who complain should be seen and not heard. Written off as misogynists for daring to demand a fair deal.

Obviously, this isn’t to say that girls are off having a fine time – most of society is well-versed on the problems and pressures faced by women. The same women who have spent years trying to prove their worth beyond motherhood and housework. In the Oppression Olympics they’d be Usain Bolt. But, unlike us, they get column inches. They get government funding and MPs. They have a vocal community who will stand in their defence. Specifically, they don’t have men telling them to ‘woman up’.

Fortunately, since the advent of the internet – a place no editors or agendas can censor – men have re-discovered
their footing. Websites and organisations such as the National Coalition For Men and the appropriately titled A Voice for Men have articulated the scope of our issues better than any left-leaning broadsheet ever could (or would), which explains why thousands of 18–24-year-olds visit them every day. Reassuringly, they’re not just a bunch of angry, hairy blokes. The editor-at-large of AVFM is Erin Pizzey – the woman who set up the world’s first ever domestic violence shelter in London’s Chiswick in 1971. Her story, which includes fleeing the country after receiving death threats from hard-liners, is so fascinating that actress Kate Beckinsale, who grew up nearby, now wants to transform it into a Hollywood screenplay. Poignantly, Erin described her role on the site as ‘coming home’.

In the Alexa ratings, the system that measures web traffic and online popularity, both are already up there and growing, fast. Why? Because they’re bucking a trend where men’s magazines aren’t. They’re telling it straight.

When Sharon Osbourne used American television show
The Talk
to describe Catherine Kieu Becker’s attack on her California husband as ‘quite fabulous’, she got more than she bargained for. Whilst they laughed and cheered the woman who drugged her partner’s food with sleeping pills, tied him to a bed, cut his penis off and destroyed it in a garbage disposal unit so it couldn’t be re-attached – all because she objected to his request for
a divorce – men plagued the network with complaints until Osbourne was forced to apologise. Even one of the cameramen refused to film the live scenes and walked away, leaving producers in a prime-time crisis. Never before had women on US TV been held accountable in such a way. It was genius.

Here in Britain, Fathers 4 Justice have long been modern-day, male equivalents of the suffragettes with their bid to equalise family law, dressing up as superheroes and throwing themselves in front of the proverbial horse.

Together, this all happened with people power – something we’ll personally need to be our own propellor of change. After all, nobody’s going to do it for us. We are not of interest to MPs, UN panels or charities, so we need to get off the sofa – even just mentally – and help ourselves. Don’t panic, I’m not suggesting we take to the streets with placards, but turn on any TV channel or radio station and there’s a global conversation about men – sometimes disguised as being about women – taking place without us. These all slowly influence our worlds, which is precisely why we need a male equivalent of feminism: something that will define, defend and expand social equality for blokes and boys, too.

You can be forgiven for laughing at this point because people assume the suggestion is absurd – that such a thing doesn’t need to exist, or already does on such a huge scale
that it’s the natural order of things – but they’re wrong. As this book will prove.

But first, we must name it to claim it. Previously, people tried to introduce terms like ‘masculinist’ or ‘meninist’ to define a bit of well-intended brief-burning, but they never quite stuck – in part because people couldn’t actually say them. So what’s left – a men’s human rights activist? Nah. Too dry. An equalist? Too pious. A feminist? Afraid not – after all, that’s incomplete. In the decades that feminism has been the political and social standard it hasn’t touched the sides of men’s issues, except in ways where it has also helped women (paternity leave is only a top topic for this reason – we’re expected to be equal caregivers, but not equal in the law).

Instead, I reckon we should all become Suffragents – a new breed of sane, sorted men whose political interests are jointly at the fore with women’s. Not to undo or compete with feminism, but to sit alongside it and create symmetry.

And this, right here, is your formal invitation to be part of it.

Thankfully, more than ever, we are already galvanising in this way, whether consciously or not. Look at Movember. A self-made men’s movement, it’s been raising consciousness, as well as smiles, since catching the world’s imagination in 2003. From the humble beginnings
of thirty Australian men fundraising for a dying friend, it’s moved in from the fringe of internet ideas to become a major weapon in winning. Still, its Burt Reynolds brilliance isn’t just because it has generated more than £345 million across twenty-one countries, bank-rolling 800 programmes and saving countless lives, but because it laughed in the face of people who thought men wouldn’t have the collective balls to do it.