Both sexes are deeply affected by the economic climate, but society is mute about male casualties
The psychiatrist, the late Anthony Clare, in a book published at the beginning of the 21st century, On Men, concluded that it was make-or-break time for his gender. He pondered on "the waning of the Y", referring to the genes on the chromosome that trigger the development of male characteristics and "the key to maleness". Men were seeing their patriarchal empire crumble, even as they still held power in all the positions that really count. Signs of female subversion were everywhere.
The choice was stark, Professor Clare argued: "phallic man" could capitulate, put his macho, aggressive, self-destructive, controlling, driven persona away and let his new, emotional, recalibrated self out of the closet – or face a long, slow and painful demise, "depressed, dependent and in need of help". It wasn't the kind of book that would have appealed to John Wayne.
What Prof Clare didn't include in his arguments was a consideration of how capitalism – or, more precisely, its failings – might speed up the process and how hard some men, unwilling or unable to give up the badge of superiority and the weird comfort of misogyny, would retaliate, and not just in 140 characters. "How much longer will we go on putting up with a situation where men pay us back what they owe to Mother?" asked the French psychologist Christiane Olivier, trying to unravel the knots of some men's hatred towards women.
While it may be useful, Psycho-style, to blame what Mummy did or failed to do, resentment of women's continuing efforts to break the chains, according to Prof Clare (and many others), is also fuelled by the binary view that if the so-called weaker sex "do well", men must do badly. In truth, the news that a third of women are now the main breadwinner, earning more, is neither a victory nor a loss in the spurious battle of the sexes. A harder look at the terrain of work and home reveals how many of us are progressing neither forward (or backward) in a linear way. Instead, we are lost in a maze, male and female united in the battle for financial survival, with a mounting number of casualties on all sides.
According to a report published earlier this year by the charity the Fawcett Society, one million women are "missing" from the UK workplace at a loss to the economy that is estimated at £15bn to £21bn a year, by the former women's minister Theresa May.
They are missing because of the perennial challenges, a lack of affordable childcare and the absence of genuinely flexible working that doesn't also require an individual to forfeit a career trajectory. Women are also further handicapped by the low pay associated with traditional female occupations such as the provision of care and unequal pay. Economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn have analysed the continuing pay gap and after allowing for issues such as job segregation and career breaks, they find 41.1% is "unexplainable", ie down to plain old-fashioned discrimination.
So, to put the rise of the female breadwinner into context, some women are earning well in a labour market that still is fashioned as if everyone has a wife at home. Other women are the main breadwinners because there is no man.
Many more females are stuck in the shallows (two-thirds of those on low pay are female), doing two and even three part-time jobs to make the unyielding system work better. Ahead lie even larger rocks. According to Fawcett, 75% of job losses are still to come, hitting the public sector hard where females dominate and which pays over 8% more an hour than the private sector to which they are allegedly being redirected.
For women, then, there's the churn and change; the issues of fair pay and equality; the struggle to balance a private life with the demands of the job market. Throw in, too, the challenge of what it means to be a good enough parent, given what economist Heather Boushey calls the "ship-has-sailed reality" that only the richest can afford to keep a full-time yummy mummy in the house. These are all ingredients that for the past 40 years and more have been discussed, analysed, fought over, mulled and generally put in the context of female change, orchestrated, researched and polemicised by many and varied voices. Not least the inimical Germaine Greer adding her contribution to the battle to redefine "success": "I didn't fight to get women out from behind the vacuum cleaners to get them on to the board of Hoover," she once said.
It gives you pause for thought. But where is the equivalent manmade process of gestation for today's versions of modern masculinity?
Heavy industry is gone; the service economy has arrived. Hierarchy, we are told, is no more; General "When in doubt, attack!" Patton has been replaced by sisterly collaboration. Unemployment is hitting working-class young men extremely hard, as it is the middle class, while loneliness is hammering their older dads. Full-time fathers are now not uncommon; shared parenting is more the norm (though not housework, but that may be down to female control) and David Beckham, with a working wife, tattoos and a penchant for kohl and facials, has become a role model. At the same time, we see increasingly nasty glimpses of puerile porn; the savagery of sexism; the violence perpetrated by some men in families. As Hannah Arendt pointed out: "Force is only used when power is in jeopardy."
Economics has changed, is changing, the world of women just as surely as it's changing what it means to be a man. But the latter is happening in a mute society, as if it's some terrible embarrassment that must never be aired. A men's movement seems too naff; men's studies too arcane; Radio 5's Men's Hour too self-conscious. There's no online Dadsnet or public space amenable to lads where discussion and debate is underway about which bits of the "old" man are being jettisoned and which refashioned and why, as Prof Clare once advocated.
In the developing world, traditional masculinity, supported in some instances by religion, is making its last stand. But what about here? We can't leave change to osmosis since it's self-awareness that accelerates the positive and works faster to eliminate the negative.
Clare, in his effort to define a man for modern times, quoted Alain de Botton on Montaigne, who said: "A virtuous ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly is achievement enough."
As sexual politics grow tougher, how might that translate?
