Contrary to progressive belief, young men are not turning into a generation of misogynists. Support for gender equality continues to rise, including among men under 30. The problem seems more to be that many men simply don’t see much recognition of their issues, or even of their identity, on the political left.
If the Democrats are the “women’s party,” as one party strategist claimed, it might not be surprising that men are looking in another direction. The official party platform lists the groups it is proud to serve; women are listed but men are not. There is a new Gender Policy Council in the White House, but it has not addressed a single issue facing boys or men.
As I blogged in 2018, boys and men fare badly in numerous areas of education, health, and crime etc.
When problems are neglected, they metastasize into grievances. And grievances can be weaponized in service of reactionary goals. The solution, then, is almost comically simple: Don’t neglect the problems.
The mistake being made on both sides is to see gender equality as a zero-sum game; that to do more for boys and men means doing less on behalf of girls and women.
Absolutely. We should have a Minister for Men, just as we have a Minister for Women. That is because men and women do need different things from the health and education systems (and men are doing much worse in them).
The author proposes some policies for the US, including:Recruit More Male Teacher
- Flexible School Starting Ages
- Expand Career and Technical Education
- Promote Apprenticeships
- Support Community Colleges
- Establish a Male Suicide Prevention Task Force
- Create an Office of Men’s Health
- Cover Male Contraception
- Set Public Health Targets for Men
- Increase the Share of Male Mental Health Professionals
- Equal, Independent Paid Parental Leave
- Reform Family Law for Unmarried Fathers
- Introduce a Nonresident Parent Tax Credit
I’d love to see one or more NZ political parties go into the next election with a men’s policy.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.
2 comments:
The left try to make out that they have the moral high ground, when in fact they are only after benefits for themselves. They go on and on and on about disparities for Maori in health, education and crime statistics, complaining about systematic racism, yet when it comes to exactly the same disparities with men, it's swept under the carpet. The last Labour government actually wrote in legislation concerning health and education that one of the aims of that legislation was the promotion of interests of women (impliedly over those of men). It's the socialist motto, all are equal but some (ie themselves) are more equal than others.
I'm glad to see expanding technical education on that list as I have been arguing in the literature for a while that technical and vocational education close the gap between boys' and girls' achievement at high school (see e.g. my paper "Smoothing the secondary-tertiary education interface: Developments in New Zealand following the National Qualifications Framework reforms", Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 57, 411-418). I would estimate that 15-20% of teenage boys are switched off by schooling which is more of a girl's thing because it stresses the verbal, and can be switched back on by offering them tech/vocat courses. These boys also appreciate the practical usefulness in career development terms of such programmes as opposed to the more abstract nature of most schooling.
But this does, of course, create a serious problem of exacerbating discrimination against girls. As Jordan Peterson has pointed out, girls face horrible systemic discrimination in fields such as brick-laying, over 99% of brick-layers being male.
Seriously now, we do need to look more at men's and boys' special needs. Society as a whole will benefit from addressing them, especially those aimed at brining teenage boys up to scratch and headed for careers rather than vagrancy and antisocial behaviour.
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