In defence of men (‘patriarchy hurts almost everyone’)

(2216 words)

Let’s start young. Boys achieve less in schools, learn less and no-one seems very interested in changing this; it’s silently ignored, perhaps regarded as a nice aid for girl power. But have those boys who go uneducated created the system that benefits men overall? Are uneducated men likely to be the ones earning vastly more than women and contributing to the pay gap? I doubt they’re responsible, but they’re the ones paying for it.

Why aren’t boys learning at school? If we can summarize books worth of ideas into a few sentences, we could identify a few things.

i)                    A culture that says that men are stupid; that knowledge and study is unmanly; and that obedience is degrading for a man. 
ii)                   Poverty distracting them from education. It’s hard to learn when hungry, when parents don’t have the time to manage homework. 
iii)                 Various gender-specific proposals of varying validity, such as mostly female teachers teaching in a way that would have suited them when young; or adults emphasizing girl’s academic achievements because girls aren’t allowed to be sporty or physical; and protecting girls from malign influences as much as possible whilst imagining that boys can deal with them better.

Since it’s just cropped up, let’s give cultural influences their own sections. Advertisements often portray a man of the pair as wacky and stupid. Then the sensible woman rescues the situation by buying or using the product. We know why: it’s because women still do far more shopping, including household shopping, than men, and so they’re the ones the advert wants to appeal to. It’s not fair that women still end up doing more housework. Women who think about such adverts assume they’re sexist because they tell men that they can be awful and women will pick up the pieces after them. I don’t think that’s the whole message men are getting, though. Boys and men also notice what society thinks of them.

It’s not just advertisements. There is a deeply insidious tendency in popular culture (e.g. the BBC’s recent show Wanderlust, or even The Simpsons) in which the main male role is a deeply unlovable waste of space, with everyone’s lives held together by a woman.

There are plenty of well-known examples: from Harry Potter to Sam Witwicky. Part of this is just the progression of storytelling. We used to have real heroes, and protagonists were almost always men. Then writers began to subvert and play with that model; protagonists became anti-heroes, the ‘fall’ part of the storyline became greater and greater for more dramatic effect, and then the hero’s journey of fall and then rise was toyed with further so that there was no rise.

              It’s likely that some writers think that people identify more with such awful protagonists because most people are similarly awful. The recent set of travesties of Transformers films are a probable example: Witwicky is almost the most pathetic example of humanity imaginable, making the films abominable piles of excrement (along with some pathetic plots). And since protagonists are still mostly men, we see a series of awful men.

              I’ve got into arguments about whether this is sexism against men or women. Is it sexist for women only to have supporting roles, even when the female character is good enough to do it all herself? Yes, of course it is. It tells women that they must always work through a man. Is it sexist to portray men as worthless wastes of space who are nothing without a woman? Yes, that can be oppressive too!

              It’s possible to oppress both men and women at the same time!

              That’s really the whole point of what I’m writing today, but there’s plenty more to say. I haven’t linked this to bigger social issues yet.

              What’s bigger than feminism, a campaign for 51% of the population? We’ll get to that…

              Men, plagued by the toxic wash in our culture about what men are, suffer from many mental health problems. More victims of crimes, including violent crimes, are men. More men are homeless because we prioritize getting women off the streets. I have heard an impoverished woman assert that women who are desperate enough to be homeless tend to have a child, because we take babies off the streets first. It might not be nice to have, or be, such a child, but we can assume it’s better for the mother than dying early on the streets.

              Men overwhelmingly commit more suicide, to the extent that statisticians always mention this as a factor in why men have such a lower life expectancy. I wonder why men are so depressed about life.

              Oh wait. What was that? Men just don’t get as much life as women, and we pretty much never mention this except as a footnote to statistics. Should we investigate why half the population somehow doesn’t live as long? No, we should probably just say it’s biological and move on. Just like it was biological 100 years ago that women so rarely achieved a university education. If we looked into it, we might even uncover some secrets of ageing, which oppresses us all, looming in the distance as the dreadful bulwark against carefree happiness.

              On the subject of different lifespans, it might be to do with testosterone and sex hormones. Certainly after menopause women seem to be, according to nature, more expendable than before. Men are, of course, more expendable in general. That’s why some countries have compulsory military service for men but not for women. Yet we choose to overcome nature in other areas. Why not ageing, and men’s ageing?

              Yes, men on average earn more. But they die earlier and retire later. How much are an extra five years of leisure worth? If we work on the assumption that there are 25 days of annual leave out of every 250 working days (i.e. each year, with 225 working days remaining), that’s a ratio of 1:9. So every year of leisure is worth 9 working years. If women live longer and retire a few years earlier, they’re getting the equivalent value of decades of extra work.

              The gender pay gap is a serious issue…but also a complex one. The pay gap doesn’t apply universally across all jobs. It tends to appear in people’s mid-lives, in correlation with settling down, getting married and having children. Even at this stage, it’s not the case that all men are doing better than all women; the most likely explanation for the correlation is to do with an increasing burden of housework and childcare. As those women fall behind, so too do those men burst forward. Those people just living decent single lives still need to do their own housework and shopping and are stuck in the middle, whether men or women. Are those single men oppressed by this system, or oppressors? It depends where you’re looking. If you look at the bottom, you see they’re not there, so they must be oppressors. If you look at the top, they’re not there either. Are they still oppressors?

             

              When it comes to relationships, it’s not all sweetness and light for men, with personal servants called women keeping them looked after. Although it is worth noting that there’s a long-standing theory that romantic love evolved from the mother-child bond, as a way to prevent infanticide by rivals. When women complain about men needing to be mothered, it’s probably a built-in part of love that it takes awareness and effort to conquer, not any particular person being needy, demanding or immature.

              On the subject of immaturity, it’s a very cultural judgement. What is a mature way to approach a relationship? When a young girl thinks she’s in love after a moment and tells her boyfriend to grow up because he wants to have some fun and she has imbibed countless stories in which settling down is how stories end, is she really proposing a superior choice? Men, especially young men, are biologically more thrill-seeking than women. Is it mature to ignore your biology? Who of the young men and women should do the ignoring? I have seen a few issues of Cosmopolitan lying around, and this description of male immaturity is common. It seeps into women’s attitudes to men, and men’s attitudes to themselves. Men trust their closest male friends more than their female partners, probably because they don’t have to deal with this everyday disgust and conflict that pervades their romantic relationships. Who benefits from that conflict? What creates the attitudes that cause it?

Disney fairytales told women that a relationship with the perfect man will satisfy all desires; that it is pure happiness and the apex of life’s achievements. When a man turns out to be imperfect, as all humans are, it isn’t Disney that bears the brunt of the resultant dissatisfaction (other myth-peddling media companies are available, along with an entire culture of this stuff). It’s more realistic that a man could change into a lion-bear hybrid than that one other human can make you fulfilled in every way.

Men are expected to work long hours in dull, pointless jobs in order to provide for families that rarely care for them any more, partly because they’re too tired to do anything fun at the end of the day. It is apparently common for men to feel isolated and excluded once the family has children. You can dismiss that as jealousy that he’s not the one being mothered any more, but that’s a pretty bigoted way to brush off the emotional suffering of a large range of people. We should probably be trying to understand the suffering and prevent it, not revel in it as if it’s some sort of justice.

Men are victims of emotional abuse in relationships, just as women can be. This might not be as bad as physical abuse (which tends to come on top of emotional abuse, not instead of), but it was feminists who originally invented the idea of non-physical violence, to describe the ways in which women suffered that weren’t just the extreme (in the modern world) of physical violence.

There’s a constant trickle of doubts fed into the minds of men and their partners about whether a man is good enough at a relationship. Is an engagement ring symbolic, or must its worth be proportional to the man’s love?

Many of these subjects will be familiar to anyone who has thought or read about sexism against women. They are very similar. I just mentioned that men are pushed into constant doubting about their actions and value in a relationship. Women are plagued by self-doubt about their appearance. Women earn less and have smaller retirement pots for their longer retired lives. Princess stories tell women that they need a man to be fulfilled, focussing attention on getting a man rather than self-improvement.

And so we return to what I wrote 1,000 words ago. It’s possible to oppress lots of people at once. If you go looking for oppression of women, you will find it. You might even call our modern culture patriarchy as a consequence. It’s an old Greek word, but they didn’t say ‘andrachy’, from ‘andros’ meaning ‘man’. They chose ‘patria’ meaning ‘lineage’, which gave rise to ‘patriarch’, the chief of the tribe, or father of the tribe. Patriarchy isn’t rule by all men; it’s rule by the patriarch.

Times have changed. We don’t have official patriarchs any more. But we do have very rich men with a lot of power and influence. We have another word for them now: we call extremely rich people oligarchs.

That’s where I’m going with this. Whether you call current society patriarchy because you’re a feminist, capitalism because you’re a Marxist, neoliberal because you’re well-read, or liberal/social democracy because you’re hopeful, it’s nonetheless clear that we have a system that creates a lot of bad attitudes and situations except for the rich, who are predominantly white men.  

If we focus too much on tribal conflict between men and women, we will ignore the elephant in the room. Neoliberalism will be quite happy to watch social campaigners turn on another group, create enemies and tear each other apart when they could have been allies. It’s probably not planned, but it would be diabolical scheme worthy of Darth Sidius or Kaiser Soze if it were. It’s a divide-and-rule scheme: have feminists fight with other men over the scraps they all get from the oligarchs, while no-one questions the system that has them fighting over scraps.

Our unjust democratic processes that disenfranchise vast swathes of voters; inequality that leaves 99% feeling at risk of poverty; an economy that relies on inducing discontentment to sell worthless junk; and lives that are far too short and filled with work – these are the big problems in society. We all suffer from problems. It's not just that men are harmed spiritually by being oppressors. Most men are genuinely oppressed. Having fewer issues means they got to be one rung higher up a very long ladder, with many other factors moving them up and down this great game as well. We can all argue about the person just ahead of us and why they got to be there, (or stamp down on those catching up below) or we can start to wonder why we’re all on a ladder, why we need to climb, and who got to be at the top.