Two women are sitting in an office eating Maltesers, discussing the caloric content of their snack. “Only 180 calories?” says a blonde 30-something. “I don’t feel naughty at all now!” With that, she stands up and flashes her chest at a passing male co-worker. The man, struck dumb by the sight, throws the documents he was carrying in the air and tumbles to the ground.
“That’s better,” says the flasher with a wry smile, pulling back down her top and returning to her chocolate.
It’s one of a million adverts these days which casts the woman as smart and sassy and the man as a hapless, bumbling idiot. But have to wonder if it would pass the watchdogs if the gender roles were reversed. Would an advert featuring a guy flashing a female co-worker be okay, do you think?
As is so often the case, this example is just part of a far broader trend. This insulting depiction of men in the media is indicative of the position they have assumed in this part of the world. You would be hard pushed to find someone willing to argue that women are not deserving of equality, but it is quite clear that the scales have been tipped in many areas.
There is no equality in the family courts, for one, and unmarried fathers are set at a particularly obvious disadvantage because of their gender. Guardianship of a child is conferred upon the mother at birth. The father, meanwhile, has no rights whatsoever.
The mother decides whether the father’s name will be entered on the birth certificate or if he is deserving of access to his child. She can cut him out at will, if the mood takes her, and the father will face a costly, uphill legal bill to secure even visitation rights. If the mother meets someone new, her partner can adopt the child without the father’s consent.
And its not just Irish laws that have been skewed in this way. Two years ago, laws in the UK relating to mitigating circumstances in murder cases were changed. On one hand, a husband who kills an unfaithful wife in a fit of jealousy will no longer be allowed to plead that he was provoked. Meanwhile, a wife who kills her husband because he has subjected her to a ‘slow burn’ of abuse may successfully plead manslaughter. Only women can be provoked, it seems.
Women have an increasing influence on western culture and social norms, and I can’t help but feel our shopping-as-a-hobby, rampant consumerism trend has sprung directly from this.
Today’s obsession with appearance, with accompanying eating disorders, plastic surgery and the sexualisation of children didn’t come from men. Men have shorter lives than women, commit suicide at a rate three times that of women, and we’ve got to a stage where a men-only golf course – even a men-only day at a golf course – is absolutely verboten.
Meanwhile, gyms that exclude men from joining are springing up everywhere. And I had to watch Tiger Woods – one of the best sportsmen of his generation – make a long, rambling apology for infidelity live on television because ‘the public’ felt they had a right to it. He apologised to all the women in his life one after the other before hugging his mother for the finale.
It was the public castration of someone who had become a hero for men all over the world for his stunning, hard-won talent, but a villain for aspects of his private life that women’s magazines and their readers decided they, for some reason, had a right to know about.
Our education system is a problem, too. The vast majority of primary and secondary teachers here are women, and boys can start hearing seriously damaging pronouncements from an early age. I remember being told by a female primary teacher that exam results prove girls are better students than boys. The girls in the class smiled smugly and the boys put their heads down.
That teacher’s much-repeated point is difficult to accept. There are certain subjects in which girls do better than boys and others that see boys out-perform girls – practical subjects which involve actually doing something being chief among them. The fact that exam results come out in favour of girls only demonstrates that there are more subjects of the type that girls excel at on the curriculum.
It’s ridiculous to think that people would put the discrepancy down to girls being ‘smarter’ than boys when it’s quite obvious that a female-dominated education sector such as ours will eventually develop in a way more amenable to female students. The argument is about as viable as me saying that the Afghan education system, in which the best performers are male, demonstrates that boys are smarter or better students than girls.
Somewhere along the line, the struggle for equality turned into something else and men are being pressed into a subservient role. Now it’s basically a question of how far along this trend will go before it prompts a reverse.
Robert Carry has worked as a journalist in Ireland, Thailand and Australia
