Verwandte Artikel zu Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care

Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care - Softcover

Parker, Kathleen

 
9780812976953: Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812976959 ISBN 13: 9780812976953
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

With piercing wit and perceptive analysis, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Kathleen Parker explores how men, maleness, and fatherhood have been under siege in American culture for decades. She argues that the feminist movement veered off course from its original aim of helping women achieve equality and ended up making enemies of men. The pendulum has swung from the reasonable middle to a place where men have been ridiculed in the public square and the importance of fatherhood has been diminished—all to the detriment of women and children, who ultimately suffer most. Exploring our burgeoning culture of permissiveness and the impact of anti-male attitudes on families and relationships, Kathleen Parker tackles some of the more taboo subjects in today’s sexual politics and culture wars that will have America talking about saving the males.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kathleen Parker is a nationally syndicated columnist whose twice-weekly column runs in more than four hundred newspapers around the country. An H. L. Mencken Writing Award winner, she frequently appears on radio talk shows and is a regular guest on The Chris Matthews Show.

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1

women good, men bad

Males have become the portmanteau cause of evil behavior, and it’s acceptable to downgrade males.

—Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University

Jackson Marlette was just fourteen when he summed up the anti-male zeitgeist for his father, political cartoonist and author Doug Marlette. They were in a North Carolina chicken joint awaiting their orders when the younger Marlette picked up a table-top ad boasting boneless chicken and read aloud: “Chicken good, bones bad.”

Then, beaming with insight, Jackson made the analogous leap and proclaimed: “Women good, men bad!”

Yesssssss! Give that boy a lifetime pass to The Vagina Monologues.



Fourteen years isn’t long to roam the earth, but boys learn early that they belong to the “bad” sex and their female counterparts to the “good.” For many, their indoctrination starts the moment they begin school and observe that teachers (who are, for the most part, females) prefer less rambunctious girl behavior. Boys’ programming continues through high school and then into college, where male students are often treated to an orientation primer in sexual harassment and date rape. A friend’s son attended one such seminar on his first day at Harvard. “It scared the s—— out of him,” his father reported. “He said, ‘Dad, I’m never going on a date.’”

Smart lad.

America is a dangerous place for males these days. Look at a girl the wrong way—or the right way, if you’re a gal of a certain age (why do you think all those fifty-year-old women are flocking to Italy?)—and you’ll get slapped. With an open palm if you’re lucky; with a lawsuit if you’re not. Or worse, a visit to Human Resources for reprogramming. Misinterpret her body language and you might wind up in prison.

The first hint for Jackson and other boys of the now twentysomething generation that life wasn’t going to be precisely fair was when, beginning in 1993, they were told that girls would be getting out of school for “Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” a creation of the Ms. Foundation for Women and possibly the daffiest idea ever dreamed up in the powder room. This is ancient history now, but not irrelevant to sexual relations today. The familiar premise was that girls needed to visit the working world in order to visualize themselves in nontraditional roles. If they saw women only in the home, where more-traditional mothers presumably spent their days watching soaps and seducing the gardener, how could they grow up to be firemen, jet pilots, and Harvard scientists?

But there was more to the Ms. mission than role modeling. The subtext was that little girls would absorb the rage of their feminist foremothers and become militant grrrrrrls who could, by goddess, kick boy butt—anytime, anywhere. Marie C. Wilson, a former Ms. Foundation president, put it this way: “When girls came into offices, factories, and firehouses, we knew they would see opportunities for their future, but we also anticipated that girls would perceive inequities in the workplace and ask the hard questions that have no easy answers—like why most of the bosses were men and can you have a family and work here, too?”

Such feminist fantasies probably were not the burning agendas of nine- and ten-year-olds—or even teenage daughters—who more likely were tilting toward “Is there a mall near here?” It was assumed, meanwhile, that boys would have no such visionary problems, given that they saw men in professional and other working roles on a daily basis. The feminist narrative, now firmly entrenched in the culture at large, was that boys could afford to stay behind and learn the lesson that would shadow them into adulthood: that they are unfairly privileged by virtue of their maleness, and they will be punished for it.

After a few years of protest from agenda-free parents who had sons as well as daughters, the girls-only day was tweaked in 2003 to include boys under the broader title of “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day”—a nice gesture, if too late for a generation of boys who had obediently absorbed the message that males were guilty for being male and females were entitled to, oh, everything.

Or had they?

More likely, boys had absorbed the message that life isn’t fair and that girls are to blame. Girls weren’t really to blame, obviously, but kids will be kids. Nobody likes a teacher’s pet, and girls were the culture’s pets. We browbeat our kids about the importance of sharing and being nice, then one day the gender fairy flits into their lives and sprinkles cootie dust on all things male. Human nature being what it is, boys were unlikely to respond favorably to the news. Getting out of school for a day, after all, is otherwise known as playing hooky—while staying behind with a female teacher, most likely a feminist herself, to have his brain chip tuned must be a little boy’s idea of hell. I know it is mine.

That corporate America participated in the go-girl-play-hooky farce merely reflects how effective feminists had been. Men weren’t about to protest when daughters began filing in for their state-sanctioned day of privilege. Men have daughters, too, after all. They wanted to do the right thing, even if it was, in fact, the wrong thing for their sons.

If boys weren’t perfectly clear on the specialness of girls, female teachers weaned on feminist ideology were poised to fill in the gaps. One of my son’s middle school teachers studiously refused to use male pronouns, a curious tic I noticed during an orientation meeting. Every time a pronoun was required, she used she or her, never he or him, effectively erasing boys from the classroom. I sympathize with anyone wishing to avoid the awkward his/her construction. I also understand the inclination to alternate between the two—his in one sentence, her in the next—though such tortured pronoun equity becomes distracting and annoying. I even understand and often resort to the all-encompassing they and their, which gathers everyone under one gender-neutral third-person umbrella, offending no one and exalting the totality of Gender Oneness.

But Miss Andry, as we affectionately called this teacher en famille, went to the extreme of simply omitting the male sex altogether. Nothing subtle about that. He simply didn’t exist for her, while She was everything a girl-teacher could want. Miss Andry made clear her preference for girls in other ways throughout the year. One memorable day, she brought doughnuts to class just for the girls. When my then eleven-year-old son asked why he couldn’t have a doughnut, she said, “Because I don’t like boys.” Glad we got that straight. To be fair, maybe it was “Girls Day” and Miss Andry was kidding, but little boys that age can be nuance-challenged. We would find it intolerable, certainly, if a male teacher said something similar to an eleven-year-old girl.

Teachers like Miss Andry most likely are products of the pro-girl education reform movement that captured America’s imagination in the 1990s. Several books and studies emerged during that time claiming that education reinforced gender stereotypes that were damaging to girls. All those lessons about men drafting the U.S. Constitution and inventing electricity ’n’ stuff apparently harmed girls’ self-esteem. Where were the mothers of invention?

The Crisis Wars

The girl crisis got rolling in 1989, when Harvard professor Carol Gilligan claimed that her research showed girls suffered from a patriarchal...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812976959
ISBN 13 
9780812976953
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
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Verantwortliche Person
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