Sometime i feel rn’t we thinking a little too much… come on this is bizarre… i wander wot it is like living in england… how much this type of thinking has affected their culture and general environment..
http://men.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/07/16/the-irrelevant-sex/?url=http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,7-2270985,00.html&frame=true
The irrelevant sex?
Richard Morrison
**The Government thinks fathers are no longer needed. So what's left for men?**
Another nail hammered into the coffin labelled “male pride”. Another brick hurled at that tottering edifice called “common sense”. It’s now official. Kids don’t need dads. That is the implication of the Government’s declared intention to airbrush fatherhood out of British law next year when it revises the Fertilisation and Embryology Act. At present, clinics offering IVF or sperm donation services must take the welfare of a subsequent child into account, including its “need for a father”, before giving treatment. In future, however, the law will refer merely to the “need for a family”.
Gay and feminist pressure groups have applauded the crucial word change as an overdue modernisation of an “anachronism” that was “judgmental and insulting”. No surprise there. But how judgmental and insulting to men trying to be good dads is the implication that a family doesn’t need a father anyway? How much damage does this “easy come easy go” attitude to fatherhood inflict on the work and morale of community leaders trying to make feckless young males acknowledge responsibility for the children they carelessly spawn? And what general message does this send out to men? We may have had 40 centuries of domination. But if we are surplus to requirements in the parenting field, and losing our grip at work too, what are we good for?
NI_MPU(‘middle’);
It’s symptomatic of our age, of course, that advances in genetic medicine should be interpreted specifically as a threat to men’s role in the reproductive process. What science is leading us inexorably towards is a chilling world in which the continuation of our species doesn’t depend on the prolonged participation of either gender. But what’s significant now is not this scientific reality, but the popular interpretation of it. And it seems clear that the issue of fertility treatment is regarded as yet more evidence that men have had their day — that we are increasingly incidental, and perhaps even harmful, to the further progress of humanity.
How did that attitude come about, and is it true? People said of 20th-century Britain that it had lost an Empire but not yet found a role. The 21st-century male is in much the same rudderless boat. We are physically stronger than women, but manual force isn’t much needed in our post-industrial age. We are better equipped, emotionally and physically, to fight old-fashioned wars, kill by brute force, charge unquestioningly over trenches. But wars are now fought by technology or terrorism — and neither of these are necessarily areas of male domination.
We can father children, but we live in a society that holds mothers in much greater esteem. And we have lost the intellectual edge. It’s extraordinary to recall that, within living memory, genius in the arts or sciences was widely regarded as overwhelmingly a male preserve. Today you would be locked up if you suggested any such thing. The ratio of females to males in British universities is now 3:2, and widening. In state schools girls are generally expected to flourish in their studies, while boys are expected to struggle.
All of which has contributed to a serious loss of self-esteem in young males particularly. They feel like society’s spare parts: out of the loop, out of favour. Young men are five times more likely to commit suicide than young women, four times more likely to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, nine times more likely to be sleeping rough.
Yet the archetypal male desire to dominate, to flaunt physical strength, hasn’t gone away. It simply has too few legitimate outlets. So it transmutes into surly displays of negative energy, such as gang violence.
All this is a sign of wounded pride: the raging-bull mentality. And in many men, it seems, pride is still a big deal — as several billion TV spectators were reminded during the World Cup final, when Zinedine Zidane head-butted a fellow footballer who had apparently impugned the integrity of his mother. His justification? “I am a man before anything else.” What’s alarming is not so much the remark itself, but that so many people seem to think that this was an understandable response — that this is how “real men” do behave when provoked. And that reinforces the view that men are good only for bullying, brawling, bragging, belching and boozing.
So how can male self-esteem be restored? We could do worse than begin at home. If we stopped belittling fatherhood and started to emphasise the unique benefits that dependable male mentors bring to families and communities, Britain’s worst social ills would be hugely alleviated. It’s because they lack mentors that inner-city boys get sucked into the tragic vortex of gangs, drugs, knives and prison (as David Cameron’s “hug a hoodie” campaign presumably acknowledges). Yet the absent or spineless father figure is just as acute a problem in Middle England. Where are the stern dads of all those teenage binge-drinkers retching and fighting every Saturday night?
If men are to regain their purpose, this is where we should start. After half a century of laddish moral abdication, we must again take responsibility for the civilising of our own. This is truly “men’s work”. It won’t be easy. We have abolished or decimated many occupations that gave young men a sense of worth, a chance to bond, and a recognised structure of discipline — brawn industries such as mining, shipbuilding and steel, for instance; or National Service.
Yet I have seen touching examples of male mentoring in the most unlikely places — on the grimy basketball courts of tough London estates, for instance, where the team coach will often also fulfil the role of trusted big brother to his charges. That’s what true male dignity is about. That’s what men must do to feel “necessary”. Because if we don’t rescue our own sex from its current paralysing and pervasive sense of nihilism, the other lot aren’t going to do it for us.