Fifty years ago last week, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, igniting an impassioned debate over her claim that millions of housewives were desperately unhappy, suffering from 'the problem that has no name'.
Women did seem to be floundering in the 1950s and early 1960s. Doctors puzzled over an epidemic of 'housewife's fatigue' and numerous American women dropped out of university. Newsweek magazine reported that US women were gripped with a malaise that was 'deep, pervasive and impervious' to any known remedy - although many psychiatrists were sure that tranquillisers could help. In Europe, too, observers worried whether women could settle back into domesticity after the Second World War.
According to conventional wisdom, women were suffering because they were being 'masculinised' by the pressures of the postwar world. Female students, as one prominent educator put it, were being forced to study a male curriculum rather than topics that would be of interest and use to them, such as 'the theory and preparation of a Basque paella'. An expanding economy was pulling women into the world of work and eroding their traditional feminine roles. The cure, most psychiatrists agreed, was for women to reject masculine activities and values and embrace their 'feminine destiny'.
Friedan had a different analysis. She argued that the problems facing women in the postwar world were caused by too much adherence to the norms of femininity and too little recognition that 'women are people too'. Women, Friedan claimed, had been ensnared by an insidious 'feminine mystique' that promised them security, comfort and indulgence in return for accepting their 'womanly' dependence and abandoning any aspirations beyond the home.
In Friedan's view, the feminine mystique offered short-term and superficial privileges at a high cost. In the long run it damaged women’s health and wellbeing, prevented them from adapting to a changing world and ultimately made them less successful as wives and mothers. She urged women to develop an identity based on their individual talents and desires rather than on stereotypes about what it meant to be a 'real' woman.
In the half century since publication of The Feminine Mystique, women have expanded tremendously the range of options and self-images available to them, successfully moving into new roles in public and private life. Today it is males who are floundering.
In America and Britain there is talk of a 'boy crisis' in schools. Real wages have fallen more for men than for women. Traditional masculine occupations are eroding but men hesitate to enter many of the fastest-growing occupations in today’s economy. Males are now less likely than females to apply to university and, if they enter, less likely to graduate.
Attempts to explain these contemporary problems are often the mirror image of 1960s claims about women. Many experts today blame men's troubles on the weakening of their traditional gender identity. Boys, they complain, are being forced to 'act like girls' in school. Adult males have been stripped of their role as family providers and protectors. Society must find new ways to validate masculinity.
In fact, most of the problems men are experiencing today stem from the flip side of the 20th-century feminine mystique - a pervasive masculine mystique that pressures boys and men to conform to a gender stereotype and prevents them from exploring the full range of their individual capabilities.
The masculine mystique promises men success, power and admiration from others if they embrace their supposedly natural competitive drives and reject all forms of dependence. Just as the feminine mystique made women ashamed when they harboured feelings or desires that were supposedly 'masculine', the masculine mystique makes men ashamed to admit to any feelings or desires that are thought to be 'feminine'.
Trying to live up to the precepts of the masculine mystique has always exacted a heavy price on males, especially in childhood. For girls, the feminine mystique was not rigorously enforced until puberty. A girl who enjoyed 'boy things' such as sports and climbing trees was affectionately called a 'tomboy'. At the same time she was allowed to cry and was excused for failing ('that's way too hard for a little girl'; 'I'll do it for you, honey').
Girls had such leeway precisely because they were never expected to compete for public success or to wield power over others.
By contrast, the masculine mystique demands an early and complete rejection of all activities and values traditionally associated with females. Boys who cross gender boundaries are derided as wusses, sissies, metrosexuals, called 'wet' or written off as 'mummy's boys'. Training people to exercise power can be a brutal business, as many upper-class British men can testify from their own family and boarding school experiences.
Boys are held to higher standards of stoicism than girls and receive harsher treatment when they do not compete successfully. Throughout their lives men face constant pressure to demonstrate their masculinity to others.
Mad Men's Betty Draper epitomises the surrendered housewife driven to despair Despite the personal costs exacted by adherence to the masculine mystique, for most of the 20th century 'acting like a man' was a good recipe for success because it conferred what RW Connell, the sociologist, has called a 'patriarchal dividend', giving males preference over females in almost every area.
Boys did not need to abide by 'girlie' rules, such as obeying teachers and studying hard, because discriminatory wages ensured that the average male who got through school — or even those who dropped out - earned more than the average female university graduate working comparable hours.
Nor did men have much need for negotiating skills. In most countries husbands had the final say in household and financial decisions. The television series Mad Men depicts how men's bad behaviour towards wives, mistresses, secretaries and female co-workers carried few penalties and many rewards. Everyone assumed that women would put up with such behaviour.
Today, however, conforming to the masculine mystique bestows fewer rewards and more penalties. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, notes in her forthcoming book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, that while the compliance and docility fostered by remnants of the feminine mystique still hold women back from top leadership positions in business and politics, those same traits do get rewarded in school. And in a world where educational achievement increasingly outweighs gender in the job market, that at least gets women in the door.
BY CONTRAST, adhering to the masculine mystique increasingly closes doors for boys and men. In a book to be published next month, the sociologists Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann demonstrate that most of the academic disadvantages of boys in education flow not from a 'feminised' learning environment, as is often claimed, but from a masculinised peer culture that encourages disruptive behaviour and disengagement from school.
As Debbie Epstein, the British researcher, puts it, 'real boys' are not supposed to study. 'The work you do here is girls' work,' one boy told an educational ethnographer. 'It's not real work.'
Reviewing studies from Europe and America, DiPrete and Buchmann report that trying to cater to the masculine mystique does not improve the academic performance of boys. In fact, the more the traditional gender distinctions are blurred, the better boys and girls do. Those boys who participate in music, art, drama and foreign languages have a higher attachment to school than the boys who reject such activities as 'girlie'.
The masculine mystique also contributes to the gender gap in university entry and completion rates. Just as the feminine mystique once encouraged women to neglect self-development in the hope that 'some day my prince will come', the masculine mystique encourages men to pin their hopes on the return of that 'patriarchal dividend'.
One study of seven European countries, including Britain, found that although parents still favour sons in inheritance, they are more likely to fund education for daughters, largely, I suspect, because they reckon their sons will make it under their own steam.
Many of the short-term privileges that still exist for men come with serious long-term costs. A study of gender differences in American university drop-out rates, published this month in Gender & Society, found that one reason why men have higher drop-out rates than women is they are less willing to take on the high levels of debt that are increasingly needed to graduate.
In part this may be due to the pressure men feel to become breadwinners. But it is also partly because the average male university drop- out earns as much in his entry-level salary as the newly minted male graduate. By midlife, however, male university graduates can earn on average £13,100 more a year.
The costs that the masculine mystique imposes are not just monetary. Kristen Springer, a medical sociologist, found that the greater a man's investment in his male-provider image, the more his health and wellbeing are threatened if his wife earns more than he does. This is a serious health risk, given that today almost 38% of UK wives outearn their husbands.
While the masculine mystique may seem sexy in the movies, men who subscribe to it at home have less successful relationships than those who have moved beyond it. Wendy Sigle-Rushton, a researcher at the London School of Economics, examined 3,500 married couples in Britain and found that the higher a husband’s participation in housework and childcare, the lower the incidence of divorce.
Research in America indicates that marriages where men and women are flexible in their gender roles tend to have the highest marital quality. Over the course of a marriage, husbands who become less invested in their masculine identity also report becoming happier.
As women did in the 1960s, men today are finding their traditional gender roles and values are becoming obstacles to their personal success and that they need to forge a new set of self-images and skills. It was not easy for women to defy the long-standing internal and external pressures demanding that we constantly prove our femininity. But our biggest gains came once we stopped feeling compelled to 'act like a lady'.
Now it is men's turn. They need to liberate themselves from the personal and societal pressure constantly to prove their masculinity. Men's lives will improve greatly when they assimilate the lesson that Friedan drove home to women half a century ago: act like a person, not a gender stereotype.
Tanks
Evan Birchfield had long been fascinated by tanks.
So when it came to his 50th birthday, there was only one present that would do.
As it turned out, buying one was the easy bit. The hard bit was sneaking the behemoth into the tiny West Coast town of Ross, where the Birchfield family runs a gold mine.
'There was a bit of stress involved,' says Andrew, one of Evan and wife Jane's three sons. He had been searching the world for a Centurion tank. 'That was all he used to talk about.'
It's quite a gift. Weighing in at 52 tonnes, the tank was first seen in Europe in 1945, arriving a month after hostilities ended. It was England's answer to Germany's much-feared Tiger tank.
Andrew's online search was so fervent that at one stage the US Department of Defence emailed questioning his interest. 'They were telling me to stop.'
He didn't, and tracked down a Centurion for sale in Australia.
'We flew over there and bought it,' he says. Tanks, by the way, cost about $130,000. Deal done, he turned for the airport. 'That's when the headaches started.'
Andrew had missed the plane. Normally, that's bother enough. But it becomes even more so when your Dad is the boss, a hard taskmaster, and you've bunked off work to buy him a birthday present in another country.
He rang Evan and lied about where he was, saying he was in Christchurch with a broken-down car, and slipped back to work on the next flight.
Then the tank got sent to the wrong port, turning up in Auckland instead of Nelson. Somebody told the television networks a tank was being imported and soon enough a journalist was on the case.
"We were trying to keep everything quiet," says Andrew, but the journalist had tracked down the business somehow. They were dancing around the office, trying to stop Evan, now 61, from answering the phone.
"A couple of times I said to Mum, 'Let's just tell him'. It'd be far less stressful especially when that TV crew started calling."
They managed to throw the media off the scent and get the tank on another ship, this time bound for Nelson, where an alert inspector noticed mud on the underside.
Andrew bunked off work again. "It was hard getting the time off," he recalls. He went up to Nelson, washed the tank and got it on a transporter down to Stillwater, from where it would be smuggled into Ross.
Jane recalls being worried it would be spotted. "They said, 'Don't worry. We'll stick a cover over it and no one will know what it is'."
So there it sat in a yard in Stillwater, under cover with a bloody great turret sticking out the front. "Well, you couldn't miss what it was," says Jane.
Evan, by now, had heard a whisper and the West Coast well knew he was keen on a tank. As Andrew says, "On the West Coast, you only need to fart and everybody knows."
Jane: "People were ringing him and asking, 'Have you got a tank coming into town?'." Early on, she'd dashed his hopes. "If you think you're getting a tank, I want an apartment on the Gold Coast."
It was such a flat response that, when he rang the transporter driver, he happily accepted the explanation the tank was there for some blackpowder gun club event.
They got the tank down to Cemetery Hill, just north of Ross, before off-loading it. Import regulations meant it wasn't allowed into New Zealand with fuel, so there was a bit of a panic finding more when it spluttered, choked and died out in the open.
Evan reckons he "nearly drove over it" that night, but they had his brother lined up to get him into the pub at the time it was delivered. By the time he did go that way, the tank was stashed in a neighbour's haybarn.
It's never simple, keeping a surprise present under wraps. Evan was up the next day with a bulldozer - he's been driving heavy machinery since age 9 - and heading over to the neighbour's place to do some work.
There were tank treads all over the place, so before Evan got there, the neighbour was in his own tractor driving up and down across the property trying to disguise the tracks. "I've got a new dozer," he tells Evan, which was a terrible excuse really.
Then they panicked, because the work Evan was going to do had him driving back and forth in front of the haybarn where the tank was stashed. So, a friend was recruited as a diversion and put in the cab with Evan. Every time their path went near the doors, the friend struck up a conversation with all the usual shouting and hollering that goes on in a bulldozer.
"We tried to keep it quiet but it was pretty hard to hide," says Jane.
But they did. And then came the birthday.
They were out the back of Birchfields Ross Mining, the expansive base of the gold-mining business, when a red car came belting up the road, hell-for-leather. It swung into the business, sliding to a halt and disgorging a cluster of armed men, all dressed like were in the Special Air Service or some special forces unit. "They came flying in there and started firing," says Evan.
Then came the tank.
It clattered along the road, apparently chasing the SAS guys, who turned their fire on the tank, like they were fighting for their lives. The tank, impregnable, turned into the yard, bore down on the birthday celebrations and rolled straight over the top of the red car.
Andrew says: "We could only run over half of the car because the guy who owned it wanted the engine."
Out popped the opposing force, dressed in a West Coasters' view of what terrorists might wear in 2002, the year after the World Trade Centre attacks. Broadly speaking, it's Middle Eastern.
"I was an Arab," says Andrew. "I was driving it. I got shot."
The SAS team conquered the tank. Evan said: "Then the SAS guys dragged all the Arabs out." The "terrorists" were held at gunpoint and many photographs were taken.
As for the car, the attempt to save the engine didn't work out so well. "It ended up getting smashed up later in the night after a few cordials," says Andrew.
Evan had a good night. "Understandably," he says, "I never went to bed."
Jane did, but woke about 4am. She says she looked out the window, next to where the party was being held, and saw Evan standing there, just staring at the tank. She watched for some time, initially thinking he was alone, then noticed a few other people still up. She watched and he didn't move, just stood there and stared at his tank.
Then, at first light, she was woken again when Evan started up the tank.
"Here we go," she thought. And off he went.
And for a few years, that was the pattern. He doesn't drive over cars anymore: "I got one stuck in the tread and it dug up under the mudguard."
There had been other lessons too. "I went through a house one day. I didn't realise it would break so much stuff off."
Eventually, there were repairs needed. "I went over to Aussie to get some parts for the one I had," says Evan.
The man with the parts said: "Have a look in the shed." And there was a tank. "It's for sale, too," said the man.
Evan wrung out his words with a fair dose of exasperation.
"Hell, don't tell me that," he said.
So that's two tanks. "That's our anti-aircraft gun in the shed there," he says, driving past a chunk of weaponry mounted on the back of a flatbed truck. "That's in case we get a tank coming at us from the air."
Evan was born in Grey Valley, where his dad had a contracting business. Evan started young, helping out with his father's business. The old Bedford truck: he can remember barely being able to touch the pedals.
The work just "dried up overnight" in the 1980s, he says. That was when they moved to Ross and began goldmining. There's a lot of regulation to work through. You ask him about tanks, and he says: "I drove a bulldozer for years and I always thought dealing with some of these public officials, a tank might be more useful."
There were a few people mining at the time and enough work for everyone. It created a collegial environment, he says, in which knowledge and innovation was shared.
The Birchfield business is alluvial mining, using water to separate gold from soil - a sort of massive gold-panning operation. He's aware it's not a universally popular way to make a living. "There's a segment of the community who really hate us with a vengeance."
The company started small but now employs 35 people. The business is a large part of Ross, with many employees able to buy houses in the town. They get well paid, says Evan.
"I can spend millions of dollars on machines but if I don't have good people on them I might as well not bother."
The goldmining business is all-consuming. "You can't have a hobby. If I had a boat or set of golf clubs I'd never use it."
If anything, Evan's hobby is mischief. One day he decided he'd like a dragon. "So we built one," he says. He waves a hand past the workshops and sheds to the back of the yard. "That's its head over there."
Sure enough, it's a dragon and a decent size. Amazing what a man with inclination, and a workshop for heavy machinery, can accomplish.
They call it the Ross Ness Monster and it made its debut when Evan and Jane's son Paul went fishing.
They knew where and when he would be casting a line. The dragon was submerged in the lake, with air canisters on remote control.
Once Paul was settled in, they activated the gas canisters and up floated the dragon, its head quietly breaking the surface just next to the small rowboat.
Paul pretty much flew for the shore. Evan cracks up, his arms are moving at a blur, miming a freaked-out Paul rowing so fast he's flying through the air. "He's in the middle of the air, rowing for the shore."
That was when the tank emerged through the undergrowth. A huge BOOM roared out as pyrotechnics in the barrel ignited, and then there was a BAM as a matching charge went off in the dragon's head.
Oh yes, says Evan: "It's good to have a second childhood."
Gentlemen
I am sitting in the office of the editor of Country Life - surrounded by antiques and photographs of stately homes - debating how exactly you identify a modern gentleman from a non gent. According to Mark Hedges, a gentleman will text but not tweet 'because that's vulgar, it's showing off'. Oh.
But David Beckham tweets, and David Beckham is a gentleman - or so said Country Life two years ago. The Beckham article went viral and, encouraged by the response, this month the magazine launches its Gentleman of the Year Awards. Beckham may well turn out to be CLGOTY 2014. 'Well, OK then, a gentleman doesn't ride a motorbike,' Hedges says confidently.
Really? But David Beckham loves motorbikes, and what about Lawrence of Arabia? 'Fair enough. Ah . . . ' this could be it, the gentleman clincher. 'I think a gentleman wouldn't spend time looking in the mirror and he doesn't bother with . . .' Hedges gestures dismissively to his parting. What? Hair products? I feel rude mentioning DB yet again, but he is the Prince of Man Products.
'The thing is,' says Hedges, patiently, 'being a gentleman is not about following a set of rules. You can't go out and buy 20 things on a list and become a gentleman. It's about an attitude, about being at ease with yourself and putting other people at their ease.' An example of lack of gentlemanliness was, in his view, Gordon Brown refusing to wear a white tie at the Mansion House.
It's going shirtless in public like Simon Cowell, 'and you wouldn't eat in the street either. I mean you absolutely wouldn't because you are not doing anything that might be distasteful to other people. We had a debate in the office and we decided if you were invited to a latex party you would wear latex because you wouldn't want to upset your host.'
It's also worth noting - from Hedges' shortlist of gentleman's do's - that a gentleman is occasionally drunk but never disorderly, he doesn't sunbathe and he 'makes love' on his elbows. 'Yup,' says Hedges, not looking particularly at ease now. 'I think what that suggests is more that a gentleman is a considerate lover. And he would drive you home the morning after.'
Can a gentleman be unfaithful, I ask, glancing at the poster of the Prince of Wales. 'I think so. Yes. But if he were a womaniser that would be more difficult.'
It's fun, this game - though you could argue that restoring pride in gentlemanliness and refreshing the image for the early 21st century is a serious business. (The day we meet in Hedges' office a UN report has concluded that a boys' club sexist culture is more pervasive in Britain than in any other country.)
For a while now the notion of gentlemanliness has been as fashionable as snuff. It's become associated with damp tweed and labradors, gentlemen's clubs (invariably dens of iniquity) and bigotry. But this is no fault of gentlemen, who come from all walks of life and in all guises and are by no means all stuffed shirts.
When Mick Jagger took the rap for Marianne Faithfull's drugs after the Redlands drug bust, that was a supreme act of gentlemanliness. And the man with the tattoos who tapped on the window of my car last week while I was reversing out of a particularly tight space in Tesco Metro and generously offered to reverse it for me was a modern gent of the first order.
Still, if gentlemanliness is to become newly aspirational we have a responsibility to ensure that we don't unleash a horde of cravat-wearing smoothies leering 'after you, madam'. There is nothing so creepy as a man putting on lovely manners - textbook charm wheeled out for the ladies or for foreigners (in America in particular, when certain men come over all brollies and 'Oh, my goodness').
Dan Rookwood, who has just moved to New York to become editor of MrPorter.com, is aware of both the advantages of being an English gentleman abroad - 'what's not to like about being considered polite, graceful, stylish?' - and the pitfalls. Strangers have stopped him in the street to ask 'English or gay?' because of his habit of dressing in natty Savile Row suits and brogues. But he remains steadfast because of his belief that high standards will get you anywhere.
'The Hugh Grant-style gentleman is very cliched. It's an act. Being a gentleman has nothing to do with a plummy voice and a foppish fringe or opening doors,' he says. 'It's to do with being nice, warm, a good communicator.'
That particular Grant brand of responsibility-shy public school charmer is not helpful to the gentleman's cause. 'The brilliant stereotype that Grant created is outmoded,' confirms Dylan Jones, editor of GQ.
If Jones had to pick someone who embodies the new spirit of gentlemanliness he would choose Grant's rival in the Bridget Jones films, Colin Firth - the self-effacing, considerate, grown-up one. (As it happens, Firth is also on Hedges' list, along with Sir David Attenborough, Justin Welby, Michael Middleton and, notably, David Miliband). Forbearance, holding your head up and maintaining your dignity in the cruellest circumstances is, of course, the greatest test of a gentleman.
To get the women's vote, however, the modern gent must pass the other big test - does he like women, treat them with respect and support them as equals? We all know men who are dazzlingly attentive and thoughtful when they're in the company of females they wouldn't mind sleeping with, but the true gentleman is the one who engages the whiskery old lady in conversation - without thinking for a moment that he is being generous - and makes her feel 25 again.
The most gentlemanly behaviour I recently witnessed was a man berating a perfectly good chair ('I can't believe we haven't thrown this thing out') after a woman slid off it, blind drunk. Apologising profusely, he then set about getting her another drink, instantly averting any potential humiliation. And the big test? After she left he refused to indulge in any discussion of the incident, preferring instead to take the blame for 'over serving'. Things just work out better with a gentleman in the room.
Men who refuse to bad-mouth anyone - especially women - are more attractive, not to mention trustworthy, and there are more of them around than you might think, according to Rachel Johnson. During her time as editor of The Lady she wanted to run a column called The Gent in which men would vent about how awful women were.
'I tried and I tried,' she says. 'The problem is it is impossible to get men to write knocking copy about their wives and girlfriends in the way that women will do at the drop of a hat. A gentleman never tells. He never talks about sex or what people are like in bed and that hasn't changed.'
To her mind, old-school manners are still relevant and, if anything, more effective than ever. 'Walking on the road side of the pavement, going around to open the passenger door, someone paying for your taxi before you get into it. Those little things make people swoon,' provided, that is, they are part of a reconstructed, domesticated package. It goes without saying that old-fashioned manners work for men - at least those under 65 - only if they are genuinely modern in their outlook.
'You expect a gentleman now not to duck difficult conversations,' says Johnson. 'He's sharing the load 50/50 at home. He does the cooking and he's shopped and he clears up.' And he's probably wearing jeans. 'I find all gentlemanly attire quite spooky.' He's also - and this is fairly new - not just good with children but keen to spend time with them. The man who says 'I've drawn the short straw and got the kids tonight' is no gentleman.
Can you be a gentleman and work in politics, I wonder. Is David Cameron a gentleman? Hedges thinks not. 'I think he's probably tried but it is all but impossible. If you are surrounded by others who are not gentlemen, as you are in Westminster, and some forms of journalism [ahem], it is the greatest test.'
And would he call himself a gentleman? 'If you call yourself a gentleman, I think you've probably missed the point.'
Short Man's Lament
There are very few things that fill me with blind, foaming-at-the-mouth, let's-burn-some-cars, hey-did-you-bring-the-kerosene, no-I-left-it-in-my-other-pants rage. At the very top of this short list is the depressing and indeed pathetic lack of solidarity among short men. The real problem facing short men is not that we are often looked down upon by the rest of society. The real problem is that short men routinely sell out other short men.
Most of you know that short people have it rough in a society like ours. In affluent countries, tall people live longer than short people. Tall people also earn more than short people, and they tend to have more prestigious jobs. Why might this be the case? About a decade ago, Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlethwaite, and Dan Silverman offered a provocative hypothesis: What really shapes adult earnings is not one's current height, but rather height in one's teenage years. They found that controlling for height in one's teen years essentially wipes out the effect of adult height on earnings for white men. This suggests that it is not so much discrimination that is holding short people back, rather it is the way our adolescent experiences shape our life trajectories. For example, being tall as a teenager could make you more socially confident, which in turn will translate into making you more likely to pursue educational opportunities that will redound to your benefit later in life.
More recently, the economists Anne Case and Christina Paxson offered a more sobering take: The main reason height and earnings are so closely related is that height is positively associated with cognitive ability. That is, the taller you are, the smarter you are (on average). This is a bit of an oversimplification, as what really matters, according to Case and Paxson, is whether you've had access to the resources you need to reach your full growth potential. If you were destined to be as tall as the professional basketball player Hasheem Thabeet, who stands at 7-foot-3, yet you're only as tall as Hakeem Olajuwon, who is a mere 6-foot-10, there's a good chance that you didn't get the nutrition and the good vibes you needed to flourish as a wee babe. But if you were always going to max out at 5 feet and you make it to that size, you're in solid shape as far as cognitive development goes. Even so, it's not crazy to assume that, on average, the taller among us had early development advantages over the shorter among us. So should short men rage against mustache-twirling capitalists because we fare less well than tall men in the labor market? No, I don't think so.
It's also true that short people, and particularly short men, tend to be disfavored in the mating market, as Ann Friedman has noted. I don't see this as a grave injustice either. While it's true that many women might profit from giving short men a second look, since awesome short men are less in-demand than their taller counterparts - I call this 'shortbitrage' - it's also true that short men are generally less likely to kill a woolly mammoth for you. This is not to say that short men can't do amazing things. Speaking only for myself, I can recite every line from Ghostbusters and I can make a pretty decent origami velociraptor. But it is easy to see why women might prefer men who can defeat other men in hand-to-hand combat, and this is an area where short men tend not to excel.
What is troubling, however, is that short men do not act as a unified bloc. Some years ago, Gallup surveyed American men on their attitudes toward height. They divided their sample of men into three groups: those below 5-foot-8, those between 5-foot-9 and 5-foot-11, and those above 6 feet. When asked if they'd prefer to be taller or to remain at their current height, 78 percent of men in the tallest third said that they'd remain at their current height while only 19 percent said that they'd like to be taller. Among men in the shortest third, in contrast, 54 percent said that they'd prefer to remain at their current height while 45 percent said that they'd prefer to be taller. As I read these numbers, a deep sadness came over me. With so many short men eager to be taller, it’s no wonder that we fail to hang together in the face of a hostile world.
As I go through life, I will occasionally say, 'well, as a short person ...' before making some observation. And I've found that my interlocutor will often interject something to the effect of, 'Hey, you're not that short,' as if to reassure me. But why would this be reassuring if there were nothing wrong with being short? This is the root of the problem. I come from a long line of fierce and proud short people, who proved resilient in the face of all manner of natural calamity. My ancestors had small bodies that were tailor-made for sweating, which allowed them to work long hours in sweltering heat in South Asia's swampy marshlands. The notion that being short is something to be ashamed of strikes me as deeply wrongheaded.
One result of this deep-seated prejudice is that short men often lie about their height. Perhaps you think that adding a half-inch or so is entirely innocent, as all you're doing is rounding up to the nearest even number. Others go even further, adding an inch or three in the hope that they will escape the stigma of shortness. Given the long odds facing short men, I understand the logic behind this kind of deception. Has it occurred to you that this practice leads people to discount self-reported height, for the good and obvious reason that self-reporting of height can't be trusted? You're not fooling anyone.
Yet I wonder if short men as a whole might benefit from a different deception, namely a collective decision on the part of slightly short men to round down rather than round up. The next time someone asks you, 5-foot-8 guy, how tall you are, tell them that you are 5-foot-1. If your response is met with disbelief, tell your nosy friend that you use an elaborate system of levers and pulleys to create the illusion of stature, or that you've been performing a series of exercises designed to reduce your stature over time in an effort to reduce your carbon footprint. Think of this as a teachable moment, in which you can explain how smaller people consume fewer resources, whether in the form of food and nutrients (we eat less), energy (we're lighter, so we can travel further per gallon), or fabric (we need less of it to fully clothe our bodies). Rounding down is a way for the slightly short to convey that they reject heightism, and that they are willing to sacrifice some of their privilege to build a better, fairer world.
To be sure, rounding up is not the worst thing in the world. I'll tell you what is the worst thing in the world. It is that short men who have internalized heightist attitudes are more likely to stand by as those shorter than them are casually mistreated. In our culture, men who are 5-foot-8 don't see men who are 5-foot-1 as comrades. They treat their shorter brothers as strangers, or perhaps even as objects of pity or contempt. In the 2003 film The Station Agent, the protagonist, Finbar McBride, a dwarf, retreats into rural isolation in part to escape the constant gawping and the cruel taunts he experiences as a city dweller. Where were the slightly shorter-than-average men who might have said something? Chances are that at least some of them were doing the taunting themselves, or laughing right alongside the taunters.
Short men, stand up for yourselves! Seriously, stand up. Wait, you're already standing up? Oops. My bad. More...
To the short men among you, I'd like to ask: Have you ever poked fun at someone for their size? Have you done so to delight your taller friends, and to establish that you are truly one of them? If so, I'd like you to think hard about the place in hell that is reserved for your ilk. If you have no fear of hell, consider this: Do you think that your chums respect you more or less for selling out one of your own?
It is those men who hover within spitting distance of the average height who have a special obligation to stick up for short men as a whole. When other short men are getting pushed around, it is these men who must speak up. Is someone making fun of 'midgets'? Now is the time to get in their face. When presented with the opportunity to seamlessly blend in with average-sized or tall people, it is these men who must reject it, and to assert the importance of treating all people fairly and humanely, regardless of their size. And if the time comes when discrimination against short people intensifies, it is these men who must join the general strike that will bring the entire architecture of anti-short-people oppression to its knees. My credo is simple: Stay short. Stay strong. And when you see a short brother in need, do something about it.
AA Gill on Men's TV
Do you think I can call Danny Cohen, the BBC's director of television, niggardly? I think so. Because he is - and, before you start tweeting, niggardly and the n-word are unrelated. The n-word derives from the Spanish word for black. Niggardly originates with the Norse word for someone who fusses over small things, and has come to include meanness and small-mindedness.
I haven't written about Clarksongate before now, because, first, I'm not an honest broker - Jeremy is an old friend and a colleague - and anyway, it was all utter nonsense, a manufactured row made to make the theatrically shocked and faux-appalled feel warmly self-righteous and conscientiously caring.
Two things have moved me to offer an opinion. One is abuse of something I believe in and consider a good and important thing: political correctness. Like nouvelle cuisine, political correctness began as a marvellous concept, a great idea that fat, bald, moist people like to mock instead of having original opinions, because they think it's poncey (from the French 'Alphonse' - a kept man). It was a fine principle to induce cultural good manners and take the foul language out of bad practice.
But at the BBC and a lot of other places, the language is now the sin itself. How much easier it is not to have to do anything about racism and prejudice: you can simply tut at other people's speech. So the BBC can have emergency meetings, inquiries and consultations about a nursery rhyme, or a DJ playing an old song, sung by a dead person, to Devon, but it doesn't bother to look at the appalling lack of diversity in its own hierarchy, or at the cringeing tokenism on screen. Where are the black presenters of Countryfile or the Chelsea Flower Show or Antiques Roadshow? For a generation, we have been paying lip service to the idea of a really multicultural broadcaster, but precious little more than a newsreader and a kiddie presenter or two have been appointed.
Then there is Jeremy himself. If he's so offensive to BBC company culture, why haven't they fired him? Well, obviously he's good at what he does: Top Gear is a huge earner. But nobody asks why. Why does he get by far and away the biggest audience on BBC2? Why is Clarkson the most popular presenter on television by miles?
It's because Top Gear is virtually the only programme the BBC makes specifically for men. It simply doesn't like thinking about men's broadcasting at all. The corporation will tell you it gets mixed audiences for EastEnders and The One Show and Question Time, but the truth is, it is happiest making metrosexual, distaff TV. Jeremy is so popular because he is the sole representative of blokedom. Blokes are also licence-fee payers, and the BBC has an obligation to serve them.
Penis Size
A medical study has answered the question that has long worried many men: how long is the average penis? Researchers at King’s College Hospital, London studied the length of more than 15,000 penises in the most complete study to date.
The review, which gathered data from 17 studies, was published in the urology journal BJU International, and showed that the average penis was 3.6in (9.14cm) when flaccid and 5.2in when erect.
The study also showed that 2 per cent of men suffered from some form of penis dysmorphia, where their fears over penis size are severe enough to be considered a psychological condition.
In an internet study involving 55,000 respondents, included in the review, just over half of men said that they were satisfied with the size of their genitalia, while 85 per cent of women said that they were satisfied with that of their partner.
David Veale, the consultant psychiatrist who led the study, and who specialises in body dysmorphic disorder, said that he hoped the study, whose data was formatted into graphs, would allow men to realise that their penis size was within a normal range.
What Men Talk About
NEW man is alive and well and to be found in the pub with his mates, according to the results of a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
Television producers, who installed 25 cameras in the Lord Nelson pub on the Isle of Dogs in east London, discovered that the main topics of conversation among male drinkers were subjects such as relationship issues, difficulties with children and sexual problems.
During 70 hours of filming at the pub, which attracts drinkers ranging from the unemployed and labourers to professional workers at nearby Canary Wharf, football was not mentioned and women were discussed only rarely.
One man talked about how he realised he was gay while dating a married woman who also seeing another man. 'Do you think that experience [of seeing a married woman] had any psychological effect on how you feel towards women nowadays?' he is asked. 'Yes,' he replies. Three middle-aged drinkers are seen talking about erectile dysfunction, a subject treated with both humour and sympathy, while a 35-year-old man reveals his fears about a forthcoming kidney transplant. 'My kidneys are failing . . . If I don't have this operation I ain't going to last,' he says. His friends urge him 'to be strong'.
Another man tells friends how much he values them because his parents rarely showed him affection. 'When I met you guys, it felt different,' he says.
Jamie Campbell, executive producer of the programme to be broadcast on Channel 4 on Thursday, said: 'What we're doing is quite anthropological, not to the degree of a David Attenborough natural history programme but there is an element of that . . . Men speak very differently when women aren't there . . . They are much less guarded.'
Campbell believes that while feminism has given women 'a handbook' to life, men are bewildered about how to behave and are suffering because of the closure of an estimated 30 pubs across Britain each week.
While drinkers at the Lord Nelson, which was built in 1855, were told they were being filmed, the landlady Kim Arrowsmith said they quickly appeared to forget the cameras were there.
She said the documentary mirrored her experiences in the bar over the past 33 years. 'I'm not sure why [men have] changed. A lot used to go out and get drunk, then beat their wives up,' she said.
'There are a lot of things today that women won't put up with. That's why the males know that now they have to be more sensible.'
Anthony Philipson, the film's director, said the programme, made by the Eleven Films production company, revealed the reality of men 'untethered by social norms or political correctness'.
He added: 'There's so much going on personally and professionally that is worrying them. I was surprised.'
Charity and Display
You might think that sponsorship websites such as Just Giving are merely a convenient tool for charitable giving, but you would be wrong. According to scientists, they are actually a new arena of chivalry, where a daily 'generosity tournament' is fought between men trying to outdo each other in the hope of winning the favour of women.
Researchers from University College London found that when attractive women seek sponsorship, men engage in competitive giving, ratcheting up their donations in an attempt to outdo the previous offering.
There was no such effect, however, when the sexes were reversed.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, took advantage of the fact that sponsorship websites allow you to see pictures of the people receiving the money and what previous people had given.
Nichola Raihani and her colleagues looked at more than 2,500 different sponsorship pages and singled out those where a man had made a large donation, which was defined as being both twice as much as the previous average for the page and exceeding £50.
The researchers found that if the page was hosted by a woman rated as attractive and a man had made a large donation, the next man tended, on average, to give £40 more.
Dr Raihani said she was surprised that the link was so clear. 'It was amazing. We make predictions as scientists, but it's not often you find such a perfect natural forum for an experiment, and also one where the data so clearly matches up.'
She said that less attractive women should not be disheartened: 'One thing we found to be a strong predictor of how attractive you are is whether you are smiling or not. People who were smiling were rated as much more attractive.'
For men? Maybe get a female friend to ask for money on your behalf.
Why men still exist
Scientists have finally got to the bottom of why men still exist.
Biologists have always puzzled over why males have survived given that their only contribution to reproduction is sperm.
It makes far more sense in evolutionary terms to have an all-female asexual population which creates daughters who can reproduce rather than sons who cannot, such as the Mexican whiptail lizard.
But research suggests that sexual competition for mates keeps populations healthy, free of disease and genetically diverse.
"Almost all multicellular species on earth reproduce using sex, but its existence isn't easy to explain because sex carries big burdens, the most obvious of which is that only half of your offspring - daughters - will actually produce offspring," said lead researcher Professor Matt Gage, from the University of East Anglia School of Biological Sciences.
"Why should any species waste all that effort on sons? An all-female asexual population would be a far more effective route to reproduce greater numbers of offspring.
"Our research shows that competition among males for reproduction provides a really important benefit, because it improves the genetic health of populations."
Charles Darwin first suggested the idea of "sexual selection" in which males compete for reproduction and females choose. It is why in the animal kingdom males are often far more brightly coloured than females, and partake in elaborate courtship rituals.
But until now nobody realised how great a role it played in the health and success of societies.
To find out how important sexual selection was to populations the scientists allowed a colony of Tribolium flour beetles to evolve over 10 years in the laboratory.
In some groups, 90 beetles had to compete for the affections of just 10 females, while in others females far outnumbered the males.
After seven years, or 50 generations, the researchers found that the males who had competed the most for females were fitter and more resistant to disease and inbreeding. In contrast, beetles without sexual selection became extinct after 10 generations.
Gage said: "These results show that sexual selection is important for population health and persistence, because it helps to purge negative and maintain positive genetic variation in a population.
"To be good at out-competing rivals and attracting partners in the struggle to reproduce, an individual has to be good at most things, so sexual selection provides an important and effective filter to maintain and improve population genetic health."
3 Male Ancestors
You might want to think twice before protesting too stridently the next time a chap bumps into you in the street: the chances are that his veins run thick with the blood of ancient warlords.
Two thirds of European men can trace their ancestry back to three tribal leaders who lived in the early Bronze Age, genetic analysis suggests.
They were alive at various times between 5300BC - shortly before the first archaeological evidence of coppersmelting in Europe - and 1500BC, when the Mycenaean civilisation as described in Homer's Iliad was in its pomp, according to a study.
There also appears to have been a sudden population explosion across much of the continent between 2000BC and the birth of Christ as these bloodlines rose into the ascendant.
Scientists at universities across Europe took DNA samples from 334 randomly chosen men in 17 groups, including 20 from England and 20 from the Orkney Islands.
By sequencing the Y chromosomes, the researchers discovered that the three most common lineages, found in 64 per cent of the men, converged much later than previously thought. Out of the 20 Englishmen who took part, 16 came from a single genetic group known, with a Homeric flourish, as R1b-M269, which goes back to one man who was born around 3000BC, give or take half a millennium.
Chiara Batini, the post-doctoral researcher at the University of Leicester who led the study, said that it also showed a big male population boom from Britain to the Balkans between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago.
'The recent and rapid continentwide demographic changes we observe suggest a remarkably widespread transition affecting paternal lineages,' she and her colleagues wrote in Nature Communications.
'The period 4-5KYA [4,000 to 5,000 years ago], the early Bronze Age, is characterised by rapid and widespread change, involving changes in burial practices that might signify an emphasis on individuals or kin groups, the spread of horse riding and the emergence of elites and developments in weaponry.'
In this shifting world, characterised by its mobile warrior aristocracies, male warlords could have spread their offspring far and wide and founded robust dynasties to protect them.
'It's obviously by chance which of the lineages succeeds,' Dr Batini said. 'Nevertheless, you can imagine very easily a scenario in which there are a few men who are more powerful. They have easier access to wealth and to other resources such as food, they will probably have more kids, the male kids have the same kind of benefits, so those lineages will be more dominant.'
The academics said this could be linked to two big population shifts in European prehistory that have been suggested by earlier studies.
About 7,000 years ago farmers from the Middle East appear to have flocked westwards into a continent previously dominated by hunter-gatherers, followed by a flood of nomads from the steppe north of the Caspian Sea about 4,500 years ago.
Several other 'common ancestor' projects have arrived at some startling results. In 2001 Bryan Sykes, emeritus professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford, published a book in which he claimed to have used mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down only by women, to describe seven 'clan mothers' from whom all modern humans are descended.
The genetic backgrounds of many Asian men have also been mapped back to several prodigiously fertile medieval generals. One theory holds that Genghis Khan and his family are the ancestors of one in every 200 men alive today.
In March Mark Jobling, professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, who was also involved in the latest study, published a paper suggesting that more than 800 million men living across Asia owed their genes to only 11 common fathers.
It is impossible to identify these with historical figures because of the lack of surviving DNA.
Men Adrift
(Economist)
Tallulah, in the Mississippi Delta, is picturesque but not prosperous. Many of the jobs it used to have are gone. Two prisons and a county jail provide work for a few guards but the men behind bars, obviously, do not have jobs. Nor do many of the young men who hang around on street corners, shooting dice and shooting the breeze. In Madison Parish, the local county, only 47% of men of prime working age (25-54) are working.
The men in Tallulah are typically not well educated: the local high school's results are poor even by Louisiana's standards. That would have mattered less, in the old days. A man without much book-learning could find steady work at the mill or in the fields. But the lumber mill has closed, and on nearby farms 'jobs that used to take 100 men now take ten,' observes Jason McGuffie, a pastor. A strong pair of hands is no longer enough.
'If you don't have an education, what can you do?' asks Paxton Branch, the mayor. 'You can't even answer a phone if you don't have proper English.' Blue-collar jobs require more skills than they used to, notes Katie McCarty of the North East Louisiana Workforce Centres, a job-placement agency. If you want to be a truck driver, you need at least an eighth-grade education to handle the paperwork, she observes; that is, the mental skills a 13- or 14-year-old is supposed to have, and which men disproportionately lack.
Orlando Redden is in his mid-40s and sporadically employed. He is big, strong and, by all accounts, a hard worker. But he is inarticulate, hazy about numbers and has no skills that would make an employer sit up and take notice. He has bounced from job to job throughout his adult life: minding the slot machines in a casino, driving a forklift, working as a groundskeeper, and so on.
The forklift job, at a factory that made mufflers for cars, was the best: it paid $10.95 an hour. But then the factory closed. He lost his groundskeeper job, too, when a new boss merged two roles (groundskeeper and maintenance man) into one, and gave it to the man with more skills. He recently found a job with a paving contractor, which is better than nothing but requires him to commute more than 30 miles (50km) a day.
Tallulah may be an extreme example, but it is part of a story playing out across America and much of the rest of the rich world. In almost all societies a lot of men enjoy unwarranted advantages simply because of their sex. Much has been done over the past 50 years to put this injustice right; quite a bit still remains to be done.
The dead hand of male domination is a problem for women, for society as a whole - and for men like those of Tallulah. Their ideas of the world and their place in it are shaped by old assumptions about the special role and status due to men in the workplace and in the family, but they live in circumstances where those assumptions no longer apply. And they lack the resources of training, of imagination and of opportunity to adapt to the new demands. As a result, they miss out on a lot, both in economic terms and in personal ones.
For those at the top, James Brown's observation that it is a man's, man's, man's world still holds true. Some 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs are male, as are 98% of the self-made billionaires on the Forbes rich list and 93% of the world's heads of government. In popular films fewer than a third of the characters who speak are women, and more than three-quarters of the protagonists are men. Yet the fact that the highest rungs have male feet all over them is scant comfort for the men at the bottom.
Technology and trade mean that rich countries have less use than they once did for workers who mainly offer muscle. A mechanical digger can replace dozens of men with spades; a Chinese steelworker is cheaper than an American. Men still dominate risky occupations such as roofer and taxi-driver, and jobs that require long stints away from home, such as trucker and oil-rig worker. And, other things being equal, dirty, dangerous and inconvenient jobs pay better than safe, clean ones. But the real money is in brain work, and here many men are lagging behind. Women outnumber them on university campuses in every region bar South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In the OECD men earn only 42% of degrees. Teenage boys in rich countries are 50% more likely than girls to flunk all three basic subjects in school: maths, reading and science.
The economic marginalisation this brings erodes family life. Women who enjoy much greater economic autonomy than their grandmothers did can afford to be correspondingly pickier about spouses, and they are not thrilled by husbands who are just another mouth to feed.
If the sort of labour that a man like Mr Redden might willingly perform with diligence and pride is no longer in great demand, that does not mean there are no jobs at all. Everywhere you look in Tallulah there are women working: in the motels that cater to passing truckers, in the restaurants that serve all-you-can-eat catfish buffets, in shops, clinics and local government offices. But though unskilled men might do some of those jobs, they are unlikely to want them or to be picked for them.
In 'The End of Men', a good book with a somewhat excessive title, Hanna Rosin notes that of the 30 occupations expected to grow fastest in America in the coming years, women dominate 20, including nursing, accounting, child care and food preparation. 'The list of working-class jobs predicted to grow is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes,' writes Ms Rosin. And those old stereotypes are deeply ingrained in the minds of the men they marginalise; they no more see jobs centred on serving or caring as their sort of thing than society does.
Although there is no reason in theory why men could not become nurses or care-home assistants, few do. Most schools would love to have more male teachers to serve as role models for boys, but not many volunteer. And poorly educated men are often much worse at things such as showing up on time and being pleasant to customers (even if you don't feel like it) than their female peers are. For the working class, the economy 'has become more amenable to women than to men', argues Ms Rosin.
Criminality, alas, remains an option for men of all skill sets, as Tallulah's prisons bear witness. The world's most dysfunctional people are nearly all male. Men have always been more violent than women, even if they are less violent now than they used to be. In America today they commit 90% of murders and make up 93% of the prison population. They are also four times more likely to kill themselves than women are.
For many men in Tallulah, the greatest obstacle to finding a job is that they have already fallen foul of the law. Mikel Davis, a polite 29-year-old, is typical. He graduated from high school a decade ago and got 'caught up in the street,' he says. 'My mind wasn't there. I wasn't dedicated to the right.'
He started to deal small quantities of marijuana. He was caught, briefly jailed and released on probation.'I haven't peed dirty since,' he says, but with a criminal record 'finding a job was hell.' Mr Davis applied to McDonald's, Arby's, Chevron - you name it. After a year he found work 'washing cars in the rain'. Now he toils at a burger joint, and is training to be a welder. When Mr Davis was selling drugs, he says, he could make more in a day than he does in a week wiping tables. But crime seldom pays in the long run. It is no way to support a family.
MR REDDEN has three children by three women. Mr Davis has two children by two. Neither man lives with any of the mothers or any of their children. Mr Davis supports both of his, he says: one, financially; the other, by visiting and helping around the home. He says he is still friendly with one mother, but 'not in a committed relationship'.
When they talk about a man's role in the home, though, both men sound like preachers from the 1950s. 'Being a man means supporting your family,' says Mr Davis. 'You've got to do whatever it takes so they eat, [or] you're no man at all.' Being a man, says Mr Redden, means you 'work hard, provide for your kids, have a car and [maybe] get your own house some day.' Mr Davis goes further: 'If I have kids and my woman has to work, that's not what a woman should do. She should be home with the kids.'
There is, to put it mildly, a disconnect between these ideas of a man's role and the reality of life in Tallulah. The busy women of Tallulah are far from rich, but they are getting by, and they are doing so without much help from men.
Fifty years ago the norms for marriage in most rich countries were simple and sexist. If a man got a woman pregnant the couple got married; in 1960 in America 30% of brides gave birth within eight and a half months of the wedding, according to June Carbone of the University of Minnesota and Naomi Cahn of George Washington University. After the arrival of children, the husband's responsibility was to earn and the wife's was to mind the home. There were exceptions, but the rules were universally understood and widely followed. According to Ms Carbone and Ms Cahn more than 80% of wives with young children stayed at home in 1960.
Those norms have changed. The pill, which was approved in America that same year, allowed women to regulate their fertility. It used to be common for brainy women to drop out of college when they became pregnant. Now they can time their babies to fit with their careers. The ability to defer children is one of the reasons why 23% of married American women with children now out-earn their husbands, up from 4% in 1960. Few women in rich countries now need a man's support to raise a family. (They might want it, but they don't need it.)
With women in a better position to demand equality, many men have changed their behaviour accordingly. Studies of who does what within two-parent families show a big generational shift. In 1965 fathers did 42 hours of paid work, 4 hours of housework and 2.5 hours of child care each week, according to the Pew Research Centre. Mothers did seven times as much housework as fathers, four times as much child care and one-fifth as much paid work, adding up to 51 hours a week. Overall, men had two extra hours a week to drink highballs and complain about their daughters' boyfriends.
Fast-forward to 2011 and there is less housework - thanks to dishwashers and ready meals - more evenly divided, with the mother doing 18 hours a week to the father's 10. Both parents are doing more child care. The mother is doing a lot more paid work; the father is doing five hours less. Overall, the father is toiling for 1.5 hours a week longer than the mother.
The same Pew survey suggests that most couples don't think the compromise they have reached is wildly out of kilter. Fully 68% of women say they spend the 'right amount' of time with their kids; only 8% say they spend too much. Many parents find it hard to balance work and family, but there is not much apparent difference between the sexes on this score: 56% of mothers and 50% of fathers say this is 'very' or 'somewhat' difficult.
As a measure of how male attitudes have changed, however, this sample is misleading. It excludes families where the father is no longer there. Couples split up for a variety of reasons, but a common complaint among women who throw out their partners is that the man was not doing his fair share. And here there is a huge class divide. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution argues, in 'Generation Unbound', that college-educated men have adapted reasonably well to the feminist revolution but it 'seems to have bypassed low-income men'.
In 1970 there was not much difference between the happiness of better-off families and that of the less-well-off: 73% of educated white Americans and 67% of working-class whites said their marriages were 'very happy', observes Charles Murray, a conservative writer. Among the professional class, marital satisfaction dipped sharply in the 1980s, suggesting that for a while men and women struggled with the new rules. But it has since recovered to roughly the level it was in 1970. By contrast, the share of working-class whites who say their marriages are very happy has fallen to barely 50%, despite the fact that fewer of them are getting hitched in the first place. In Britain, too, more-educated couples are more likely to say their relationship is 'extremely happy'.
This difference is in part because unskilled men have less to offer than once they did. In America pay for men with only a high school diploma fell 21% in real terms between 1979 and 2013; for those who dropped out of high school it fell by a staggering 34%. Women did better. Female high-school graduates gained 3%; high-school dropouts lost 12%.
And the change is even more dramatic than these figures suggest. First, women are now better educated than men; the proportion of women with no more than a high-school education fell from 32.9% in 1979 - one percentage point higher than men - to 11.4% in 2013, one percentage point lower. Second, many men do not work at all. In America, the share of men of prime working age who have a job has fallen from a peak of nearly 95% in the mid-1960s to only 84% in 2010. In Britain the share of men aged 16-64 who work has fallen from 92% in 1971 to 76% in 2013; for women it has risen from 53% to 67%. For those with few qualifications the situation is worse: in America in 2010 25% of 25- to 54-year-old men with only a high-school education were not in work; for those who did not graduate high school the rate was 35%.
There is no sugar-coating this: many blue-collar men no longer have the sort of earnings or prospects that will make women want to marry them. A recent Pew poll found that 78% of never-married American women say it is 'very important' that a potential spouse should have a steady job. (Only 46% of never-married men said the same.) In theory, this preference should not stop men without steady jobs from finding a mate. There are roughly equal numbers of heterosexual men and women in rich countries, so you might expect nearly everyone to pair up. For poor people, especially, it makes sense. Two pairs of hands can juggle work and kids more easily. Spouses can support each other through sickness or night school. But this works only if both believe that the commitment is long-term. It is pointless to make plans with someone you fear will sponge off you for a while and then vanish.
Which brings up the other side of the control modern contraception offers. When pregnancy is easily prevented or can be legally ended, it no longer functions as a road to marriage. It makes it easier for men who choose not to stick around to tell themselves, and their partners, that a child was not part of the deal.
No single factor can account for the fragility of working-class families. But economic and technological shifts have clearly affected social norms. Some scholars blame the welfare state for making the male breadwinner redundant. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, protests that women at the bottom of the social scale end up “married” to the taxpayer. Means-tested benefits make it easier to get by without a spouse, and sometimes penalise marriage. In America, a single mother with two children who earns $15,000 a year would typically receive $5,200 in food stamps, which would fall to zero if she were to marry a father who earned the same; and that is just one of 80 or so means-tested federal benefits.
Teena Davison, a cook in Tallulah, is raising four children on her own. One father is in Texas; the other is nearby but disengaged. 'Sometimes they help out but basically I do it all,' she says. She gave up trying to make either man do his share. 'I don't want to go through it because they constantly lie, you know, tell the kids I'm going to get you this and never get it.' So, she says, 'I don't even bother with them [or] make a big fuss about it.'
Nonetheless, she worries that the absence of a father might affect her children. The older ones 'say bad things' about their dad when he lets them down. Ms Davison tells them to stop, 'because he's their dad no matter what'.
SEX ratios matter when it comes to forging relationships. And here the falling fortunes of working-class men do further damage. In 1960, among never-married American adults aged 25-34, there were 139 men with jobs for every 100 women, with or without jobs. (This was because women typically married somewhat older men.) By 2012 there were only 91 employed men for every 100 women in this group. 'When women outnumber men, men become cads,' argue Ms Carbone and Ms Cahn in 'Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family'.
Even a small imbalance can have big effects. Imagine a simplified 'mating market' consisting of ten men and ten women, all heterosexual. Everyone pairs up. Now take one man away. One woman is doomed to be single, so she may opt to poach another woman's partner. A chain reaction ensues: all the women are suddenly less secure in their relationships. Some of the men, by contrast, become tempted to play the field rather than settle down.
In most rich countries the supply of eligible blue-collar men does not match demand. Among black Americans, thanks to mass incarceration, it does not come close. For every 100 African-American women aged 25-54 who are not behind bars, there are only 83 men of the same age at liberty. In some American inner cities there are only 50 black men with jobs for every 100 black women, calculates William Julius Wilson of Harvard University. In theory black women could 'marry out', but few do: in 2010 only 9% of black female newly-weds married men of another race.
When men with jobs are in short supply, as they are in poor neighbourhoods throughout the rich world, any presentable male can get sex, but few women will trust him to stick around or behave decently. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, two sociologists, asked a sample of inner-city women of all races why they broke up with their most recent partner. Four in ten blamed his chronic, flagrant infidelity; half complained that he was violent.
Such experiences make working-class women distrust men in general. They still have babies with men, but they seldom marry them. A whopping 50% of births to American women without college degrees are non-marital, but only 6% of births to college graduates are. Similar trends can be seen in Europe. In Britain 90% of professional couples wait until they are married before having kids, compared with only half of those who earn the minimum wage. Looking at eight European countries, Brienna Perelli-Harris of the University of Southampton and others found that the less educated a mother is, the more likely she is to have a baby outside marriage.
Caitlin (not her real name), who lives in Hartlepool, in north-east England, first got pregnant at 16, ten years ago. She now has four children by two men. She broke up with the first one (a labourer) because they quarrelled 'all the time'. 'He'd argue about me going out the door,' she says. He was hardly a model father. Whether he helped with the chores depended on his mood, she says, and losing at PlayStation would put him into a foul one. He now lives with a new girlfriend. Caitlin does not trust him to take proper care of the children, so she has stopped them from seeing him. He tried to con the authorities to pay him the child benefits that should have gone to her, she says. As for the father of her fourth child: 'I found out he was going to jail for GBH [inflicting grievous bodily harm] from the Hartlepool Mail.' She has concluded that: 'It's easier without men. It's more predictable. I know whether I'm coming or going.'
Hartlepool has much in common with Tallulah. It was once a thriving industrial town, but as jobs in factories have vanished, the nuclear family has collapsed. The share of babies born outside marriage in Hartlepool has jumped from 12% in 1974 to 70% in 2013 (in England and Wales it rose from 9% to 48%).
Old-timers say life used to be simple for men. 'I finished school at 16 on July 25th 1969. On August 1st I started in the steelworks,' recalls Dave Wise. 'You always knew where you were going to work. If your dad was at the steelworks, you went there too.' Mr Wise now runs a community centre in West View, a down-at-heel part of Hartlepool. A sign outside says 'Bite Back at Loan Sharks' - a local scourge.
Young men from Hartlepool who make it through university do just fine. But as in the rest of the rich world, boys there do worse than girls in school. They read less, do less homework and are more disruptive - which may be why teachers give the same paper a worse grade if they know it was written by a boy, according to the OECD. Raymond Steel, a 19-year-old from Dyke House, another troubled Hartlepool neighbourhood, says he didn't enjoy school. 'I lost interest quickly and was naughty until I got sent home.' The girls did better, recalls his friend Kieran Murphy, because 'they paid more attention.' Both men are now learning trades - plumber and builder - but expect the hunt for work to be arduous.
They could move to London, where jobs are more plentiful. But it is hard to leave a tight-knit neighbourhood. In Hartlepool, siblings and cousins often live a street or two away, which creates a network of support. Caitlin and her sister, who is also a single mother, often help each other with the child care.
As in Tallulah, many men in Hartlepool have old-fashioned views. Mr Steel says it would be 'a bad thing' if his future wife earned more than him - 'You'd feel you were not providing.' When men and women expect different things, relationships fail. Some hard-up mothers have all but given up hope of finding Mr Right. They strive to become financially independent and insist on controlling their own households, notes Ms Sawhill. 'They often act as gatekeepers, by denying a father access to his own children.'
Single motherhood is much better than living with an abusive partner. But the chronic instability of low-income families hurts women, children and men. The poverty rate for single-mother families in America is 31%, nearly three times the national norm. Children who grow up in broken families do worse in school, earn less as adults and find it harder to form stable families of their own. Boys are worse affected than girls, perhaps because they typically grow up without a father as a role model. Thus the problems of marginalised men tumble on down the generations.
Men who never shoulder family responsibilities miss out on a lot of joy, and so do many fatherless boys. In Britain, fewer than half of the children of divorce say they have a good relationship with their father. Mr Redden complains that his son, who lives with his mother, 'doesn’t listen to me...we ain't that tight like I’d like us to be.'
SWEDEN has done a better job than most countries of fostering equality between the sexes, and its success is particularly apparent in child care. You can't throw a ball in a Stockholm park without hitting a bearded man pushing a pram. Fredrik Blid, an engineer, is taking two of his small children for a stroll. 'Day care is closed,' he explains. Mr Blid and his partner (an art director at a firm that makes things for babies) split the child care 50/50. If a child is sick, they take alternate days off work. They did not discuss this before they had children. 'It was natural,' he says.
Perhaps. If so, though, nature has been helped along by the Swedish government's decades of work aimed at promoting gender equality, effort which consistently sees it get the highest scores on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Women’s Economic Opportunity Index. The equality seen in parenting is supported and shaped by generous parental-leave laws. Each couple is entitled to 480 days off work (between them) for each child. The government pays the stay-at-home parent up to 946 kroner a day ($112) to replace lost wages. Sixty of those 480 days are reserved for men, and are lost if not used. The government offers a bonus of up to 13,500 kroner per child to couples who take equal time off work.
Such policies have had an effect: the share of parental-leave taken by men quadrupled from 6% in 1985 to 25% in 2013. But the government is not satisfied. It sees the unequal division of child care as one of the biggest remaining obstacles to women earning as much as men. Two of the smaller Swedish parties (including the Feminist party, which is bankrolled by Benny Andersson of ABBA), want to compel men to take 50% of parental leave.
This goes too far for many Swedes, particularly those with manual jobs. Working-class Swedish men often make much more money than their wives, thanks to strong unions in heavily male industries. When a waitress makes only 20,000 kroner a month, having her 50,000-a-month construction-worker husband take time off represents a significant cost, says Karin Svanborg-Sjovall of Timbro, a free-market think-tank in Stockholm; many might see it as an unreasonable one. Among white-collar workers, wages are more equal and there is a less macho culture, so child care is split more evenly.
The parental-leave policy works well for professional women, many of whom work for the government, which is happy to accommodate their long absences (65% of managers in the public sector are female). But it has been a mixed blessing for blue-collar women in the private sector. Employers know that young female job applicants are likely to take a lot of time off. None would admit to discriminating, of course, but it is striking that 25% of blue-collar women are on temporary contracts and 50% work part-time - of whom nearly half say they would like to work full-time but cannot find an opening.
Some liberal Scandinavian men find their new roles demoralising. Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist married to a Swede, writes of walking 'around Stockholm's streets, modern and feminised, with a furious 19th-century man inside me'. One expects novelists to be disgruntled, but they are not the only ones. In a recent poll 23% of Swedish men supported the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) - more than twice the number of women who did. A similar pattern can be seen in other European countries: men are far more likely than women to vote for protest parties such as Greece's Golden Dawn, Hungary's Jobbik, the Netherlands' PVV and France's Front National.
The SD is an anti-immigrant party: its supporters fret that hordes of refugees from Somalia and Syria will bankrupt Sweden's welfare state. However, it is also in revolt against what William Hahne, an SD leader, calls 'extreme feminism'. The SD wants to return to a family-based tax system that would favour single-breadwinner homes. Mr Hahne complains that 'If a man is masculine in Sweden today he is seen as bad.' A hunky blond ex-paratrooper, he had to apologise after getting drunk and abusive in a bar in Iceland in 2010.
Some supporters of the Sweden Democrats are men who have been left behind as the economy shifts from industry to services, suggests Asa Regner, Sweden's minister for gender equality. Others take a 'very old-fashioned' view of the family that the majority has left behind, but a minority misses deeply. Many of them, Ms Regner speculates, 'wish for a country which is simply not there any more.'
MEN are not easy to help. 'We find it's very difficult to connect with [them],' says Carol Walker of Relate, a British counselling charity. 'They don't want to talk about their relationships, sometimes.' This slotting into stereotype matters more when economic times are hard. Couples badly affected by the financial crisis were eight times more likely to split up than those who were unscathed, according to a Relate-sponsored study called 'Relationships, Recession and Recovery'. As ever, the connections go both ways: the same study found that an unstable relationship at home makes it harder to thrive in the workplace.
Losing a job can affect a man's libido. 'If they've always been strong and suddenly feel helpless, that can cause sexual problems,' says Ms Walker, who works in north-east England. Some men feel emasculated if their partner out-earns them. 'It is hard to be a traditional man in a non-traditional world,' says Ms Walker.
If you offer a man counselling, he may refuse. The very notion is unmanly, some feel, though it is often quite effective. Still, there are ways to lure men into talking about their feelings. John Errington, a former lorry driver, organises a 'men's shed' in Wingate, a former mining village near Hartlepool. It is literally a shed, with a darts board and a hob for making tea. Local men meet there and do constructive things, such as plant vegetables or do odd jobs. At the same time, they socialise. Some have lost jobs or wives; others just want something to do. At least one volunteer is trained in spotting the warning signs of depression or suicide.
Hanna Rosin talks of 'plastic women', who adapt deftly to economic and social change, and 'cardboard men', who fail to adapt and are left crumpled. She has a point. The sheds, though, show some are trying. On a recent Wednesday afternoon four men in Wingate gathered to chat and cook panacalty, a local stew of corned beef, potatoes, carrots, leeks and sprouts, swimming in beef stock. 'It gets me out of the house,' says Ken Teasdale, a widower. 'We all help each other,' says Barry Setterfield, a retired joiner. The 'men's sheds' movement, canny in its appropriation of one of the time-honoured male preserves not normally associated with power or status, started in Australia and has spread to Britain, Finland and Greece. There are more than 40 in County Durham, where Wingate is. Boosters say they save public money by keeping men out of hospital. Participants love them.
As the sheds show, working-class men have changed with the times. At home they are far more likely to change nappies than their fathers were, or to do the ironing, perhaps while watching football on the television. But they have not changed as fast as the world around them. And that world has not finished changing.
Jobs that reward muscle alone are not coming back, so men will need to pump up their brains instead. Several countries are experimenting with ways to make school more stimulating for children in ways that boys will appreciate. The OECD suggests offering them books they might actually enjoy - about sports stars, perhaps, or dragons. Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, suggests giving boys gizmos to fiddle with and more breaks so they can run around outside and let off steam: all helpful, and all things that might be appreciated by girls, too. A greater appreciation of anti-boy bias among teachers would help, as well, as would more men teaching.
"It's hard to be a traditional man in a non-traditional world."
Men in the classroom do not just broaden children's experience; they provide role models doing something both caring and disciplined. Boys need to know that their jobs will not be like those of the sports stars they read about; they also need to know that, energy having been let off in the playground, timeliness and good behaviour matter. Manners maketh man - especially in the service industries.
It is inevitable that more men will earn less than their female partners in years to come. To pull their weight, they will have to do more at home. There are few signs that women want househusbands; but though they don't want a man who does all the housework they often want one who does more of it. And doing more chores could ultimately make blue-collar men happier, because it would help them forge happy relationships. As the experience of white-collar men shows, more equal unions can be just as rewarding for men as the old-fashioned sort.
When men live with women on more equal terms, they may grow closer to their children. Fathers may find they like being attentive, and it would certainly be good for their kids, especially the boys. As one man whose dad abandoned him lamented on Fathers' Day in 2008:
'[Fathers] are teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models. They are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it. But if we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing - missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.'
The speaker is now president of the United States - plenty of fatherless boys turn out fine. But his point, which is echoed by many more conservative thinkers, is sound. There are many ways to be a man, but not all of them are equally honourable.
Overcompensating
In the early 13th century, Genghis Khan sent a message of friendship to a governor in the Kwarazmian Empire. The messengers, however, were killed, in a direct insult to Genghis' power.
By way of revenge, Genghis invaded, massacred an estimated four million people, made a pyramid of severed human heads and — believing something more inventive was required for the initial aggressor — executed the governor by pouring molten silver into his eyes and ears.
Scientists at Washington University have confirmed what scholars of history, masculinity and Vladimir Putin have long suspected: if men feel their manhood is slighted, they have a tendency to overcompensate.
For an experiment, published in the journal Social Psychology, 50 men were given a test of hand strength. Afterwards, they were shown their results on a chart, which also contained two bell curves showing the range of previous female and male results.
Unknown to them, their results were fabricated. Half were told they were average for men, and the other half were told their grip was significantly weaker and, rather, average for women. They had been informed that the exercise was a test of “the effects of exertion on decision-making”, and as part of that were then asked to fill in a questionnaire about themselves.
What the researchers wanted to see was whether having their masculinity threatened affected the answers. Previous studies have found that baby-faced men are more likely to win military medals, to have hostile personalities and to commit crimes. This has led some psychologists to believe that men who feel insecure about their masculinity respond by exaggerating other supposedly masculine traits.
What the researchers found was that the men who were told that their grip was average for women exaggerated their height by 0.78in. Compared with the men who were told their grip was normal, they also reported almost twice as many previous relationship partners and claimed higher levels of aggressiveness and athleticism. “Height is something you think would be fixed, but how tall you say you are is malleable, at least for men,” said Sapna Cheryan, a psychology professor. “We know that being seen as masculine is very important for a lot of men. We discovered that the things that men were using to assert their masculinity were the very things that are used as signals of identity.”
She said that this was not just a curiousity but demonstrated an important truth. “Men have a lot of power in our society, and what this study shows is that some decisions can be influenced by how they’re feeling about their masculinity in the moment.”
Blue Collar Workers
AT FIRST glance the patriarchy appears to be thriving. More than 90% of presidents and prime ministers are male, as are nearly all big corporate bosses. Men dominate finance, technology, films, sports, music and even stand-up comedy. In much of the world they still enjoy social and legal privileges simply because they have a Y chromosome. So it might seem odd to worry about the plight of men.
Yet there is plenty of cause for concern. Men cluster at the bottom as well as the top. They are far more likely than women to be jailed, estranged from their children, or to kill themselves. They earn fewer university degrees than women. Boys in the developed world are 50% more likely to flunk basic maths, reading and science entirely.
One group in particular is suffering (see article). Poorly educated men in rich countries have had difficulty coping with the enormous changes in the labour market and the home over the past half-century. As technology and trade have devalued brawn, less-educated men have struggled to find a role in the workplace. Women, on the other hand, are surging into expanding sectors such as health care and education, helped by their superior skills. As education has become more important, boys have also fallen behind girls in school (except at the very top). Men who lose jobs in manufacturing often never work again. And men without work find it hard to attract a permanent mate. The result, for low-skilled men, is a poisonous combination of no job, no family and no prospects.
From nuclear families to fissile ones
Those on the political left tend to focus on economics. Shrinking job opportunities for men, they say, are entrenching poverty and destroying families. In America pay for men with only a high-school certificate fell by 21% in real terms between 1979 and 2013; for women with similar qualifications it rose by 3%. Around a fifth of working-age American men with only a high-school diploma have no job.
Those on the right worry about the collapse of the family. The vast majority of women would prefer to have a partner who does his bit both financially and domestically. But they would rather do without one than team up with a layabout, which may be all that is on offer: American men without jobs spend only half as much time on housework and caring for others as do women in the same situation, and much more time watching television.
Hence the unravelling of working-class families. The two-parent family, still the norm among the elite, is vanishing among the poor. In rich countries the proportion of births outside marriage has trebled since 1980, to 33%. In some areas where traditional manufacturing has collapsed, it has reached 70% or more. Children raised in broken homes learn less at school, are more likely to drop out and earn less later on than children from intact ones. They are also not very good at forming stable families of their own.
These two sides often talk past each other. But their explanations are not contradictory: both economics and social change are to blame, and the two causes reinforce each other. Moreover, these problems are likely to get worse. Technology will disrupt more industries, creating benefits for society but rendering workers who fail to update their skills redundant. The OECD, a think-tank, predicts that the absolute number of single-parent households will continue to rise in nearly all rich countries. Boys who grow up without fathers are more likely to have trouble forming lasting relationships, creating a cycle of male dysfunction.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, hairdresser
What can be done? Part of the solution lies in a change in cultural attitudes. Over the past generation, middle-class men have learned that they need to help with child care, and have changed their behaviour. Working-class men need to catch up. Women have learned that they can be surgeons and physicists without losing their femininity. Men need to understand that traditional manual jobs are not coming back, and that they can be nurses or hairdressers without losing their masculinity.
Policymakers also need to lend a hand, because foolish laws are making the problem worse. America reduces the supply of marriageable men by locking up millions of young males for non-violent offences and then making it hard for them to find work when they get out (in Georgia, for example, felons are barred from feeding pigs, fighting fires or working in funeral homes). A number of rich countries discourage poor people from marrying or cohabiting by cutting their benefits if they do.
Even more important than scrapping foolish policies is retooling the educational system, which was designed in an age when most men worked with their muscles. Politicians need to recognise that boys’ underachievement is a serious problem, and set about fixing it. Some sensible policies that are good for everybody are particularly good for boys. Early-childhood education provides boys with more structure and a better chance of developing verbal and social skills. Countries with successful vocational systems such as Germany have done a better job than Anglo-Saxon countries of motivating non-academic boys and guiding them into jobs, but policymakers need to reinvent vocational education for an age when trainees are more likely to get jobs in hospitals than factories.
More generally, schools need to become more boy-friendly. They should recognise that boys like to rush around more than girls do: it’s better to give them lots of organised sports and energy-eating games than to dose them with Ritalin or tell them off for fidgeting. They need to provide more male role models: employing more male teachers in primary schools will both supply boys with a male to whom they can relate and demonstrate that men can be teachers as well as firefighters.
The growing equality of the sexes is one of the biggest achievements of the post-war era: people have greater opportunities than ever before to achieve their ambitions regardless of their gender. But some men have failed to cope with this new world. It is time to give them a hand.
Stubborn men Won't Admit They're Lost
Men are so stubborn that they will walk the equivalent distance of Land’s End to John o’ Groats in their lifetime to avoid asking for directions after getting lost.
The average man’s sense of direction is so dire that he will clock up about 900 extra miles, and only 6 per cent of men would ask for directions or check a map to avoid the additional mileage.
More than twice as many are so proud and stubborn that they soldier on regardless until they find an alternative route rather than admit they are wrong.
Wrong turns and a lack of common sense mean that the average British male will needlessly travel 1.5 miles a month before correcting his mistake, clocking up an extra 18 miles a year. Over 50 years, that adds up to about 225 hours.
The poll of nearly 1,000 British adults was carried out by TrekAce, a forearm-mounted navigational aid for walkers and cyclists. A spokesman said: “It’s incredible to think that we waste so much of our precious time getting lost.
“The results of this survey reinforce what many have believed for years, that men are not the best navigators. But it also shows the extreme lengths that men are going to to avoid asking for directions or going the right way in the first place. It is clear we still need a helping hand when it comes to tackling unfamiliar and even familiar territory.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, 94 per cent of respondents said women generally had better navigation and directional skills, even if men were often reluctant to admit it.
While 28 per cent shrugged off a partner’s poor sense of direction, a third were less forgiving and reacted angrily, which “typically leads to an argument”.
After getting lost, 14 per cent of people said they refused to stop on the basis that “all roads eventually lead to the same place”.