How dare you be a man

From Esquire magazine

For the past 150,000 years, being a man has been a respectable occupation. We hunted stuff, fought valiant battles, and spent our leisure time over a few drinks discussing what a groove it is to rule the world. Oh, and we got married, possibly did a bit of whoring, often fell in love – sometimes ruinously – and sired children.

Now, we’re told, our time is up.

You probably haven’t read the small print, so here it is: up until this year clinics offering IVF or sperm donation services have had to take the welfare of a subsequent child into account, including its “need for a father”. Now the Fertilisation and Embryology Act has been revised to stipulate instead simply the amorphous need for a “family”. No need for dads, ergo no need for men.

Hurrah! trumped politically correct pressure groups. Let’s get away from that anachronism that was the man looking after his family. Here was another – possibly the last – pillar of male domination knocked to the ground.

Yet why should this view have credence? In fact, medicine is moving fast enough for there not to be a biological need for mothers, so why is it men who have to be written out of the evolutionary equation?

Because we live in an age where emasculation has become desirable, fashionable even, among the politically correct. The abolishing of school sports, rubbishing men’s competitive spirit, the insistence that women should be able to stand alongside their male counterparts in the Fire Service and even the SAS is all part of the wisdom of the unwritten constitution of the nanny state.

It promulgates, too, the cult of “All men are useless”. The sitting about, can’t cook, love beer comedy of Men Behaving Badly, which we thought was a friendly pastiche on the behaviour of the male of the species, has actually been taken seriously by these people.

So now we see Neil Morrissey incapable of putting up a shelf to the exasperation of his fellow Men Behaving Badly star Leslie Ash in the Homebase television commercials. Carling lager ads feature a man’s girlfriend pouring the last drops from a can of lager on the floor so he will lick it up cleaning the house as he goes along. Or how about the BT advert in which a stepfather figure is constantly shown up as a dimwit by his wife and family, who are happily au fait with the technology?

Commercial-makers reflect the views of society: their living depends on it. So when even the advertising newspaper Campaign earlier this year accused the industry it reports on as portraying us as “castrated dweebs” who appeal to neither men nor women, it would seem that we should have something to worry about.

The former leader of the Australian Labor Party, one Mark Latham, 46, certainly thinks so. “One of the saddest things I have seen in my lifetime has been the decline in Australian male culture,” he writes in his delightfully titled book A Conga Line of Suckholes (the description he applied to the floor of the Conservative Government because of their loyalty to George Bush). “Australian mates and good blokes have been replaced by nervous wrecks, metrosexual knobs and toss bags.” Don’t hold back, Mark.

Yet he has a point. The politically correct masters – all right, all right, and mistresses – of the nanny state who cheered the news that families don’t need fathers are certainly doing all they can to create a brave new society in their terms. So it is that the Labour Party is enforcing women-only shortlists for MPs in a move to make the parliamentary party comprise 50 per cent women and “reflect” the society in which they live, (conveniently forgetting, of course, that we vote for MPs, making any target inherently impossible). Similarly, perfectly able male applicants to police forces up and down the country are rejected because quotas have to be filled.

But because of the number of women who still choose stay at home to look after children, surely if we take this to quota-filling to its logical conclusion there would either permanently have to be a body of men unemployed to ensure a 50-50 balance continues in the workplace, or a workforce that has permanently more men than women. The Royal Highland Fusiliers, in other words, would need to comprise 50 per cent female soldiers and provide baby changing facilities on the front line.

They would have to employ equality officers, too, because the nanny state seems to have this weird idea that without the intercession of legions of bureaucrats, we’d all be tits-out-for-the-lads sexists, poring over Zoo and Nuts and smashing each other over the head at football matches.

So it was that earlier this year, bubbling up from deep in the reservoir of government quangos, somewhere no doubt, in the Department of Stating the Bleeding obvious, we were presented with the Dad Pack.

It came from “Fathers Direct”. They are not to be confused with Fathers 4 Justice, the embittered men who clamber up public buildings and win the support of Bob Geldof; these are lip-quivering civil servants whose living appears to depend on producing so many yards of fatuous, self-evident nonsense. So the Dad Pack told us, for example, to “Bite your lip, not your partner, when she is ratty” and in the section on the birth to take a “water spray to keep her cool – a water pistol is less effective but can lighten the atmosphere”.

Hah! We men, eh, if we’re not too busy attacking our wives, we’re always at the ready with a water pistol gag.

This crude stereotyping is par for the course. The Dad Pack is written in a weird Ronseal advert bloke vernacular, as if none of us has been to a university or had a civilised relationship with a woman before. When your “partner” is pregnant, it advises: “Shop, clean, decorate. When knackered, try not to say, ‘who is having this baby, you or me?’” As you would.

Anyway, who’s to say females are such victims, left to suffer the vagaries of troglodyte male behaviour were it not for the intercession of Fathers Direct? Career women in middle and top management jobs, for example, earn nearly as much as their male counterparts. A survey in 2003 by the Chartered Management Institute and analyst Remuneration Economics found the average female department head earned 1 per cent less than her male equivalent – £53,257 a year compared to £53,732. Indeed, many women were the bigger wage earners in their family. Meanwhile, British Government figures show that there are now more female millionaires aged between 18 and 44 than there are men. In an episode of the BBC series The Money Programme entitled “Filthy Rich and Female”, the businesswoman Nicola Horlick estimated that within 20 years 60 per cent of the United Kingdom’s wealth would be controlled by women.

If this is true, then we should all celebrate. What will happen to women’s rights groups if it really is a fact that women are doing better in the workplace than men? Could it mean the final death knell for the feminism that declared all men are rapists? Will a new glass ceiling for men come into being and women’s groups be replaced by men’s organisations? And if that means that coffee mornings will be replaced by park football afternoons, and ladies who lunch by men who lager, then bring it on, boys, bring it on.