The manifestos of all major parties teem with blandishments to women, yet none of them has a word to say about the glaring disadvantages of boys and men, argues Neil Lyndon
Could any national drama more starkly reveal how completely men’s interests are a non-issue in British politics? We are not even in the wings.
While the manifestos of all major parties teem with cooing blandishments to women, none of them has a word to say about the glaring disadvantages of boys and young men in education and employment. None of them demonstrates a smidgen of concern that the routine separation of tens of thousands of children from their fathers every year by force of law in the Family Court is this country’s most indefensible abuse of human rights.
None discusses the sickening figures for suicide among men. You could scan the parties’ policies with ultrasound but you wouldn’t detect any trace of interest in a male contraceptive pill – 50 years after the pill for women went into mass circulation - still less a commitment to that essential development. Any party that promised a national effort to make a pill available to men within 10 years – like President Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration promise that the USA would send humans to on the moon and back within a decade – would get my vote almost without further question.
Many of the political concerns in that list are in the manifesto of Mike Buchanan's J4MB (Justice for Boys and Men) party which is fielding three candidates in this election. But, with bone-wearying predictability, that group has been boorishly lampooned and scorned by feminism’s fellow-travellers and Uncle Toms in the conventional media – even including these pages – as if it had officially twinned with the Monster Raving Loonies.
Matt O’Connor, founder of Fathers 4 Justice recently reported that, when he tried to raise men’s issues with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the coalition government, Iain Duncan Smith told him that such questions are "taboo" in politics. That response accords with Paul Boateng’s self-righteous ire when, as Home Office Minister, he ejected representatives of Families Need Fathers from his office in the 1990s, telling them that he didn’t want to hear a word about disadvantages for men until the last inequality for women had been extirpated. In 20+ years, therefore, and despite the sure justice of their cause, outfits like FNF and F4J have succeeded in impressing themselves on the political establishment to roughly the same extent as human beings upon Saturn.
With similar reasonableness, Matt O’Connor himself and Tim Samuels of BBC 5Live's Men’s Hour have recently argued the case for a Minister for Men. Some hopes. If this comes to pass any time in the next 15 years, I’ll eat every word I’ve written in the last 25 years on the rooted, sclerotic insistence of the feminist media-political establishment that disadvantages and inequalities for males cannot exist in a patriarchal order of society. The appointment of a Minister for Men would contradict that sacred creed at root. So it cannot be allowed.
Where, then, should men look for a sympathetic political response to men’s concerns? The Liberal Democrats are unusual in having expressed concern over the number of suicides by men in prison; but, if you put the words "Liberal Democrats men" into the Bing search engine, you get back pages that are mostly about women and their disadantages - apart from one contributor who observes "I've never met a Liberal Democrat 'man' who wasn't a whiney, sniveling, underachiever", which doesn't sound very welcoming.
Nor are men likely to find a sympathetic ear in a Labour Party whose manifesto includes a 15-page section on Women in which men, throughout, are portrayed as the enemies of equality and a menace to women.
So what political instruments can men possibly develop that might represent their interests and start to give them a hearing over legitimate concerns?
One approach might be for men to imitate the political tactics (not the ideology) of the Militant tendency of the 1970s and 1980s which systematically infiltrated and influenced the Labour party. Militant proved that it needs only five people of a similar cast of mind to take over a ward or local party association, 50 to swing a constituency, 500 to call the shots at the national conference. The Conservatives and UKIP look most open to such an approach, as does the Tax Payers' Alliance. So go to it, guys.
Another possible strategy would be to back and promote influential women who will represent men's concerns in conventional parties. In America, writers like Karen Straughan and Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys are articulating some of the most telling and educated arguments on behalf of men. They and women like them ought to be in politics and running for office. In Britain, many of the most radical, original criticisms of feminism are now appearing online in Conservative Woman. If writers such as Belinda Brown and Kathy Gyngell occupied safe Conservative seats in Parliament and told IDS to jump, his only question would be “how high?”. Go to it, girls.
As long ago as when Tony (“I’m ashamed to be a man”) Blair was in Downing Street, I came to believe that men’s best hope for political change lay with women (see my 2006 speech to the conference of the Equal Parenting Alliance in Sexual Impolitics). Perhaps, then, women who are advocates of equality for men, too, should work within the new Women for Equality Party, launched last week by Catherine Mayer and fronted by Sandi Toskvig, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz.
That party has said it welcomes men. They have declared that equality should benefit everybody. They have said that equality for boys in education is among their aims. They have said they believe in equal parenting.
Laudable sentiments. So maybe they’ll take on the wider disadvantages and inequalities of males and call themselves The Equality Party?
We might all vote for that.
Perhaps we should not hold our breath, however. The Women for Equality Party may not be whole-heartedly dedicated to all-embracing equality - given the fact that, in 2008, Sandi Toskvig published a book called Girls Are Best.
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With similar reasonableness, Matt O’Connor himself and Tim Samuels of BBC 5Live's Men’s Hour have recently argued the case for a Minister for Men. Some hopes. If this comes to pass any time in the next 15 years, I’ll eat every word I’ve written in the last 25 years on the rooted, sclerotic insistence of the feminist media-political establishment that disadvantages and inequalities for males cannot exist in a patriarchal order of society. The appointment of a Minister for Men would contradict that sacred creed at root. So it cannot be allowed.
Where, then, should men look for a sympathetic political response to men’s concerns? The Liberal Democrats are unusual in having expressed concern over the number of suicides by men in prison; but, if you put the words "Liberal Democrats men" into the Bing search engine, you get back pages that are mostly about women and their disadantages - apart from one contributor who observes "I've never met a Liberal Democrat 'man' who wasn't a whiney, sniveling, underachiever", which doesn't sound very welcoming.
Nor are men likely to find a sympathetic ear in a Labour Party whose manifesto includes a 15-page section on Women in which men, throughout, are portrayed as the enemies of equality and a menace to women.
So what political instruments can men possibly develop that might represent their interests and start to give them a hearing over legitimate concerns?
One approach might be for men to imitate the political tactics (not the ideology) of the Militant tendency of the 1970s and 1980s which systematically infiltrated and influenced the Labour party. Militant proved that it needs only five people of a similar cast of mind to take over a ward or local party association, 50 to swing a constituency, 500 to call the shots at the national conference. The Conservatives and UKIP look most open to such an approach, as does the Tax Payers' Alliance. So go to it, guys.
Another possible strategy would be to back and promote influential women who will represent men's concerns in conventional parties. In America, writers like Karen Straughan and Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys are articulating some of the most telling and educated arguments on behalf of men. They and women like them ought to be in politics and running for office. In Britain, many of the most radical, original criticisms of feminism are now appearing online in Conservative Woman. If writers such as Belinda Brown and Kathy Gyngell occupied safe Conservative seats in Parliament and told IDS to jump, his only question would be “how high?”. Go to it, girls.
As long ago as when Tony (“I’m ashamed to be a man”) Blair was in Downing Street, I came to believe that men’s best hope for political change lay with women (see my 2006 speech to the conference of the Equal Parenting Alliance in Sexual Impolitics). Perhaps, then, women who are advocates of equality for men, too, should work within the new Women for Equality Party, launched last week by Catherine Mayer and fronted by Sandi Toskvig, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz.
That party has said it welcomes men. They have declared that equality should benefit everybody. They have said that equality for boys in education is among their aims. They have said they believe in equal parenting.
Laudable sentiments. So maybe they’ll take on the wider disadvantages and inequalities of males and call themselves The Equality Party?
We might all vote for that.
Perhaps we should not hold our breath, however. The Women for Equality Party may not be whole-heartedly dedicated to all-embracing equality - given the fact that, in 2008, Sandi Toskvig published a book called Girls Are Best.
Source
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