We Need to Talk About Masculinity

More talk on the man problem. It’s starting to get redundant:

We need to talk about masculinity. Across a country torn by recession and struggling to adapt to social change, men and boys are feeling lost and powerless, unsure what the future holds and what role they might play in it. Most feel as if they’re not allowed to question what it means to be a man today – or discuss what it might mean tomorrow.

The Labour MP Diane Abbott, launching a new campaign this week, is not the first person to kick up a fuss about this “crisis of masculinity”. In a speech to the thinktank Demos on Thursday she said that millions of young men are in distress, acting out violently or sinking into depression. Unfortunately, the only solution many in the audience could offer is not giving men and boys more power over their own lives, but restoring their traditional power over women, as “breadwinners” and “male providers”.

Nobody seems to have bothered to ask men and boys whether they actually want to be “breadwinners”, or whether female independence is really their biggest worry at a time when youth unemployment is more than 20%. Sadly, the debate is still focused on the evils of feminism, and on convincing men their real problem is that women are no longer forced to trade a lifetime of resentful sex for financial security. The chosen scapegoats, inevitably, are single mothers.

POSTED BY TONY RAFETTO