Here I could see I was seriously travelling in a different direction. Many women fell on the idea of backlash as the new feminism, whereas I disliked its assumption that men would inevitably seek to oppose and challenge women’s equality. But I wasn’t surprised that the idea was so popular. Such assumptions were everywhere, especially in what I have called ‘womanism’, a sort of popularized version of feminism which acclaims everything women do and disparages men. Womanism is feminism’s vulgate. It asserts that women are the oppressed or the victims and never the collaborators in the ‘bad’ things that men do. It entails a double standard around sexuality where women’s sexual self-expression is seen as necessary and even desirable, but men’s is seen as dangerous or even disgusting. Womanism is by no means confined to a tiny, politically motivated bunch of man-hating feminists, but is a regular feature of mainstream culture. It fuels the tabloids and the broadsheets alike. Womanism is a convenient response to many of the uglier aspects of the great convulsions shaking modern society; the very convulsions that are, in other aspects, delivering what feminism demanded.
Of course, many men, especially social commentators, have not responded any better. They have indulged in nostalgia and made various attempts to push the genie back into the bottle. They made it easy for feminism to justify ignoring the changes. But both sides seemed to me to be insisting that there was only one relevant question for understanding sexual relationships: given the gender divide, which sex has power?
I knew that I had finally crossed some invisible boundary when, after New Labour came to power in May 1997, I began to feel so ambivalent about the activities of feminists at the highest level of government. The establishment of a women’s unit and the appointment of a women’s ministry did not fill me with joy and enthusiasm, nor did the sight of ‘Blair’s Babes’, the huge increase in the number of female MPs ensured by the policy of all-women shortlists. Of course I was pleased to see all those women at last changing the appearance of the Houses of Parliament and promising to change the culture too. I ought to have been delighted to see people with the same history as myself now able to argue the feminist corner, fighting for greater equality between the sexes of all levels of society. So why feel uneasy?
This was not the usual radical unease – that feminists in government are prepared to do too little, are too cautious, too ready to kowtow to the limitations imposed by a government determined to carry majority consent with it at all times; instead, it was caused by the conflict between the certainties of this new feminist regime and my own perception that there were real social changes underway no longer easily understood by these feminist ideas. I thought we needed to look at what was happening to the sexes, without the preconceptions that one group still has power and the other needs special privileges to compensate for this. Yet here was a women’s unit confidently telling us it would champion ‘women’s interests’, apparently taking it for granted that we all knew what these were, so that we would finally be on the way to that elusive equality. The unit took for granted as truth that very rhetoric which I was beginning to question.
While these tendencies were steadily building a power base, I had been travelling in the opposite direction. I’d let go of the fundamental proposition that women are by definition oppressed. I began to wonder what it means to have institutions fighting for ‘women’s interests’ at the beginning of the new millennium. But no discussion was forthcoming. Everyone seemed to know what women’s interests were, from types of childcare, through assumptions about what women want and what men are, to the continued need for privileging women in order to further their equality. In contrast, I wanted a more honest appraisal about whether women are consistently discriminated against and what different women really want now in terms of work, childcare and mothering.
Once you let go of feminism’s fundamental propositions, the world looks very different. In the West in the 1990s the meaning of gender has changed and so too has its significance in relation to other aspects of society. Interpreting these changes from the perspective of an unchanging model of male power seemed to be less and less tenable. Instead I could see situations where men were really becoming vulnerable and women potent. And I was worried that because it did not share this realization, feminism could end up allying itself with socially divisive and bigoted ideologies which attack and blame poor men for all society’s problems.
So this is the complex context of men’s and women’s relationships as we enter the new millennium. Many aspects of the feminist vision are within grasp but not in the form originally envisaged. Instead of the rout of men sought by the radical feminists or the cosy co-operation envisaged by the socialist feminists, the 90s has been a sexually uncomfortable and sometimes antagonistic time. Oliver James, the psychiatrist, has described it as a time of ‘gender rancour’. There is much confusion about how to interpret this antagonism and neither sex has covered itself in glory when trying to do so. Some women have fallen back on old simplicities about men’s power and women’s moral superiorities. Some men have called for traditional solutions so that they can feel comfortable again.
This book is a detailed account of what has been happening between the sexes. What is the truth about the so-called male crisis? Is it an illusion? Or has men’s position really changed for the worse? If so, is this descent of man anything to do with the ascent of woman? What has been feminism’s contribution to these complex economic changes? Has it been useful in keeping gender in mind or has it simply hung on to its old ideologies and policies, involving a problematic blindness to the most vulnerable groups of men? And if blind to the different degrees of vulnerability of men, is it possible that feminism might have helped demonize certain groups, disguising rather than illuminating what is really happening in society.
This book has three key themes: families and parenting; the increasingly problematic socialization of boys and young men; and the fraught area of sexual relations. In each it is clear that feminism clings to the fundamental tenet that women are by definition the oppressed party. In each case this obscures what is really happening and can produce public reactions and social policies which can be retrograde and divisive. And in each case, by clinging to its old tenets, feminism fails to see that it has been successful, that it has changed society in deep and unforeseen ways. It is time that feminism faced up to the problems of its success.
So first I examine where feminism came from, why it was necessary in the 1970s and the ideas that drove it on (Chapter 1). In Chapter 2 I look at the tidal wave of social emancipation that resulted and how feminism’s fundamental ideas spread into the area of personal interaction where perhaps they were not as illuminating as they had been in the public areas of work, leisure and politics. Feminism’s demand for women’s rights began to become problematic and Chapter 3 looks at the success feminism had despite, rather than because of, its best intentions. The whirlwind of economic change in the 1980s, which bears the name of a woman, ‘Thatcherism’, delivered women the economic role that feminism demanded but without the accompanying social benefits and at the direct cost of many men. Families and communities were torn apart and by the 1990s men had become a problem.
In Chapter 4, I look at this unexpected turn in sexual relations and how feminism’s response was to deny rather than face up to the crisis of masculinity, to the fact that men were being forced to change by economic realities. This was a missed opportunity; hadn’t feminism demanded that traditional male values and behaviour should change? But it was hostile economic forces, not feminism, which brought this about. So when (Chapter 5) men appeared