Men Have Rights Too

Angelo Agathangelou: We wish the excellent new site 'Men Have Rights Too' all the best. A resource for Men in general, fathers and mentally or physically abused men particularly and also boys in the UK. Do check out their site especially if you need support and listen to the excellent introduction with Erin Pizzey founder of shelter UK.

Men Have Rights Too

Help and support for men and their families who are in, or have been in, an abusive or violent relationship and don't know where to turn for help and advice. - Men, if you don't talk about your problems, how can you expect to be heard? So many false allegations made about the male which are then taken as fact ending in fathers not being allowed to see their children for months, if then.  

To listen to Gerald and Erin Pizzey on Pheonix Radio, click here.

 

This is interesting, taken from The Times - How to Be a Man: that’s the book we need. Alice Thomson

While girls are endlessly analysed for their problems, boys receive little help for their anxiety or lack of awareness

A16-year-old boy emailed me last week: “Why are you so obsessed by girls reaching the top? Why don’t women columnists worry about boys struggling at the bottom?
Teenage boys are seen as predators, potential paedophiles and rapists, and sex-obsessed. Girls are always the victims, they’re not. They can be terrifying, I get sexts every day from girls pushing themselves at me. I don’t feel lucky, I feel intimidated.”

Fair point. I often talk to girls at schools about the pressures they face, but there are no masculine clubs, no everydaysexism blog cataloguing the harassment they might encounter walking home. They don’t have a bonding philosophy beyond football and Minecraft. They aren’t taught to be proud to be men. Mothers discuss misogyny, never misandry — but boys can feel overwhelmed too.

Girls now receive more attention. We worry that they are expected to compete with porn stars in the bedroom. We worry about their eating disorders, their perfectionist tendencies and whether they will cope with the work-life balance. We now have a female Hamlet on the stage, but male angst still abounds.

At the Cheltenham Literature Festival this week, Caitlin Moran, who wrote the definitive How to Be a Woman, talked about a boy who tried to strangle his girlfriend the first time they had sex. When she burst into tears, he was horrified but relieved. He thought it was what girls wanted.

We need a How to Be a Man. Girls have myriad books now about sex, from Fifty Shades of Grey to Bryony Gordon’s The Wrong Knickers. But male authors aren’t allowed to write books about sleeping around because it sounds too aggressive. Instead there are Facebook groups such as TheLADbible where you get points for “smashing a virgin”. So young men don’t know the rules any more — when flirtation becomes harassment. They just know that sex is fraught.

I met the 16-year-old and his friends. “I don’t want to be seen as a rapist,” one explained. “Boys don’t have a right to grope but I wish girls realised they shouldn’t grab or touch us either.” Another showed me pictures sent by girls in bikinis, shiny lips pouting, cleavage out. “They’re three years below us,” he said. All the boys knew that being in possession of a sext from an underage girl is a criminal offence. “A policeman came and explained.”

They hadn’t been taught about pleasurable, consensual sex. They did, however, worry that porn changes what their generation expects. “It makes you rate girls’ bodies differently and think they’re all into collars and whips,” one said. “It doesn’t teach you what real girls want.”

Andy Phippen, professor of social responsibility in IT at Plymouth University, says: “I work with a lot of academics in this area, many of whom approach the topic from a feminist perspective, which automatically positions boys as ‘bad’ without exploring why they have the attitudes they have and what it is like to be a boy. The vast majority just want a nice girlfriend, but they are living in a highly sexualised society that makes things very confusing.”

It’s not just sex. Boys also have a warped view about their looks. A survey by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology studied 2,000 teenage boys and found that they were as self-conscious about their bodies as girls, with 62 per cent not liking their faces. A third think they need to lose weight or go under the knife. Yet boys are rarely mentioned in the debate on anorexia or cosmetic surgery.

At school they also suffer. Teachers have lower expectations of them, so that by the age of seven boys believe that girls are smarter than they are. Not surprisingly a third more girls apply for university. Last summer women accepted 52,300 more places than men and more women than men started apprenticeships.

This female hegemony continues after university. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, 11 per cent of male graduates were unemployed after completing their first degree in 2012, compared with 7.2 per cent of female graduates. Top companies such as McKinsey management consultancy stop at nothing to get females, offering graduates mani/pedis on recruitment days.

Men do catch up in the workplace and overtake women, but not always — the most vulnerable people in their twenties are men. They are more likely to live at home with their parents and, according to Shelter, nine out of ten people sleeping rough are male. They are also significantly more likely to take their own lives. Suicide has become the biggest cause of death for men under 35, while for women it is still traffic accidents.

When it comes to domestic abuse, women — traditionally seen as the victims — aren’t the only ones to suffer. Forty per cent of reported victims are male, although this includes assault by male relatives or partners. In marriage 3.4 per cent of women reported a case of domestic abuse over the past year, the same proportion as men, yet there are only 70 beds in refuges for men and 4,000 for women. Last year 17 men were killed by their wives.

Fathers don’t tend to worry about younger males in the pack. They seem to see the teenage years as a rite of passage, but they didn’t have the same pressures themselves, just a few porn mags and a lot of fumbling. The return of feminism is brilliant but not if we start denigrating men again. We need to teach both sexes how to have sex and succeed.

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