British men, who once ruled the world, are now whining about feeling emasculated.
Asked what it meant to be a man in the 21st century, more than half thought society was turning them into "waxed and coiffed metrosexuals", and 52 per cent say they had to live according to women's rules.What they apparently want is what some American academics have dubbed a "menaissance" - a return to manliness, where figures such as Sir Winston Churchill were models of manhood. ...
Men said they "felt handcuffed" by political correctness - only 33 per cent felt they could speak freely and say what they thought, whereas two thirds found it safer and to conceal their opinions.
Men have the power to reverse this trend by simple force-of-will. If men would stop responding negatively to other men who say politically incorrect things, the whole charade would quickly disintegrate. Sure, we'd get clucked at by women, but c'mon. We're stronger, smarter, and control the vast majority of the world's wealth. If our only response to the feminization of society is to whine, then dude, the game is over.
I think that the problem is much more complicated than that. You seem to accept the flawed premise that the sexes are in conflict with each other, vying for control and dominance. And as long as we accept that premise then it doesn't matter which side wins, because everybody loses. My view is that big portions of our social rules have been destroyed, partly by rapidly changing technology and partly by socialists intent on bringing down the entire society.
Women like masculinity but don't understand it, just as men like femininity but don't understand it. We need to build a society that balances the two. And even if every socialist were to vanish tomorrow, changing technology would still make that a complicated project.
Masculinity once focused on physical strength, manual labor, and courage in the face of death. Now it's not clear how any of those are important, given modern technology. What use do the modern world have for men?
Pregnancy once dominated women's lives. They faced serious risks to themselves and terrible risks to their babies. The task of keeping a home clean, safe, and comfortable once consumed every waking hour of a typical woman's life. Now pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy are unimaginably safer, while modern conveniences make housekeeping a part-time job at most. What use does the modern world have for women?
The world changed drastically in the last century, but our DNA didn't change with it. Men and women still have all the same inclinations and instincts that they had thousands of years ago. Today we must try to adapt our instincts to our world, and our world to our instincts. We need to build new conceptions of masculinity and femininity that make sense in the modern world---a task that would be much easier without the destructive din of socialist propaganda ringing in our ears.
It's a difficult task, but not impossible and not new in our time. Redefinitions of masculinity run back at least as far as when the first archers were mocked by their spearmen comrades for wielding weapons that were deemed un-manly. Changes in technology has always forced these sorts of redefinitions of social roles. But today technology is changing faster than ever before, so we have to move fast to keep up.
BB: I generally agree... this post was mostly tongue-in-cheek :)
I think most people would agree that men and women shouldn't be in conflict, but conflict nevertheless arises because there isn't agreement on how we should be working together.
While it is the fashion in some circles to repress and sanitize all thoughts (I mustn't be racist, snobbish, chauvinist etc.) I imagine women feel that pressure too. (It's certainly fashionable to complain about doing it.)
I'm not saying it's a bad thing (it's better than just going around being racist, surely!), but it's better to apply it to your underlying attitude rather than at the presentational level of language. Successfully working on the former should make us feel freer. I think that it's doing the linguistic footwork without focusing on the attitudes that breeds this feeling of frustration.
What we receive as the traditional roles weren't around for so long. Sewing, for example, is seen as a lady's occupation, but that's a purely 20th century view. And as Ben Goldacre says "Boys who were raised in pink frilly dresses went down mines and fought in World War 2."
The problem with the traditional view of masculinity is that it excludes many men too. There are plenty of legitimate ways to be masculine that are at odds with the tradition we like to mourn.
it's better to apply it to your underlying attitude rather than at the presentational level of language... I think that it's doing the linguistic footwork without focusing on the attitudes that breeds this feeling of frustration.
Well said!
Now, I realize that this post was not entirely serious, but the whole fuss about political correctness is something I find somewhat frustrating, so here's my take on it.
"Being politically correct" just means "being (or at least acting) respectful, considerate, empathetic, and understanding of people who are different from you", i.e. "Not being (or at least not acting like) a bigot". Is that a bad thing? How can someone argue that spreading false stereotypes about a race/gender/nationality/religion/career/etc is a good thing? When people are frustrated about the fact that expressing bigotry is frowned upon, do they really not get the hint about how bigotry is (almost always) wrong? It's when political correctness becomes a value for its own sake - rather than just a consequence of bigotry being bad in general - that you get situations like that Harvard president having to resign due to a comment that was not quite bigoted but that did not sound quite politically correct.
One could say that it's "masculine" to be rude (i.e. relying on crude words, rather than on the content of the message, to cause some impact), non-empathetic, inconsiderate, ignorant, intolerant, and stubborn. That it's masculine to alienate, or cause extra work for, people you don't care about and who are powerless to make you pay for it. To think that people whose preferences are different from yours are all idiots and do not deserve an honest attempt at understanding. To me, all that just sounds like "I get to be immature because I'm big and strong, deal with it". I don't much care for those aspects of masculinity. Besides, you can throw them out and still be left with plenty of other "typically masculine" traits well worth developing, like being athletic, handy with hardware, emotionally strong, techie, able to read a map and do math in your head, and other things (that women are perfectly capable of doing but that historically became associated with manliness).
The problem with political correctness is not that one is forbidden to espouse false stereotypes (not a bad thing on its own) but rather that the set of false stereotypes is divided under political correctness into the set one is permitted to say and the set one is not permitted to say. There is no societal penalty for saying that men are, as a class, idiots or draw up false pictures of "have it all" women who effortlessly juggle career and family life.
Political correctness, if it is uniquely about anything at all, is about banning certain expressions of thoughts and ideas which are objectively correct but are not politically acceptable. Eliminating false stereotypes could certainly be accomplished by a more strict fidelity to well established ideals of truth. There is no need to make up something new for that. PC is about changing the lies we say in order to fit an agenda and that is abhorrent whether we're talking economics, gender relations, or anything else.
Stereotypes are necessary for efficient thought. To imagine that we can function without stereotypes is just a faulty theory of mind.
Stereotypes are sometimes inaccurate and can be improved. But most people who claim to oppose stereotypes really just oppose certain stereotypes, and want to replace them with new stereotypes.
I think TML is on-the-nose with his point that political correctness isn't about reducing bigotry, it's about replacing one form of bigotry with another. This is easily illustrated: when was the last time you saw/heard a commercial in which the white male was the clever/knowledgeable party and the idiot role was played by a female/black/child/etc.? I'd venture to say no one can even recall a single instance.
Is this an example of eliminating bigotry? No, it's a valiant attempt to create a new stereotype of the white male as the gullible fool, in constant need of rescue by his wife, kids, black co-worker, hot pizza delivery girl, etc. It's nonsense.
To act as if political correctness is truly about reducing bigotry is to evade the real discussion.
As BB pointed out (and Bernardo side-stepped) stereotypes are extremely useful when based on reality. That a stereotype casts a group in a negative may have very little relation to hits truthfulness or usefulness. (In fact, negative stereotypes that are true are probably the most useful to us, because they can protect us from harmful situations.)
MW: "To act as if political correctness is truly about reducing bigotry is to evade the real discussion."
I think this is the basis for at least part of the real discussion. Don't ignore how much things have improved, thanks partly to the growing consciousness of a need for political correctness. If the downside is merely a kind of prescribed or (socially) enforced politeness, sure it's annoying, but maybe it's a fair price to pay.
Adverts very seldom appeal to our higher instincts, so I don't think it's useful to use them as a barometer for anything. If we took adverts seriously in this way, you would believe that everybody drank nothing but beer and the highest aspiration of all men is to participate in at least one threesome. Apart from the risk of alienating whole ethnic groups / genders from a brand, adverts which champion traditional masculinity would simply look old-fashioned (although plenty do actually go for that, but underneath protective layers of irony). Advertising is the work of the devil, look at it and you'll always find something distasteful.