the biggest social revolution of our lifetime
women continue their astonishing dominance of university admissions…[they] now make up 57 per cent of university entrants, and they outnumber men in every subject — including maths and engineering
I’ll tell you why women are running out of men to marry
I was half asleep in the front seat the other day, coming back from some exhausting tour of an educational establishment, and in the back seat were two twentysomething female graduates. They were talking about men, so I tried to focus, while keeping my eyes cunningly half closed. Everyone has a sexual trigger. But just as everyone has something that turns them on, they also have triggers that turn them off. That fine line between turn-on and turn-off is where taboo subjects reside. What do you consider taboo? What turns you on and makes you uncomfortable at the same time? The answer to that question will be different for every person. Then act out the fantasy scenario with lots of dirty talk! The words paint the images in your head, and your body will respond. It’s the perfect way to taste the tempting taboos – but without actually getting in over your head. That’s another great thing about dirty talk – it’s a license to try out any fantasy you want, and reap the benefits without suffering the consequences! You can dig this site for the REAL SEX STORIES. Once you decide what you consider taboo, think about it in terms of talking dirty. You already know that talking dirty to your partner is a turn-on… but what about broaching those taboo subjects, and talking about those sexual things you would never really do? The fantasy might be a bit too far-fetched for you to consider making a reality, but there’s nothing stopping you from going all the way with your naughty talk about the subject! A friend of mine gets turned on by the thought of her boyfriend with other women. She has a fantasy of watching him, tied up and helpless, while one woman after another enters the room and proceeds to do all kinds of wicked things to him. In her fantasy, she’s sitting in a chair beside the bed, watching. She would never do it in real life, however. She and her boyfriend are completely faithful. So where does the fantasy come from, and why does it turn her on so much? That’s where the word “taboo” comes in. Her fantasy rides that line between a real-life turn-off and the fantasy turn-on. She fulfills that fantasy often, however, by whispering her thoughts into her lover’s ear as they are in bed together. Her naughty talk about seeing him with other women gets him aroused, too… and it’s a safe way to explore the fantasy without the risk of anyone getting hurt. What fantasies do you have that need to be fulfilled? Share them with your partner. Make it clear you don’t want to do these things in real life, but also make it clear that the thought of them turns you on.
One of them made the eternal feminine complaint. “All men are useless these days,” she said. “Yeah,” said the other. “The trouble is that they haven’t risen to the challenge of feminism. They don’t understand that we need them to be more masculine, and instead they have just copped out.” Everyone wants to know what the best sex toys for women are and really it’s always going to come down to personal choice you can choose between a plug or big black dildos perhaps. But if you have never tried one before and are feeling a little timid about purchasing your first toy, then bboutique guide to female sex toys for beginners is for you. Thinking about purchasing your very first vibrator can be exciting but also intimidating. Do you go in to a shop, do you order online, do you get it delivered to your home, and what if somebody finds out! And even when you get passed all these hurdles, how do you possibly know which are the best sex toys for women? When it comes to girls and toys it is normal to feel apprehensive about all these points. But if you’re feeling too timid to take the plunge with a female masturbation vibrator, then think again. Every woman with a sex toy has had to overcome these feelings and more often than not, end up becoming quite the collector! Firstly, think about how you are going to get one. Ordering online is usually a very reliable process and it’s easy to know what the top selling sex toys are from other user’s reviews. But if you don’t feel comfortable having it sent to your home address, you can always have it delivered to a friend’s home or collect it from the post office. If you don’t have the ability to order online, then there is no shame in walking in to a sex shop. There are many stores which now specifically gear their stores to the lucrative female market, so if you’re not ready for endless rows of black leather, chains and impossibly sized dildo’s, then immerse yourself in a shop that is specifically for women with happy pink rows endlessly filled with beautifully coloured female sex toys. why not try these out for best sex toy.
I am afraid that, at this point, I copped out myself, and slid into unconsciousness. But before I went under I thought, hmmm, this is interesting; and I think back to that conversation as I read that women continue their astonishing dominance of university admissions.
Look at those girls go! Women now make up 57 per cent of university entrants, and they outnumber men in every subject — including maths and engineering. This thing is huge, and it is happening at every level, and no one seems to be thinking about the consequences.
Most trainee barristers and two thirds of medical students are now women — compared with 29 per cent women in the early 1990s. If current trends continue, most doctors will be female by 2012. It is ludicrous for the Equal Opportunities Commission to keep droning on about “glass ceilings” at the top of corporate Britain, or in the judiciary, when you think how fast this transformation has been.
It is a stunning fact — the biggest social revolution of our lifetime — that far more women than men are now receiving what is in theory an elite academic education. When I was at university 20 years ago, the figures were almost exactly the other way round, with the ratio 60:40 in favour of males. Far more female graduates are coming out of our universities than male graduates — and, in 30 years’ time, when these people reach the peak of their careers, the entire management structure of Britain will have been transformed and feminised.
Speaking as an ardent feminist, I expect that this will have many wonderful results: a culture that is more feng shui and emotionally literate and altogether nicer, and an economy that benefits from unleashing the phenomenal energy and talents of British women who are — if GCSEs, A-levels and university entrance results mean anything — currently giving the male sex a good old intellectual thrashing.
Obviously a neanderthal corner of my heart worries about some aspects of the coming feminisation. Will we all become even more namby-pamby, elf-n-safety-conscious, regulation-prone and generally incapable of beating the Australians at anything than we already are? Hmm? And even if the feminist revolution is good and unstoppable (and it is both), we should perhaps consider some of the downsides — and the most interesting is that greater equality between the sexes is actually leading to greater division between the classes. Here’s how.
Since the emergence of our species, it has been a brutally sexist feature of romance that women on the whole — and I stress on the whole — will want to mate/procreate with men who are either on a par with themselves, or their superior, in socio-economic and intellectual attainment. A recent study shows that if a man’s IQ rises by 16 points, his chances of marrying increase by 35 per cent; if a woman’s IQ rises by 16 points, her chances of getting hitched decline by the same amount.
Now look at those university entrance figures again, feed in that basic human prejudice, and some recent social phenomena become intelligible. If you have a sudden surge in the number of highly educated women — more women than men — then it is not surprising that you have a fair few Bridget Jones-type characters who are having a tough job finding Mr Darcy. It is a gloomy truth that 40 per cent of female graduates born in 1970 are likely to enter their forties childless.
As a result of the same instinct — female desire to procreate with their intellectual equals — the huge increase in female university enrolments is leading to a rise in what the sociologists call assortative mating. A snappier word for it is homogamy. The more middle-class graduates we create, the more they seem to settle down with other middle-class graduates, very largely because of the feminine romantic imperative already described. The result is that the expansion of university education has actually been accompanied by a decline in social mobility, and that is because these massive enrolments have been overwhelmingly middle-class.
It is one of the sad failures of this Government that relatively few bright children from poor backgrounds have been encouraged to go to university, partly because of weaknesses in primary and secondary education, partly because of the withdrawal of the ladder of opportunity provided by academic selection. Once they have failed to go to university, the boom in the number of middle-class female students only intensifies their disadvantages.
Let’s put it bluntly: nice female middle-class graduates are either becoming permanent Bridget Joneses, or marrying nice male graduates, and they seem on the whole to be turning up their nice graduate noses at male non-graduates. And when the nice middle-class graduate couples get together, they have the double income to buy the houses and push the prices up — and make life even tougher for the non-graduates.
The result is that we have widening social divisions, and two particularly miserable groups: the female graduates who think men are all useless because they can’t find a graduate husband, and the male non-graduates who feel increasingly trampled on by the feminist revolution, and resentful of all these hoity-toity female graduates who won’t give them the time of day.
What is the answer, my friends? I don’t know. We could try fiscal incentives for heterogamy. We could have plotlines in soap operas, in which double first girls regularly marry illiterate brickies.
But the only long-term solution for the “uselessness” of young men, as complained of by my twentysomething colleagues, is to get serious with the education of males in primary schools. And if the Equal Opportunities Commission wants to say something sensible for a change, it should start campaigning for more male teachers.
I absolutely refuse to believe that this is the case in computing subjects. Throughout my university career men have far outnumbered women in this field. It wasn’t so bad in first year, but as things went on it got gradually worse, culminating in a roughly 30 to 1 ratio of men to women in my postgraduate year. Meaning roughly thirty men to one woman.
It’s because computing isn’t fashionable, of course. Nothing to do with a woman’s ability to understand the subject. I know this, because the by far the brightest student in the class for every undergraduate year was female. Us men were completely outclassed at our own game.
Personally, I don’t know any women who like their men to be feminised sops. They want Real Men (albeit ones who help out around the house a bit). Equality of opportunity between the sexes is right and proper, but the ‘feminisation’ of society is not as benign as it may seem.
Society was once dominated by men and male values but women’s changing position in society has marked a shift towards more ‘feminine’ ideas to do with compassion and empathy. I’m not sure this has done women any favours. It seems to me that these supposedly feminine values are, in fact, the product of a different phenomenon: the appeasement of envy.
When men held all the power, their supremacy was undoubtedly a point of envy for women, much in the same way as the poor envy the rich. Attempts to afford equality of opportunity has been accompanied by an orgy of masochistic self-abasement, driven by the fear of being envied – of being identified as the bad guy, the oppressor.
The result has been that men have abandoned anything that whiffs of testosterone and flattered what they perceive as feminine with preferential treatment. This process of appeasement has undermined the visions and values that once formed the basis of society. As writer Jenny Bristow puts it:
Too right on the computing front. I don’t think there was a single female in my class group by the time I reached the end of my undergraduate degree in CS. If females outnumber men in CS, I’ll eat my hat.
Just to back up the last two comments on computing graduates. I am a first year Computer Science student and there are no women at all in my class and very few reading any course in technology.
I agree with Chris Walker that computing isn’t fashionable. However if you look at the number of students for Media Studies, Sociology or Psychology not only is the quantity much greater but they are also filled with females.
I’d be interested to know what Boris thinks of the declining number of graduates in Computing courses and the consequences this will have, especially as we are now being forced to import many scientists from countries such as India and China.
‘Us men were completely outclassed at our own game.’
Erm, no, sorry. I do have to disagree there. This is what feminists will love to hear from men – i.e. that men have ‘lost’. The real problem with feminism is that it has imposed the concept that men and women are equal in all things, which is not true. Men and women have different characteristics that make each sex good at some things and bad at others. The imposition of standard teaching practices has blown an almighty hole in the education of boys with the result being that girls now out-perform boys in all respects. This isn’t because boys are less intelligent than girls but because boys have been abandoned within the education system.
The problem with some women these days is that they want everything and expect to get it – a perfect man, the perfect, well-paid job and career, a family, time away from work etc. etc. The fact is that some women have turned into snobs as the result of feminism. They now consider themselves the superior sex and winners in a war that never actually existed in the first place, until feminism came along. The new feminist society has prostrated itself at the altar of women and stuck two fingers up at men, so it is no wonder that there are so many ferral youths out there kicking in bus shelters – what else do they exist for? They now have no place in the new society. As usual with equality, the oppressed took one look at the scales of justice, saw a marble weighing down one end, and dropped a brick on the other to ‘balance’ things up. Thus, the net result is that we’ve swung from one end of the scale to the other, completely missing the solution to the problem and creating many more in its place.
I can’t help but think of the Two Ronnies sketch, The Worm That Turned, and laugh at its uncanny accuracy. 2012 really isn’t that far off, you know…
Andy – I’m not trying to disagree with all your post but let’s just re-word one sentence:
“The problem with them is that they want everything and expect to get it – a perfect life partner, the perfect, well-paid job and career, a family, time away from work etc. etc”
That sentence could easily apply to any educated person of any gender. I don’t see why it is a “problem” when applied to women. That’s really the point.
To get back To Boris’s point: I think male teachers are very valuable in Schools and know some very good ones. I don’t know why there are not more of them. Perhaps some of the males out there will tell us why they are not primary teachers?
Male role models in schools Boris? What about male role models in politics and other spheres of public life?
All the great things we have, our national wealth, the NHS, state education for all, the welfare state all exist because men have struggled and fought for them. Men have struggled and fought to get higher up the pecking order and to provide more for their families.
Women don’t actually need a man now. With the ‘equality’ movement, sperm banks and the social acceptance and mass marketing of sex aids they don’t actually need men any more. They can get a job, have a child, have sexual pleasure, get paid whilst they are having their child and walk back into their jobs. Men have become obsolete in mainstream British society.
Having been in control since time began there is no such thing as ‘mens rights’ or even ‘majority rights’. The equality movement is forcing a change in the natural balance of things. Most young mens natural opinions on society are cast down as ‘homophobic’, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘oppresive’ etc.
Be careful, or the likes of Adolf Hitler will become their next role model. In a society where ‘women’s rights’, ‘gay rights’ etc are seen as laudable, but any movement for the furtherence of straight men in society is seen as intolerable what will be the end result?
Off topic, but have you read Boris’s “The Dream of Rome”?
BJ relates the Roman Empire to the modern-day attempt to create a united Europe in a book characterised by very sharp perception coupled with a thrilling readability. I like to think my Dad, who said he was the cleverest pupil he ever taught (much cleverer than David Cameron) helped to make him the writer and Classical scholar he is!
‘That sentence could easily apply to any educated person of any gender. I don’t see why it is a “problem” when applied to women. That’s really the point.’
Yes, that’s true and I should have made that clear. Apologies. My problem is more with the encouragement, by feminists, that women can have absolutely everything. Men, on the whole, have found through experience that life is a series of compromises. Experience will eventually tell modern women this, but, in the meantime, a lot of them will continue to be pushed by our new society order into attempting to have the lot. I can’t think of anyone encouraging the same of men; in fact, I can only think of people encouraging men to take more time off work, look after the children and so on.
Steven_L, am I correct in thinking that you think the attitude which produces this mindset is wrong: ‘Women don’t actually need a man now’? Or do you think that it is true? When I hear that said and believed to be true it annoys me, because we are not obsolete – that’s just the way that women are encouraged to think by some people. In the strict sense, science can render males (a wonderful scientific term which removes all notions of humanity) obsolete, but science can also destroy the world (atom bomb etc.). Just because we are able to do something doesn’t mean that we should. I’m quite certain that in the future science will be able to render women obsolete, too, but I would never find it acceptable for this to be suggested as so. What so annoys me about that suggestion is that it removes any concept of our being anything more than just cells bunched together. I suppose that it’s the extension of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – that we have no maker and no purpose, we are only the product of random evolution. In that case, we’re essentially worthless, both male and female, so why do we bother to live at all?
<‘Steven_L, am I correct in thinking that you think the attitude which produces this mindset is wrong: ‘Women don’t actually need a man now’? Or do you think that it is true? (Andy)’<
It’s just a thought, originally communitcated to me by a male hairdresser (not a gay one), that I decided to share. I’d hate to think that women are starting to believe men to be unnecessary too.
My view is that for people my age (mid twenties) the traditional model of the family is becomming impossible to follow. When my parent had me my mother stopped working, for a whole ten years.
I remember that there were some girls at school who had the simple ambition of getting married and raising a family. This was discouraged on the grounds that women should ‘want more’ in this day and age. To me there is nothing wrong with women wanting to pursue this traditional role in life.
I used to live with a staunch Irish Catholic girl. She was engaged and was quite clear that when she had her first child she would become a full-time Mum. She wanted a large family too. She envisaged not working for at least 20 years, she was also dead against the idea of other women with young children working. If I said this I would be seen as a ‘chauvinist pig’.
If I got married in this day and age to a working woman and had a child it probably wouldn’t be an option for my wife to become a full-time Mum. Boris says in his article <‘And when the nice middle-class graduate couples get together, they have the double income to buy the houses and push the prices up — and make life even tougher for the non-graduates’<. The fact of the matter for most people is that it is impossible to afford the standard of housing needed to raise a family well without two good incomes.
So when I look at my parents as a role model, and they are good role models, that role has become obselete in todays society. My chosen career is just as lucrative as my Father’s was. If my wife followed the same career as my Mother did in radiology (or let’s nursing, a completely respectable career choice) once we were both earning our full salaries we would be able to afford a £150,000 house on joint income. Up here where I live in Northumberland that buys a two bedroom house in a nice area with a good school. It buys a three bedroomed house in a poor area with a bad school. There would be no room for my wife to stop working and become a full-time Mother to our child.
Boris says there should be more male teachers, traditionally a middle class job. In terms of providing for a family being a teacher is a poor option. You need to be reasonably intelligent and have a degree and post-graduate quaification to be a teacher too. All the young men that don’t go to university, or who did go to university but are stuck in menial call centre or admin work because of the number of graduates, probably feel obsolete themselves.
The traditional role of a man is to provide for his family. If a young man feels that he can’t do that very well, even in a well paid middle class job, because of house prices, what future does the family have? So you’ve got a load of young well educated women who can’t find a man who earns enough to provide for them or meets their ‘needs’ intellectually. Then you have a load of young men who feel inadequate in terms of fulfilling their natural hunter/gatherer roles as breadwinners.
What’s the problem? Is is women doing to well? Men doing to not well enough? Confusion over roles in the modern world? I don’t think it’s any of these. I think the biggest problem for my generation and the next generations is the cost of housing.
Contra the other computing comments here, one of my computing tutors circa 1970, always willing to give advice, was a woman. And a very pretty one too.
And Feng shui is complete phooey.
Of course, another problem with the feminist evolution is that feminists haven’t taken infants with them. These annoying little so-and-sos remain rooted in their evolutionary pasts where it seems that they formed the irritating habit of realising that their best bet for survival consisted of screaming until they see the face of an extremely well-known and trusted adult.
The attachment needs of huge numbers of young children are being mucked about with nowadays. Even if you are a sceptic about Bowlby et al, you only have to look at the long-term consequences for children such as Romanian or Columbian orphans who experienced severe neglect in the first year to life, to wonder if this sort of issue is not significant, even if perpetuated on a lesser scale. And despite all the attempts to make it otherwise, humans do significantly better on breastmilk, which all rather leads one to the old rather stark conclusions (ie: that children need mums and that mums need dads.)
Actually, perhaps not so stark. I can’t recall the precise number but a huge majority of working women would actually prefer to be with their young children.
On the matter of sorting out the education of boys, Andy is right when he says:
“Men and women have different characteristics that make each sex good at some things and bad at others. The imposition of standard teaching practices has blown an almighty hole in the education of boys with the result being that girls now out-perform boys in all respects. This isn’t because boys are less intelligent than girls but because boys have been abandoned within the education system.”
Yep, that’s the case. For example, the latest research suggests that on average a boy will be neurologically ready to learn to read a wapping six whole years later than a girl. Teachers in the past tacitly knew this and made allowances. Less easy to do now, what with all those SATS and the literacy hour. So boys just give up now when they needn’t because in another scheme of things, they could be playing to their strengths until they are ready to do the literacy thing, and then bang, they learn to read and catch up by the time they’re 8, 9, 10 or even later.
Little chance of that in any normal form of schooling nowadays, which is why increasing numbers of parents are choosing to home educate, and then also finding that they must insist that the state butt out and not insist on imposing their utterly uninformed and damaging standards.
(From female graduate who learned the hard way).
Sticking this sentance in having just run into the end of the page, I would like to say that I hope some of these paragraphs make a decent point. I think the one after the two line gap beyond halfway down is the most important myself. I have more points to add, but most of them are obvious enough – I think anyone who reads the following in full deserves a medal, alongside my sincerest apologies for wasted time and effort.
I finished 6th form last school year, and am very unhappy with the whole education system, especially in its attitudes to males. My own life has been heavily damaged by current attitudes and approaches in education; such that having ranked 5th in my year group in year 10 at a grammar school, from which 14 in that year group went on to Oxbridge, I am winding up as a bitter non-Oxbridge dropout. (My final results were 4A*s 7As GCSE, AABB A-level, plus a Merit in the English AEA – good by general standards but very disappointing for me).
The problem is, it’s a cultural phenomenon more than anything. I was at least able to go to a boys grammar school, and played rugby and ran cross country for five years, but I can’t much help it if I have friends who lambast me for not being a vegetarian, for not talking about girls, for being competetive, and for being a little bit on the angry side around age 16 (who’d have thought it, an angry and unhappy 16 year old boy?).
You can trace the cultural phenomenon through music. Even in the early 90’s, you have bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, which were sort of, closest modern equivalents of older masculine blues-y music. We now have a movement known as “emo” music, and if you know what that’s like you’ll get my point.
Within the education system itself though, some improvements could be made. For a start, split-sex education certainly works best for some guys. It does tend to increase incidence of homosexuality and other sexual deviances/hang ups..producing such luminaries as EMForster, TELawrence, etc etc…
Basically, the old grammar school/public school system served Britain very well in the early 20th century – it was very good at supporting intelligent males to achieve what they were capable of. Classics, Latin, rugby, formal uniforms, houses and assemblies, and a sort of tolerance of sarcastic comments written amusingly in margins and so on.
It is amusing that the sexually liberating feminist movement has done so much to cause the rise of “laddishness”/loutishness. Personally I’d love to see The Sun page 3 vanish, but feminism seeks to effeminise everything, and it is hardly surprising if men then cling onto the few things that make them still feel like men. Hence they tend to emphasise and exagerrate in themselves academic ignorance, homophobia, amoral sexual promiscuity, etc.
At my school, in 6th form females were introduced into the year. This had a decidedly bad effect on the year group – although I liked most of these girls I ever talked to on a personal basis.
But one thing which stuck out to me was something I remembered from primary school, and my younger sisters agree this is true: primary school teachers bias in favour of girls, because girls are easy to deal with. They’re nice and neat and smile, and offer to help the teacher. Boys can be angry and sarcastic and generally boisturous. Their comparative worthlessness is constantly ground into them. I survived, because I was stubborn and obtuse and a touch arrogant at that age. Moreover, I was taught subjects like Maths by my parents at home.
Anyway. I guess my point is that little can be done about the inherent cultural bias against males – one hopes that in time it will swing a little back again. These things do tend to move in circles – compare the foppishness of the Wooster novels with politicians from, say, Ed Balls’ era (appropriate name). However, we aren’t ever likely to see a return to neanderthal status, or to the warrior culture of the mongols, et alia; perhaps this is the beginning of the end of the male sex. Which I find a slightly depressing thought.
In terms of what can be done – well, honestly, boys tend to benefit from a lot of the values of the early 20th century British establishment education, boys need to spend time with their fathers, need to be allowed to ‘break’ from their mothers – boys who don’t have enough independence tend to react against this in any way they can, explaining in part the phenomenon of middle class chavs – they tend to react well to stricter upbringing and schooling, and need to be allowed to keep certain male preserves. It’s all very well complaining of, say, the macho culture of the House of Commons, say – but a)you can’t then complain if boys aren’t interested in politics, and more importantly, b) – I don’t go around trying to masculinise female institutions and culture!
The anti-smoking prevalency illustrates this too. Whatever anyone says – the odd cigaratte now and then does sort of, mentally reinforce you somewhat. I smoke probably half a dozen a month – if that kills me before I reach 120, bugger that, I don’t much want to be 120.
I’m hesitating at the start of every paragraph I write, because I don’t want this to be a typical rant on ‘elf an’ safety, nanny state, dangerous book for boys, etc etc etc. If boys are cut off from modern society, and shaped into being a male of 100 years ago, it only causes problems for them later – this was the case for me – the problem is to identify a modern masculine identity.
I guess the kind of culture I’d like myself would be, the kind of thing you get in a Hakuri Murakami novel. I have to say, when I saw the newest James Bond film, that was a bit of a breath of fresh air. Not my model male, but still, someone for males to actually look up to.
I don’t know. This is petering out pathetically, but I personally feel caught between two worlds. I personally believe it is possible to combine a certain acceptance of the modern world with a more macho and disciplined and self-believing male identity. But then, I can’t think of a gay relationship as a marriage – but I am generally sort of, in favour, of homosexual relationships – what was the name of that Theban guard? I sort of see it as a kind of close friendship…maybe that’s my boys grammar school education for you! I guess I’d say that feudal Japan, ancient Greece, bohemian-to-aristocratic Victorian Britain, and the semi-fictional world Murakami novels tend to inhabit, portray best something like my ideal vision of society. Which is pretty out of kilter with the Cameroony approach to society, which seems to reflect the direction of things these days.
I’m going to add two more points I’m afraid.
It should be noted that one problem is the current generation of young teachers. The way they do things tends to merely frustrate masculine sort of boys. I suppose the difference could be said to be embodied in a comparison of, something like, an essay by Matthews and an essay by van de Meiroop (in the field of archaeology). I have actually met Roger Matthews, and he’s a nice person, quite a humble person – possibly a better person than the more Oxbridgey de Meiroop, I don’t know. But not all boys can be like someone like Matthews. You can’t try to force people totally out of their nature and not expect ill effects. You wouldn’t try and force a gay guy to become heterosexual, no?
The education system fails to make the best of boys. Maybe you can’t make all boys into ideal modern people. Given that, you should try and make them the best people they can be – the best version of who they really are. This is an important point which modern teaching and even parenting tends to ignore.
If I look at my old self, for example, you can see this illustrated very well. There are downsides to me, and upsides. Society might not like my angriness, competetiveness, ambition, tactlessness, sarcasm, and sexual insecurity, but it isn’t acknowledging my hard work, determination, will to be a good person, loyalty to my friends quite especially – people tend to be very damning indeed of masculine males as they grow up, and it’s bloody unfair, and people don’t have a damned clue how much pain they cause.
Once a boy is forced to be emotionally open, he tends to lose strength and ambition, and even some measure of self esteem. Therefore it is important to *not* harass all apparently emotionless teenage boy, because there’s often a lot of feeling underneath.
And now I’ve forgotten my last damned point. So I’ll make another instead. Modern culture focusses invariably on happiness, and as a result, tends to favour and approve of immediate gratification. If a boy is pretty happy with his lot in life, he has no motivation to work hard. My own success was, undoubtedly, built off the back of a good deal of unhappiness. And very rewarding it was too.
There is a lack of ambition in society, and it pulls boys down more than girls. We don’t aspire to collective enterprise and virtue, but only to being happy and looking after ourselves. And parents are afraid or unwilling to do things on the basis that they are “good for” their children, which is part of the same thing. And I shall end on a final moan that female-dominated households do not provide the best environment for boys to succeed in.
It is all very well for middle class parents to make a society based around making their children happy children as they grow up – this ignores the plight of our “chav underclass” completely and selfishly. I don’t think it helps that women have a good deal of say in education, but don’t really understand what makes men happy, don’t understand the nature of male friendships, and so on.
As a sort of appendix to this disordered mess – take a look at Brown and Blair. I know a lot of people don’t like Brown here. I assure you, his cheating PFI scheme to flatter his economic statistics and ridiculous golden rule, his obfuscation, not to mention, even, his divisive focus on “Britishness”, – he is not my favourite man in the world by any means. But I do have a certain admiration for him, and get pretty pissed off with the way he is constantly criticised for being dour, unemotional, and so on, in contrast to the charming Mr Blair, or worse, the creature known as Mandelson.
I find it unfortunate that whilst Cameron makes an excellent answer to Blair, in attacking Brown he is only helping to further the disappearance of masculinity from society, not a traditional Tory aim.
Anyhow, Brown came 97th in that sexiest man poll – which is pretty good considering that he’s a politician with a dull image, getting on in years, without an exceptional figure or strong media presence outside the political sphere.
Quite a lecture IRJM!
I think that in less equal times, all women wanted was a fair crack of the whip – a level playing field. They wanted the opportunity to succeed or fail on the same terms as men. Which is all fair enough.
Unfortunately, the feminists who took over the fight for equality had a slightly different agenda. These people embodied the same mindset that can be found in all anti-establishment movements: a deep sense of resentment at the world for failing to reward their sense of entitlement. This resentment can never be appeased by giving them their declared ambitions. It seeks to deprive its enemy of its humanity – to prove that it never deserved the power it once had.
Once feminists had highlighted sex inequality, and society began to accept its injustice, they used this acceptance to ram home their agenda. This was never about equality, it was about appropriating the power they had been denied, and then trampling male pride into dust. This means demonising any traits that are redolent of masculinity and domination. Anything, in other words, that allows someone to enjoy an advantage over another. This includes competitiveness, ambition, robustness, fortitude, aggression, logic and stoicism. In their place, a new set of virtues has been established, based around compassion, humility, empathy and emotion. The lesson being that men should be more like women.
The collective philosophy of the new Left is now based around lowering horizons and dampening spirits as a way of levelling down society. The message is that if we all stop competing and striving, there won’t be the inequality that leads to resentment and envy.
The middle-classes have thrown themselves into this cause with gusto, as a way of appeasing the envy of others and of distancing themselves from the masses, who are largely indifferent to the guilt-and-blame game. This may all feel very virtuous and progressive but, as Carlotta pointed out, “There is a lack of ambition in society, and it pulls boys down more than girls.” Society needs acheivers and hierarchies for the benefit of everyone.
Some years ago the government of Singapore, facing a similar problem, instituted a programme of advertising & of running an introduction service to encourage male non-graduates not to be scared off by female graduates. Perhaps somewhat paternalist but surely better than all the adds we get telling us not to eat salt.
For example, the latest research suggests that on average a boy will be neurologically ready to learn to read a wapping six whole years later than a girl. (Carlotta)
Cobblers. Like most ‘research’ is these days. This boy learned to rede and rite when he was 5 or 6 years old. The girls weren’t any quicker. Nor the boys slower.
My principal memory of learning to read was the strong feeling I had of What’s The Point?. So, well, The Cat Sat On The Mat. So what? It was only when I read a little story about a mouse and a lion, that I’d never heard before, that reading suddenly became interesting. And I started reading everything I could. But I can well imagine lots of boys never got past the What’s-The-Point stage. There were better things to do – like play football.
Exactly the same applies to mathematics. Or anything else.
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/02/british-mp-blames-picky-ladies-for-uks-demise.php
By Sarah Horne 02/01/07 1:50 PM
“A British Minister of Parliament, Boris Johnson (MP-Henley), is
proving that retro attitudes in England aren’t limited to matters of
race. In “I’ll Tell You Why Women Are Running Out of Men to Marry,” an
op-ed for the Telegraph today, Johnson weighs in on the Dowd-trodden
phenomenon of overeducated women who are unable to find mates, blaming
the picky singletons for a decline in social mobility in the UK…..”
Oh dear, Boris has upset all the girly-boys with those comments you can bet on it.
About now they will all be empathising like mad and running around the house with a mobile phone clamped to their ears talking furiously to “Janet” or, “Denise” and screeching things like, “Oh, I know!” And, “Yes, I know!” And, “You would have thought one of the ‘sisters’ would have framed Johnson for sexual harassment by now, wouldn’t you?” in reply to everything they hear, in a effort to appear interested in what the other twat is talking about and with the other hand they will be masturbating like fury over an image of ‘Richard’ taken directly from the Richard and Judy web site.
Being a subtle sort of chap, not given to angry rants and getting the wrong end of the stick, (Ahem!) it came as a shock to me one day last summer when out shopping in Camden market with my grown up daughter, when our private conversation was suddenly interrupted by an eves dropper whose “eve” was being dropped inches from the back of our heads.
This ‘New Man’ type had heard me say, “I hate Camden at the best of times – all these bloody females stinking of Putuli Oil because soap is a stranger to them and their white “dreadlocks” are designated as mobile wildlife preserves by Prince Bloody Charles and his weirdo friends in the, ‘I’m-more-green-than-you’ Chelsea set. I mean, look at that idiot with the kid in a papoose strapped inches away from her stoned face!” I then indicated with a curl of my lip and a slight movement of my head, a nearby female who was licking an ice cream that was dripping milky white deposits on her crying child’s head and who was staring vaguely into space as she fingered a T-Shirt that had a slogan on it which read, “Greens do it in the garden.” Her other hand was held in a death like grip by a terrifyingly butch lesbian, who I would bet, worked for Camden Council as a special advisor on all things patriarchal/heterosexual and death camp building related matters.
I then turned back to my daughter and said, “That poor kid is going to grow up in some smelly bed sit somewhere in the back streets of Camden, convinced that reality is a fog of dope smoke and the ceaseless whirring of vibrators and assorted dildos. It’s hero’s will be chairman Mao, Dennis Skinner, Germain Greer and Tony Blair and its favourite toy will be a Peter Mandelson action figure that comes complete with a free Ken Livingstone doll dressed in drag and which has its own make up set and London congestion charge planner.”
At this point in my harangue against new age hippydom and the loony lefties that were all around me like a vaguely hostile tribe of right-on, deeply suppressed, angst ridden, wankers, I was gratified to note that my daughter was almost crying with laughter. Encouraged by this and the fact that she had been miserable all week because her boyfriend of two weeks had gone back to Spain and “deserted her.” I carried on and it was then that I upset the ‘eve carrier’ behind me and caused the idiot to drop his load.
“I know you are a woman, darling.” I said to my daughter. “And I don’t blame you for that. It was just the luck of the draw. ” I added, for extra comedic effect. “But, surely.., even you, with your limited intellect, poor vehicle reversing skills and inability to grasp logical thought, can understand that this poor kid is doomed to a life of endless lefty rallies against female victimisation by multi-national conglomerates – who demonstrate their evil patriarchal control over women by daring to make a profit from the sale of Tampax – and a diet of muesli, pasta and smoothies.” I paused and watched as my daughter turned purple and found herself unable to speak because she was convulsed.
You see, my daughter understood that I was taking the piss and not being [very] serious. Something the eve carrier behind me missed.
Ask any comic and he will tell you that the worst possible thing in life happens when you have your audience helpless with laughter and some twat takes it upon himself to start heckling you. In the next few moments, standing there in the boiling heat of a global warming inspired summer, and surrounded by a huge heaving mass of sweating, pressing bodies, I understood how that feels.
“I bet she and her lover-thingy spend endless hours discussing the virtue of crystal based meditation as a means of achieving world peace while at the same time, believing with all their hippy hearts, that unlimited abortion is in the, “best interests of the child.”
No sooner had I uttered the unspoken full stop at the end of that sentence than I felt a bony finger tap me on the shoulder. I turned to see a another new age hippy type white male, resplendent in, yes you have guessed it, unwashed dreadlocks. He was wearing dark blue corduroy trousers and open sandals and sported a white T-Shirt with a large printed blood stain on the front beneath which, in tiny letters it said, “Fur Free Equals Guilt Free.”
As soon as I read it, I knew this twat had never had a moment of guilt free living in his life. I could just picture him being force fed Muesli in a dope smoke haze of a nearby bed sit, to the tune of a whirring vibrator.
He was about twenty years old, but his eyes said he was over eighty. Astonishingly, I noticed he had wisps of grey hair at his temples. Whether by the vagaries of some underground fashion statement, or the endless worry about his personal space being invaded by right wing reactionary “normals,” I was unable to tell. Evidently, he was unable to tell that he had just tapped a right wing reactionary space invader’s shoulder because, if he had, he would not have said what next came spilling from his fried lefty brain.
“It’s people like you that have oppressed women for centuries and you should be ashamed of yourself talking to her like that.”
Martine, who was by now, almost apoplectic, stared at this confused youff with a sort of, “Oh shit! Bad move.” expression in her eyes while at the same time, her face was jerking from the effort of trying not to guffaw in public. She lost that battle entirely in the next few seconds.
“Who are you poking?” I began. Aggressively. I felt it was important to dominate this cretin in a typical right wing reactionary way in order to establish a general sense of evolutionary pecking order and because I hate being poked by left leaning strangers, on hot days, in Camden market.
He literally gulped. I saw it. A genuine gulp, that forced his Adam’s Apple to resemble an over excited child on a bouncy castle. The fact that I was a good six inches taller than him. Weighed about a 100 pounds more. Obviously ate meat and had a look in my eyes that screamed, “I may kill you in public if the mood strikes me,” may have caused the gulp.
I never got his name. We were never really formally introduced, but I am willing to bet he was called either Jeremy or Ken. I have noticed from watching BBC output that almost all, loud mouth, interfering, nosey, I-wanna-rule-your-thinking, would-be lefty male bullies, are called, either Jeremy or Ken. (Paxman, Clarkson and Livingstone spring to mind. Female lefty bullies tend to be called Jo, or Natasha. As in, Brand and Kaplinski).
[Editors note: In the interests of political balance and general spite, I should point out that Liberal bullies do not exist. Being threatened by a member of the Liberal party is tantamount to be threatened by an occasionally pissed off salad.]
The thing that had poked me finished his gulping and took an involuntary step backwards as he lost his sense of outrage and felt it replaced by a general sense of grim foreboding. I stepped forwards, as all good space invaders should and loomed large and pissed off over him.
“Run away!” I roared.
“Wha…” He stammered.
“Run away!” I roared again. Holding a large bunched fist close to the end of his nose. “I can feel a patriarchal urge to beat a sense of humour into you. I may not be able to contain this testosterone rush more that a few seconds.”
He gulped again.
Martine lost the plot and publicly guffawed.
He ran [well, sort of, politiley pushed his way through the throng, really] away.
OK. So what is the point? The point is that Boris, bless him, is taking the piss and the new men and rabid feminist lefties out there, who along with losing all sense of rational proportionality years ago, also lost touch with reality as their single and deeply oppressed mums fed them feminist bullshit every day and a diet of barely edible tasteless mush, bought with the money left over from a huge giro cheque and annual forced payments extracted from an absent, half forgotten father. After dope buying, rampant and pointless shopping and absurd patriarchal inspired Tampax expenses have been taken into account too, to be fair.
Though Boris would never have the guts to say this, (He’s a politician after all) the real reason women are not finding men to marry them is that most heterosexual men eschew homosexuality and therefore, the idea of marrying something that swears and drinks like your dad. Thinks it is a man in all respects and resembles a docker in drag, complete with tattoos, is abhorrent. They may sleep with her because she has all the required bits and they at least, still resemble something vaguely feminine, but marry them? Good grief no! Apart from anything else, marriage these days is like working for years to be in a position to buy a house and then giving it away. Who the hell wants to do that?
The cynics among us might remark, “But that is exactly what the feminised left want!”
And they would be right!
As for Boris, he is just joking right? Boris? I mean, you ARE just joking…right?
George Rolph.
The Oxford researchers found that 61 per cent of all travel emissions came from individuals in the top 20 per cent of ’emitters’, while only 1 per cent of emissions came from those in the bottom 20 per cent. This high emitters group is mostly made up of employed men in high income groups (earning over £40,000 per year). (Source: ESRC)
Is carbon emission part of masculinity mainstreaming or should that be other way round – expecting hardheaded men to get more physical – that is to say cut easy riding ???
Tayle(s) well said: “There is a lack of ambition in society, and it pulls boys down more than girls.” Society needs acheivers and hierarchies for the benefit of everyone.”
This is the real issue, achievers, role models and hierarchies respected – masculinity will follow naturally. I returned to Oxford after quite some time and realized that society’s change of aspiration and behaviour was overwhelming.
Excellent and humerous post Mr. Rolph.
I notice that you point to a more valid reason why our modern ( excuses for ) men are not marrying, feminism and government agenda which is destroying the nuclear family and conning both mothers and fathers into work like slaves while their children are indoctrinated and nurtured by strangers in creches.
A man has to be a fool to marry and have children in these times as he has no right to his ome, children or future should his wife decide to replace him with state aided hostage taking of children ( mother custody ).
A father has no right to his children other than to pay the ransom demanded by the government and its instruments of asset removal. he has the right to have a chunk of his salary removed by the government, who take their cut of the blood money before passing on to the mother.
As regards the education fiaso, if you lower the bar enough, even a snail could compete in the hurdle race. A trawl around internet forums indicate that many of todays university students cannot spell correctly or even write coherant sentences!
Many grls tend to prostitute themselves on ‘model’ forums as nude models in order to get guys with cameras to play at being Playboy photographers in order to pay their student loans.
Other than the unacceptable option of being ‘rent boys’, the male university students have to work in bars or accumulate huge debts in order to be programmed by the state.
You are quite right Mr. Rolph. Feminism and its agenda is largely to blame for much of todays societal decline and problems.
I’d just like to say that it was me who said “There is a lack of ambition in society, and it pulls boys down more than girls” 😉
Though I liked Carlotta’s post, and Tayle’s and some others for that matter.
RE: George Rolph’s post – is Boris “a Minister of the British Parliament”? So Blair’s resigned and NuLab have defected? Hurrah!
Stupid woman gets her terminology wrong 😉
Melissa: Yes, a bit of a lecture I’m afraid. It’s something I feel quite strongly about.
Since my line quoted above was repeated a couple of times, I’m guessing some people actually read my rant. Medals all round!
George Rolph: Anytime you want me to buy you a drink at Camden lock, and give me a running commentry on the freakshow let me know, you sound like an absolute hoot!
As for <‘most heterosexual men eschew…the idea of marrying something that swears and drinks like your dad’<
I dunno, I quite like Welsh valley’s girls.
<‘I’m guessing some people actually read my rant. Medals all round!’ (IRJM)<
I read it, I needed a cigarette break and another cup of tea in the middle of it, but I read it. You sound like you need to spend a year working in a pointless job, saving some cash, getting drunk a lot, generally chilling out and deciding what you want do do.
Now now Boris, this really will not do at all. This is a D-, detention, and See Me after class.
What on Earth is the message of this article? Answer: your contempt for other men and those idiot boys, “cunningly” disguised as self-loathing. We learn that you are dozy, that you copped out and have a neanderthal corner of your heart. We discover that you are an ardent feminist, who enjoys seeing state-school oiks getting a good thrashing in school. You personally have NO INTENTION of saving them because you think it is a Good Thing To Do, and that school-room sadism is unstoppable in any case. Lucky you.
Your solution is more men teachers? Well, that won’t work while the Minister for Education is an ardent feminist, now will it? That would simply confirm the disaster – or is it only voters with sons in state schools who are aware of this? Think about it, and think about who those sons now vote for as they reach 18. You have the figures I’m sure; feminist miseducation has brutalised their voting habits, probably for life, and we must say goodbye to trendy Tories, hello BNP.
Turning now to your other theme, the misery of unmarried women graduates, I think you deliberately flunk it once again. Everyone knows the cause of their loneliness: women require much firmer committment than the family court allows them to offer men. However, the profits from divorce and the pleasures of invading another’s marriage are too good to miss. Nobody important wants a fix.
A final big slap on the wrist. You claim that male non-graduates are also miserable, because of “hoity-toity female graduates who won’t give them the time of day.” However you also say “that if a man’s IQ rises by 16 points, his chances of marrying increase by 35 per cent.” Since IQ is not harmed by skipping university, it seems to me that bright male non-graduates are achieving marital bliss BECAUSE miserable females won’t give them the time of day! I think you would see this in a very positive light indeed, if you weren’t such an ardent feminist.
D-, rewrite by Friday, and DO remember how little feminism appeals to ordinary people nowadays.
A brilliant and fascination analysis. Very thought provoking. Certainly we need a new masculinism, one that takes on board the noble feminist critique of male pompous, boorish oppressiveness, yet rekindles the fires of male self-confidence and assertion in the direction of something more sublime. I believe that a new type of spiritual, somewhat post-Religious, male is waiting in the womb to emerge. Yet this is a question more for culture in general than politics I grant. One cannot socially engineer such developments. Your suggestion about encouraging more male teachers is surely wise. And original, thought provoking scripts in soap operas is also a good idea.
It was always the original stance of the best feminism that men should also be liberated from their subjection to their own gender templates. The wimpy, mother’s boy template is as traditional and conventional as the stern and bombastic emotionally sterile one. Both should be transcended. I am imagining (am I wrong?)this was the type of man your fellow travellers wanted, and not just a retreat to a pre-feminist male.
It is interesting how a corrective to some of the misandristic tendencies in some feminist consciousness, which tend to think men just hopeless by nature, will actually serve the nobler sentiments of feminism and the wishes of these twentysomethings for a better type of useful man, Darcy or otherwise.
So, less sexist misandry from women also please, in combination with a new, more refined fire in men.
George Rolph: Anytime you want me to buy you a drink at Camden lock, and give me a running commentry on the freakshow let me know, you sound like an absolute hoot!
Good grief! No! I mean, I would not mind having a drink with you anywhere BUT Camden Lock, but to go there voluntarily, no. No. No!
The only reason I went last time is because blood is thicker than water and my daughter insisted. I itched for days afterwards and every time I scratched my head I became ultra paranoid I had contracted Marxist/Feminist head lice. (They are different to normal head lice because they want to form “collectives” and raise their kids without male head lice in attendance in a lesbian “village” just south of your crown. It’s Easy to recognise them, they are red through and through and not just from being lefty blood suckers!).
Stephen_L – I am currently ensconced in student accomodation in central London working on my writing; applied for Eng Lit at a few places for next year and can drift along that route and go to Oxford for the MA or something. Haruki Murakami, Eric Clapton, running and writing. Hopefully be fixed for next year.
Anyway, I’m not that happy right now again – Scotland lost 🙁
Good post Alan Smith. Jonathan’s post is on something like the right lines, if I understand it correctly.
George Rolf – Camden Lock – it isn’t all that bad. I get shoes there sometimes, I got my key chain there a few years ago. It’s fun if you’re in mid-teens, listen to heavy sorta music, and haven’t been out much.
You do get disagreeable people around a bit…but anyhow, give me a Marxist over a vague Guardianista any day. On the other hand, most “Marxists” have never read Marx (including many who claim to have done so) and thereby are not really Marxists.
I mean – who would you rather have a pint with – John McDonnell (straightforward left-wing trade unionist type) or Martin f*****’ Jaques (eurocommunist and Guardian columnist)?
<‘give me a Marxist over a vague Guardianista any day’ (IRJM)<
I dunno, out of the lefties I find that the Stalinists are the most interesting. Being young and holed up in student accomodation you probably don’t meet any proper Stalinists. Most have moved on into their fifties, have nice houses in middle class areas, and are unrecognisable from the ‘guardianistas’ until they utter the telltale words ‘Uncle Joe’. Most Marxists argue that Stalin was not a ‘proper communist’, but Stalinist’s dismiss this view and recognise the harsh reality of enforcing a collectivist policy on the masses.
[Ed: comments to the moderator deleted owing to objections received on inappropriate content]
Most Marxists argue that Stalin was not a ‘proper communist’, but Stalinist’s dismiss this view and recognise the harsh reality of enforcing a collectivist policy on the masses. – Steven
Marxists are like bad magicians who keep messing up a trick, but insist on doing it again and again until they get it right. Whenever Marxist nations are reduced to corrupt, totalitarian, poverty-striken police states, they always claim that the ruling politicians went off-message and do not represent ‘true’ Marxist politics.
Marxists treat their philosophy as a work of science. They are always spouting nonsense about how Marx ‘proves’ the contradictions of capitalism, how the workers are exploited and alienated and so on. There is a near-religious fervour in their assertions. How sweet it must have been to read a text that rationalises their resentment at feeling hard done by. So I wasn’t being bitter, envious or touchy – I was being exploited and oppressed! Hallelujah!
Stalinists, on the other hand, are unabashed sadists, who think that a happy nation means sharing round the misery and enforcing equality with an iron fist. The pleasure they get from punishing achievers makes up for the degradation that their policies inevitably result in. What nice people.
More foreign cleaners, all crimes are tough.
Simple answers for clever people…
Pass us a computer game will you? …
The ‘social revolution’ Mr Johnson describes is indeed well underway and shows no sign of slowing. I don’t, however, consider it remotely problematic, since the thing that it is making redundant is not men, or women, nor even relationships between them, but the nuclear family.
The nuclear family is currently under threat from forces so strong I’m tempted to describe them as evolutionary. The increase in LGBT families; the increase in single parents; the growing educational disparity between men and women – all these are driving us towards an extended-family model of relationships.
The extended family has historically been the only sustainable model for a society in rapid social change, and so it remains. What’s difficult is disengaging from the rhetoric we have built up to protect the nuclear family. Why should women in their forties remain childless? Why should they not have children by themselves or with friends, or for gay couples that do not or cannot conceive themselves? If you have a snappy retort to this, I’d wager that it’s based in ethics – ethics that have grown up around the nuclear family, ethics that seek to support and protect it. The extended family has its own historical morality set, a set with which my generation is becoming increasingly familiar and comfortable – a set marked by pragmatism and boundaried not by blood ties, but by identity.
One might be fooled into thinking this our own brand of homogamy – but that’s not the case. The extended-family model is broad and inclusive precisely because it IS heterogamous; it seeks to provide as wide a pool of resources as it can to meet a common need – and given the right economic and social context, it does so very efficiently.
I find it incredibly heart warming, that a politician (good old Boris) actually has in his possession; a decent sized pair of hairy swingers to actually highlight the damage feminism is doing to our present and future society. It’s also great to know that there are still men out there, of the same opinion, who have not subscribed to this encroaching metro-sexual and feminist ideal that has steadily pervaded and forced it’s way into the lives of normal decent men. Men who want to just be men.
I only hope that Mr Cameron [inappropriate line Ed]…back to the centre.
Mr Palmer,
In your opinion, then, are masculine qualities timeless? Is there no leeway for social change in how we understand our own and other people’s gender?
Petra
I agree there is a need for people in this day and age to understand other “gender’s” and be more tolerant. However the “masculine qualities” as you put it, are being steadiliy and forcibly erroded. You only have to look in the schools to see the distinct lack of male teachers who would be seen as strong role models and mentors to teenage boys. Who have they got to look up to?
I agree with Palmer,
The real man is being attacked. What a bunch of spineless wet lettuces men are at the moment. What a unnecessary irritation feminism is. I hope it is a fad and one day men and women can live in harmony once more…and what fun that will be !!
Alan Smith. F-.
Re-read the atricle, circle the bits you didn’t understand, hi-light the bits you mis-quoted then re submit your comment.
It’s all very interesting.
I have to say, I find public schoolgirls very bossy and braying.
I am very glad that there are more opportunities women to work, advance in the professions and to have the ability to lead the lives that they want to live.
I am worried though.
The vast majority of the women that I work with and who have children would much rather throw in the towel or at the very least want to significantly reduce their working hours. In many ways I suspect that they have seen through the hopeless charade that we men have constructed for ourselves to value our indentured slavery as a “profession”.
This creates an opportunity, in that part-time working and withdrawal from the labour market creates spaces for others to progress and advance. But there are a number of dangers that I see: when this current generation of female graduates decide to spend more time with their families who will step into the gap? what is the impact upon their colleagues (of either sex) of the part-time manager (at times a superior’s “quality time with the children” was bought at the expense of my own work/life balance)?
We haven’t got this right yet.
Another point to consider is that the bright daughters of the middle classes have taken up training positions that may, in the past, have been available to the sons of less well off and less well educated parents, who will not have done so well at school or university, but still have potential. In righting an historic injustice I believe that we may have committed another as, despite the rise in the number of university places has expanded immensely, entry to the professions and the availability of training places remains as restricted as ever; it’s not just at primary level that we are letting young men from poorer backgrounds down and denying their aspirations.
Could it be that we (as in anywhere in Europe) do not have more male teacher because 1. it has been considered by society a female job and 2. the bad pay. Men seem to go for occupations that pay better. Not stating a fact, just an observation.
So British women are running out of men to marry: Good. Until they dump feminism they don’t deserve a husband to slave for them. So they’d better get used to holding each others’ hand. [Ed: comments to the moderator deleted owing to objections received on inappropriate content]
There should be a decrease in women’s involvement in paid employment and incentives for women to increase time spent looking after their families. It is obvious from polling that children are suffering as a consequence of women’s absence from the home.
Education should take into account sex differences and if parents deem male teachers important enough there should be some facility for them to pay for them.
Teachings is typically a ‘second salary’ and as women are prepared to work for second salary rates and men are not its not surprising that all the teachers are female.
Feminism has been really bad for boys and it’s been bad for families and ultimately I think it’s also been bad for women.
Feminism hasn’t given women choices because we impact on one another and compete with one another so if my girlfriend and her husband work full time and buy a house I have to work full time as well to keep up. This means I can’t choose to stay at home with a child if she doesn’t because the collective choices of others mean house prices are too high to make this possible. It’s a bind.
The issue of graduate women and non graduate men without counterparts is a problem. I guess having women competing with men reveals the fact that women’s IQ’s tend not to have the extreme ranges that men’s do. Some men have both astonishingly low as well as high IQ’s where as women tend to be averagely intelligent and we can churn through the education system very appropriately and get into university.
Massively low or high levels of intelligence will never be particularly well catered for in an education system full of female teachers with typically good but not exceptional academic ability. This makes it more difficult for lots of boys to develop their abilities properly. It also means this mismatch between men and women’s IQ’s gets played out in the educational and economic spheres and this makes the romantic competition more pronounced than perhaps it once was. But although there may be an educational miss match between men and women I would imagine the economic mismatch is less pronounced.
Society tends to value masculine skills quite highly. Women tend to want a partner with a good income and you can earn a damn good income with a trade which is a typically male preserve. The types of graduate jobs that many women do on the other hand often command some pretty average salaries.
Sad though that we can’t all have quite what we want.