Our thanks to James for an embarrassing piece in The Guardian, titled, “The ‘masculine mystique’ – why men can’t ditch the baggage of being a bloke”.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Oh, I tried reading this a stopped barely three paragraphs in. One of the Guardian’s new male feminists; doubtless we will be reading about his sordid sexual past and the many women he molested in a year or two’s time.
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“afternoon school run before turning the laptop back on again in the evening”. As usual its all about comfortable professionals. And just as with women who do different things the “problem” appears to be that the chaps feel a bit left out because their rarity. Even in the article itself where it mentions a man with a less lucrative job it points out that fairly soon he’ll have to return to full time work! In other words there really are all sorts of practical reasons rather than “mystique” . For instance its pretty obvious why the fathers of young children work the longest hours, well obvious to anyone earning the average, mode or median wage. I’d be perfectly content if the small numbers of either sex who want to adventure into different roles, did so and simply enjoyed their unusualness, rather than this obsession with trying to appear “usual” or “normal” and berating the rest of us for our practical choices.
Surveys confirm that men too like to have time off work to enjoy children, the lucky ones may have jobs that can accommodate this. Of course the irony is that the jobs that do accommodate “flexible working” teaching, health, civil service etc. are becoming “toxic” to men, so the opportunities are probably reducing!
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Yes, most jobs that accommodate ‘flexible working’ are in the public sector, where men are in a minority and still declining proportion, and as pubvlic sector workers they’re 100% funded by taxpayers, mainly men. Men pay about 73% of the income taxes that pays for ‘flexible working’.
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I’ve read the entire article once through.
Fascinating in it’s narrow, bizarre conclusions.
Mike, am I right in thinking that the article blames the many ‘male tragedies’ and ‘masculine disgraces’ listed, on two things –
a) men working full time and not spending more time at home being stay at home dads and house husbands and
b) men trying to live up to traditional male role models and ‘strong, dominant, successful’ traits –
blaming men for being what we’ve always known as ‘men’
Am I right in thinking the article suggests the solution to ‘male tragedies’ and ‘masculine disgraces’ is to ‘feminise’ men?
Perhaps that’s what the logo ‘The future is female,’ on t shirts summer 2017 fashion trend was all about. No room for men in the future, so let’s feminise them.
No recognition given in the article to ‘male tragedies’ such as suicide being a reaction to severe life events such as divorce and the financial devastating effect it can have on men, or on men losing access to their children, paternity fraud, false allegations, males suffering domestic violence.
No recognition of males being frustratingly stuck in a feminised school system, teaching styles more suited and accessible to female pupils, delivered by predominantly female teachers.
No mention of men living in a rapidly changing, confusing world where increasing number of ‘spaces’
are being feminised.
No mention of the frustration of living in a consumer,materialist society where people are trapped as full time wage slaves to afford the thousands of things the ad men tell them they need which they don’t need. Read ‘Affluenza’ by Oliver James.
No mention of the frustration of a population working full time and not being able to get on the housing ladder and having a safe haven that is their own.
Men are living in a world that doesn’t seem to care about men. They’re ridiculed, aren’t appreciated.
Men are living in a world where only females are championed and celebrated to the rafters.
And Mark Rice-Oxley thinks that men are depressed and suffering ‘male tragedies’ because they are not spending time being ‘house husbands’ and ‘stay at home dads’ ???
Any article I’ve ever read about ‘house husbands’ and ‘stay at home dads,’ always seem to conclude that their female partners start to lose respect for such men and grow to resent and despise them leading to marriage problems. I’ve read reviews of a current tv programme called ‘Motherland.’
I haven’t watched it yet, where there is a stay at home dad presented as drippy and a bit pathetic.
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