The Crisis of Masculinity: Pru Goward (2004)

The Crisis of Masculinity –is
there the need for a men’s movement?

Speech delivered by Pru Goward,
Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, as part of the Oz Prospects Lecture
Series, State Library of Victoria, 20 April, 2004.

• Distinguished guests,
  ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the honour of being invited to speak to
  you tonight about the crisis of masculinity and the need for a men’s
  movement.
• Let’s put aside
  the need for a men’s movement for the moment and begin with the latest
  political fashion statement, the crisis of masculinity.
• Curiously, it is not
  a term I often hear defined by those who use it. The phrase itself is presumably
  meant to convey the drama of its meaning without need for explanation; that
  is, without rationale, or evidence. Is it meant to tap into latent fears lurking
  deep within our troubled souls, to offer some explanation for everything that
  worries us, from the greenhouse effect to illicit drug use, but can’t
  quite put our fingers on? It would not be the first time that pop sociology
  has played this role.
• Yet the term is resonating,
  it’s echoing something, even if only very faintly and often
  times distorted.
• So what does it mean?
• Let me start with the
  facts about men, many taken from the report of the House of Representatives
  Standing Committee on Education and Training’s Inquiry into the education
  of boys, released in October 2002.
• Fact 1: Men are more
  likely to commit suicide than women, though women are apparently more likely
  to try.
• Fact 2: Men are more
  likely to be murdered than women- double the numbers. They also commit 85%
  of murder and manslaughter. The ratio of male to female juvenile offenders
  in custody is nine to one, similar to the adult rates.
• Fact 3: Men do have
  specific health problems, such as prostate cancer, which are only belatedly
  receiving attention
• Fact 4: Men live on
  average four years fewer than women.
• Fact 5: By aged nine,
  while there are no real differences in numeracy, Australian boys are clearly
  behind girls in the literacy stakes. In 2000, the difference was 4.4% - a
  year earlier it had been even greater, at 5%.
• Fact 6: By the time
  students are 14, according to a 1995 study, the literacy gap between boys
  and girls is 8%, an increase from 3% in 1975.
• Fact 7: Two thirds of
  those in reading recovery programmes are boys.
• Fact 8: 80% of students
  suspended or expelled are boys.
• Fact 9: Overall girls
  achieve better academic results than boys at Year 12 level. In New South Wales,
  for example, there is now a gap of 19 marks out of 100 between the male and
  female average Tertiary Entrance Scores, the widest gap in Australia.
• Fact 10: In 2001 the
  Year 12 retention rate gap between girls and boys for was 11%. Before 1976,
  boys were much more likely to finish Year 12 than girls.
• Fact 11: 56% of university
  graduates today are women, 44% are men.
• So far, this confirms
  the picture of the male underachiever. We should be pleased that young women
  have become better educated, but bothered that young men have not kept pace
  and continue to put themselves at risk.
• But there are also a
  few counter-facts, in particular that many of these facts were much the same
  thirty or forty years ago, yet nobody talked about a crisis of masculinity.
• Boys in catholic schools,
  for example, often did not see a male teacher until their later years.
• During the war years
  many boys grew up with absent fathers and, if their fathers were killed, permanently
  without a father figure. Boys have always been the ones to play hookey from
  school and girls have been avid readers since they were first allowed to read.
  In the days before no-fault divorce, there is no evidence that families were
  happier or more connected with their children.
• Suicide, murder, prison
  and risk taking behaviour have long been more prevalent among men.
• Women’s greater
  literacy skills have long been recognized. In the UK for example, there were
  once equal male and female quotas set for the 11Plus examinations that determined
  selection for secondary school. British educators apparently recognized decades
  ago that if there were no quotas, girls would dominate in their entry to the
  academic stream- at the expense of boys. Since boys and girls did equally
  well at their O levels six years later, British educators believed they were
  reflecting the need to accommodate the different development rates of males
  and females. Thus the quotas.
• According to the Parliamentary
  enquiry’s report, boys are more likely to have auditory and laterality
  focus difficulties (which affect ability to read from left to right). These
  delay or impair reading skills. I will return to laterality focus a little
  later.
• I repeat, it needs to
  be recognized that none of the so called problems that men and boys face today
  are new.
• When we look at the
  adult work force, we see a different picture again.
• Men are, despite their
  educational deficit, still more likely to take leadership positions, be chief
  executives, senior managers and board members.
• Women make up only 26%
  of our federal parliamentarians.
• Although more girls
  than boys have been finishing year 12 since 1976, we have never had a female
  prime minister and only one ever female high court judge.
• Although more women
  now graduate in law from university than men, less than ten years out from
  graduation, men are more likely to have remained lawyers and more likely to
  have been promoted.
• The earnings gap between
  men and women in full time work is significant- women earn 84 cents of the
  male dollar. When part timers and casuals are included, women earn 66 cents
  in the male dollar and by the time we get to old age, according to the National
  Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, NATSEM, women are two and a half
  times more likely to live in poverty.
• These too, are facts.
  What interests me as a student of social change and of the role of gender,
  is how we explain these apparent contradictions and the emergence of a new
  crisis from old facts?
• The answer, as always,
  appears to lie in the detail.
• Fact: According to the
  same parliamentary inquiry and just about every submission to it of consequence,
  the gap between boys’ and girls’ literacy is much more marked
  for boys of low socio-economic status families than for middle and upper status
  families.
• The federal Department
  of Education, in its submission to that inquiry, says, for example,
• “the differences
  between levels of literacy for males and females are greater among students
  from manual and unskilled occupations than among children from other socio-economic
  groups. The gender gap is larger for the lower groups.”
• Fact: The shift to a
  knowledge based economy along with new management techniques mean that computers
  are fast replacing the need for high levels of numeracy but there is an increasing
  need for high standard verbal communication between people.
• Employment and earnings
  outcomes for boys who complete Year 12 are excellent. Ironically, even 19
  year old men with low literacy in full time work earn more than 19 year old
  women with high literacy in full time work.
• Fact: The availability
  of unskilled or manual work suitable for boys without Year 12 has declined
  in the course of the last twenty years. Agriculture and manufacturing now
  account for only 19% of all employment; in 1966 it was almost half of all
  employment. Unskilled blue collar workers, of whatever age, are vulnerable
  to unemployment and marginalization. They are overwhelmingly male and economic,
  not social reform, has done this to them.
• Fact: Reading is no
  longer entertainment for boys. Computer games for example are overwhelmingly
  played by boys. As observed by the Parliamentary Inquiry, this is at the expense
  of reading. A majority of boys report doing most of their reading at school,
  whereas girls say they do most of their reading as leisure.
• In other words, girls
  read a lot and boys are no longer being forced to get practice doing something
  they don’t find as easy to do. Not surprisingly there is a skills gap
  by aged nine.
• Fact: low socio-economic
  boys are the most likely to consider they must be the main breadwinner and
  conform to traditional family structures.
• Fact: Low socio economic
  boys are the most likely to play truant, be disciplined at school and to commit
  crime. Middle and high status boys are much less likely to experience these
  problems.
• Fact: By age 24, men
  who have not completed Year 12 expect to have 1.6 children- the lowest number
  for any age male group and even among other 24 year old men.
• Fact: According to the
  Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Survey in Australia of June 2002, HILDA,
  this fertility gap is very different for older age groups. Among men aged
  40 to 55 for instance, men with year 11 or less education expect to have,
  on average, slightly more children than those with tertiary education. They
  have 2.24 children, graduates have 2.21.
• Fact: Overall the more
  men earn the more children they now have- men earning more than $70,000 a
  year for example, expect 2.12 children compared with men on low incomes, who
  expect around 1.83 children.
• And who can blame them
  if according to traditional family values, they don’t have the income
  to support a family.
• If anyone is suffering
  a crisis of masculinity, it is this group. Younger men with low educational
  levels.
• UNLIKE THEIR COUNTERPARTS
  IN EARLIER GENERATIONS.
• This, I suggest, is
  the new fact.
• Whereas once low educational
  levels, mucking up at school or preferring footy to reading did not deny men
  the capacity to have children or to work for forty years and head a household,
  this is no longer the case. And the downwards spiral of expectations begins
  earlier and earlier.
• If a boy or girl is
  struggling with reading and school work at thirteen or fourteen today, doesn’t
  everyone from mum, dad, the teacher, careers advisor and family friend tell
  them they will end up on the scrap heap, without any prospects? Not surprisingly,
  truancy, dropping out, inattentiveness and under-achievement soon follow.
• Paraphrasing the Jesuits,
  show me the boy school leaver at fifteen, and I will show you the unemployed
  and childless man at thirty.
• A man who feels disconnected
  from our two great social institutions, work and family.
• Surely, a man in crisis.
• An angry man who is
  more likely to have his marriage or partnership break down, his children leave
  him and his connection with them severely limited by either his actions, their
  mother’s or their own.
• A man who continues
  to live on a diet of movies and tv sport shows that demonstrate traditional
  male values and virtues.
• A man who was brought
  up not to learn the skill of communicating with others, who often failed to
  pick up the signs of frustration and unhappiness in their partners, and then
  were shocked and astonished when they walked out.
• Yes, surely a man in
  crisis, a crisis even of masculinity. But not all men.
• This is not to say that
  social change, and in particular, the changing status of women, has not also
  put men, all men, under pressure.
• But pressure of a different
  sort.
• Men have had to change
  their work culture, their social behaviour, accept women as bosses, women
  as equals in the workplace and the women they love living under pressure at
  home.
• The Household, Income
  and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, HILDA, for example, finds 60% of
  mothers in full time working couples do 11 or more hours of housework a week,.
  Only 12% of full time working fathers in couples do so.
• No wonder only 15% of
  these men felt taking care of their children was more work than pleasure,
  whereas 20% of the women did.
• A sense of unfairness
  also comes through in these results. Most men and women surveyed agreed that
  house-work should be shared equally if both are in paid work- only that’s
  not how it turns out in practice.
• You can be sure your
  average Australian woman will make her view of his shortcomings as housekeeper
  quite clear to him one way or another. Life in the average family starts to
  resemble the Battle of the Somme, where a few concessions are gained during
  one row, only to be lost during the next.
• And let’s not
  kid ourselves about female gate-keeping here. Both with child care and housework.
  Women often gate-keep as aggressively as men do. There’s also a chance
  that those same developmental shortcomings that made it harder for men to
  learn to read, like laterality focus for example, makes being the perfect
  housekeeper harder for them too.
• (You might think laterality
  focus, or the ability to scan from left to right, is only about reading. But
  it also helps us sweep a room with our eyes from left to right and find every
  dirty sock, every piece of newspaper on the floor and every speck of dust
  that has been missed when HE did the tidying up, all in less time than it
  takes Wayne Carey to kick a goal).
• Forgive that aside-
  my point remains that the housework as well as the child care are the causes
  of many a nasty fight, where she blasts him or gives him the silent treatment
  - he slams the door and rushes off into the arms of the friendly family computer.
• He can no longer go
  down to the pub and drink it off with his mates, drink-driving laws have put
  paid to that.
• ( I think we would all
  prefer it if he let off steam by mowing the lawn, but then there is only so
  much grass in anyone’s back yard!)
• These are things young
  men and women didn’t see their parents fighting about, fights which
  puzzle and infuriate both of them. No wonder she cries quietly into the ironing
  and he has his so called crisis of masculinity. Once she went and did a course
  in Feminist Studies and Political Economy at university- today she may write
  those courses.
• But this is not a crisis
  of masculinity; this is an opportunity for masculinity to grow.
• Although the lofty offices
  on the marbled floors of the executive levels are still dominated by male
  executives and female assistants, news of the crisis of masculinity may well
  have reached here.
• They too, will be noticing
  that younger male executives are more child-focussed than they were, more
  likely to have a career wife than they were and maybe even to wear exotic
  after-shave or enjoy cooking on the weekends.
• This is not to say that
  alternative masculinities, such as the much-vaunted metrosexuality, are wide
  spread. As principals of boys-only schools observed in their submissions to
  the parliamentary inquiry, boys are much more likely to conform to a dominant
  form of masculinity than girls are to femininity- it seems to be more ok for
  girls to be different to each other.
• Is this a crisis anyway,
  or just a change?
• I suspect very often
  this so called crisis is in the eyes of their fathers and mothers rather than
  the young men themselves.
• Young men might be enjoying
  this new found freedom from the tyranny of being sole provider.
• Take the case of a middle-aged
  friend of mine who runs a large motor service and repair business. In his
  life time he has seen dozens of pimply youths with a love of cars and grease
  under their fingernails start out as apprentices and leave him for the challenge
  of a better job. Today, he says, they aren’t especially hungry for the
  overtime and, quote,
• “they aren’t
  as ambitious as we were”. “Young men used to say, “I want
  your job”- now they say “I like my life the way it is thanks””.
• At this point my twenty
  something daughter interrupted him to say
  • “no, that’s
    because they know we’ll go Dutch with them”
  • that new-age habit
    of going halves in the price of a night out.
• And this is true. These
  boys have gone to co ed high schools with girl school captains, or competed
  against them directly. They go out with young women who work from the time
  they are at school, and may now earn even more than they do; the finger-nail
  biting pressure for young men to achieve is relieved. They know that when
  they marry or partner, she will kick in as much as he, she will work part-time
  when the children are young, if they decide to have children, and she will
  provide for her own old age.
• He might even harbor
  a dream of working part time himself when the children need him. He might
  choose to partner with someone who does want the boss’s job, while he
  becomes the principle parent and home-maker.
• What a blessed relief,
  young men might say.
• Is this group in crisis,
  or is it just struggling, along with women, to find new and relevant rules
  for relationships- and no harm in that?
• For that other group,
  of low achieving males, there are different problems and solutions.
• We might need to change
  our approach to give marginalized teenage boys the chance of a real job suitable
  to their skills while they sort themselves out.
• It might mean responding
  better to the cognitive development needs of boys.
• It might mean better
  partnering and relationships education, and development of communication skills.
• It certainly means better
  public policy.
• One contribution the
  women’s movement made to public policy cannot be denied - it now requires
  that gender be factored in. Not always performed in practice, but certainly
  recognised as legitimate.
• For some individuals
  it may be about the need to downsize their lives, cut their long working hours,
  reducing their need for more things and allowing more time for their children.
  For others it is about greater access to the world of work, to the goods and
  services, as well as the dignity and status, that it brings.
• So is the answer to
  any of this, a men’s movement? I think not.
• What we see of the so-called
  men’s movement today is often strident, often harking back to times
  lost rather than working with the future.
• For example I have seen
  no coherent plan to address the educational needs of boys proposed by the
  men’s movement, although this remains the major source of many male
  problems today. Interestingly, many boys-only schools are making huge strides
  in addressing educational deficits, but I have seen none describe themselves
  as part of the men’s movement. Many academics are focussing on this
  issue and doing great work, but again most of them would not subscribe to
  the tenets of the men’s movement.
• The question of whether
  or not we need a men’s movement to fix it does, I think, entirely miss
  the point. The last thing men need if indeed they are experiencing a crisis
  of masculinity is another war with women. If we are successfully to address
  the crisis of masculinity- and, for that matter, the greater poverty, violence
  and earnings disparities suffered by women- then what we need is a partnership
  movement, not a men’s or a women’s movement that treats
  the other as the enemy. In the case of the advancement of women and its many
  battles, there have always been women determined to punish men, but also men
  equally determined that women should suffer for daring to demand equality.
• Similarly, a men’s
  movement would lead to more, not less, social division. Especially if it is
  driven by anger and sadness for what has been lost, rather than hunger for
  a better future. Men and women are the two faces on the coin of humanity;
  to deface either of them is to devalue humanity.
• A partnership
  movement, by contrast, would be different - in tone, in approach.
  Naturally it would require a different sort of leadership, both at the political
  and community levels.
• Inevitably it’s
  going to be more complicated and less spectacular than the glory and spoils
  of war, but it might be the only real choice if we are to resolve these issues.
  Unless of course, we really prefer the fight and getting even.
• It also goes without
  saying that running a social change movement is often not much fun. Celebrity
  feminists like Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan or Naomi Wolf tend to be the
  exception. There are many others in the women’s movement, for example,
  who have suffered gaol terms, close encounters with public railings, no jobs,
  broken marriages, endless letter writing over nights in other people’s
  kitchens on battered typewriters- all as part of a pitifully under-financed
  struggle taking up infinite amounts of available leisure time for years.
• The public thanks you
  get for it is to be called a man-hater, hairy legged, bitter, twisted, got
  no sense of fun and no wonder your kids have turned out badly. I don’t
  know if men would want much of that, apart from the hairy legs.
• So rather than a men’s
  movement, this could be the Get a Life Movement.
• A movement to recognize
  and manage technical and social change in a way that enhances, not diminishes,
  our happiness and contentment.
• It is about kindness
  and respect, as well as about merit and achievement.
• Perhaps most challenging,
  it is about real communication between men and women, both on day to day life
  and on ideological issues.
• Ultimately it is about
  choice, real choice for men, as well as for women.
• It is all that women
  have ever wanted, and it should be enough for men.

Last
updated 23 April 2004.