Peter Lloyd , author of Stand By Your Manhood, is fighting back – against the feminisation of society. Good for him and good for the Daily Mail for serialising parts of his magnum opus.
He is right to argue that there has never been a worse time to be a man. Many of the statistics of anti-male bias in modern British society are ones we have rehearsed here on TCW too. He is also right to describe the routine rubbishing of men as feminist fascism and stiletto sexism and men as the new second class citizens.
I call this deeply hypocritical behaviour, feminist chauvinism or misandry. Woe betide any man who similarly denigrated womanhood.
Reading through his account of the contemporary vilification of men – the extent to which the dice are loaded against men in work and health, you cannot be surprised that men are going off women.
Just pages away, in same edition of the Mail, is an example of why. The paper reports the claim of Goldman Sachs banker Sonia Pereiro-Mendez that she’s been treated unfairly after getting pregnant. She sounds like the feminist employee from hell. Not content with secretly filming her colleagues to get their ‘sexist’ behaviour on record when she became pregnant, she objected to a salary drop to a sum most women (or men) would still dream of, £192,000. Her bonus too – of £284,000 – she deemed inadequate, despite retreating into the company car park to breast feed her baby (during breaks).
This is the sort of ’high flier’ who gives women a bad name. Would her male colleagues have kept their full bonuses if they took off to the car park to feed their baby in breaks? I doubt it. Being paid enough to have proper nanny care and not compromise her very well rewarded career was insufficient. She wanted more – the money and to breast feed her baby at work to boot – and to turn her ‘cause’ into a legal nightmare for her company.
Ruthless feminists like this lady ride roughshod over their companies and their colleagues.
But the answer to the new feminist oppression is not male gender quotas ‘for us poor blokes’, as Peter Lloyd suggests. Shameful feminist tactics and orthodoxies are the problem not the solution. Competing in the victimhood stakes is not the answer either.
All this will do is create two competing victim groups – with their competing sets of rights. What a legal nightmare and what a recipe for non communication. But this, I fear, is where Peter’s analysis – and that of many of the men’s rights groups that have emerged – is leading.
In my view, the beleaguered male must challenge, not adopt, the feminised rights and victim culture, however difficult that is. Men need to demonstrate that they are, as Peter argues, a brilliant sex – inventors, creators, doers, fighters and protectors.
Women who think they don’t need or want this are deluding themselves – however much the Julie Burchills, Barbara Ellens and Suzanne Moores tell us otherwise. These feminist scribes speak for the minority, not the majority.
But what all women need to face up to are the two types of ‘modern men’ that feminism has so cruelly manufactured for them: The Oh so correct honorary Nick Clegg-type feminists (Miliband and Cameron also fit this mould) who promote and toe the feminist party line – men who I suspect don’t really turn women on at all. Second are the refuseniks who have gradually turned into a worrying class of embittered, angry misogynists – leading the sexodus. These men will not even give women the chance to see if they find them attractive.
Woman need to understand they have hoist themselves on their own feminist petard. Any idea that women have ‘won’ misses the point. Feminism has not secured a good deal for women, any more than it has for men. They are paying a bitter price in loneliness for refusing to or understanding how to accommodate men and maleness.
This is the thrust of Peter’s second extract in the Mail. “For an army of women, Mr Right is simply not there, no matter how hard they look for him. And the reason? When it comes to marriage, men are on strike. Why? Because the rewards are far less than they used to be, while the cost and dangers it presents are far greater.”
As sociologist Geoff Dench has pointed out too, the lower down the social pecking order they are, the worse this is for women. Their unemployed male counterparts are even less likely to step up to the plate as partners, let alone as providers or protectors.
In this case there is no divorce to complain about; it is not a case here of women keeping the children and men paying the bill. These ‘couples’, if they ever were, were never married, the men have never paid any bills. The taxpayer has, for them.
The crux of the matter is where all this leaves children . As Lloyd points out:“not having a father leaves a hole in the soul of a child”. The next generation should be of concern to men as much as women. That’s why men playing victim, however badly they have been treated, is no answer. It will not stop that gap. It will just speed up the sexodus.
The challenge for real men (and real women) is otherwise. It is to challenge feminism not to ape it.
