A Plea for Men to be More like Women, not Less

Suicide rates among young males is a genuine social concern. The left should not back away from this simply because the right wing with its Traditionalist, anti-feminist and Men’s Rights groups have gained online hegemony over the issue. Not every conversation that begins with the chilling factual statistics over male suicide in the young has to erupt into the kind of reactionary denunciation of contemporary ‘feminisation of men’ typical of Laurence Fox and Dan Wootten.

On the contrary historical research would reveal that the origins of these groups were informed by a pro-feminist agenda of attempting to re-engage the role of the father, often absent in an atomised and alienated society in which a marriage or parental partnership is treated as just another disposable commodity to be jettisoned as soon as ideologically informed personal taste dictates. The burden of parenting has, under late capitalism, fallen to the mother. Rather than causing what the right wing call the ‘feminisation of men’ however, this asymmetrical inequality has created multiple generations of men for whom the emotional servitude of women in providing unwavering, unquestioning comfort , pleasure and support for men is taken for granted as a social fact.

This state of affairs fosters narcissism and indulges fantasies of male superiority to the degree that when the harsh biological realities of co-existence with non-parental females present themselves candidly to a young male, suicide can appear an attractive alternative to the psychological process, requiring introspection and critical self-examination, of disabusing himself of his acculturated assumptions about women.

This is not simply a matter of replacing mythic ‘rites of passage’ or reactivating the role of father, as if returning to a previous stage of cultural evolution were enough; there needs to be a thoroughly contemporary reassessment of how parenting and gender roles are assigned and semantically weighted in all domains: socially, economically, culturally, and politically. It is less a matter for ‘Traditionalists’ than it is for modernists, postmodernists and metamodernists who have critical insight into the social formation in which we are living and those of its elements which are arbitrary and contingent structures and moments.

Positive social change will not come about through the reassertion and retrenchment of former models of masculinity with its themes of the dominant breadwinner and household heading; these aims, accompanied as they are by the ‘trad wife’ discourse are pure and simply ciphers of anti-feminism designed to pick apart post-war progress and territory won by women entering the labour market, while also neglecting a substantial body of existing literature on the unpaid labour of women in the ‘traditional family’ imaginary: work in the household, work that is cognitively and emotionally supportive of working men. The religious roots of this imaginary remain to be reappraised and their theological and deontological freight reframed for a new millenium.

As long as the left abdicates its responsibility in this issue we will continue to see discussion of the transition of young males to an adult maturity, fit for the role of fatherhood, defaulting to the right wing topic of ‘the feminisation of men’ and the position of antifeminism a la Fox and Wootten. On the contrary what is required today is an honest appraisal of the multimodal, multiskilled talents of single mothers and the proposal that absent fathers today are if anything far more in need of a contemporary sense of feminisation.