Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS THE ILL-ADAPTED MALE TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Rosalind Gill Producer: Michael Blastland Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 6264 Broadcast Date: 28.12.00 Tape Number: TLN50/00VT1052 Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Fay Weldon Writer Adrienne Katz Director, Youth Voice Paul Johnson Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics John MacInnes Reader in Sociology, University of Edinburgh Lynne Segal Professor of Psychology and Gender, Birbeck College, Univesity of London Hilary Rose Professor of Physic, Gresham College Geoffrey Miller Author of ‘The Mating Mind’ GILL You may find this programme deeply insulting. Alternatively, your first impression may be that it confirms your deepest convictions. It all depends what you think of men. But a word of caution: the evidence and arguments here won’t lead us to a conventional conclusion, despite what may sound, at first, like a familiar lament for the modern male. WELDON When I look at young boys today, I think poor things. GILL Fay Weldon, writer and long-time analyst of relations between the sexes. WELDON You wonder what the future holds for them. You wonder where they will find their status in life, their identity and their, kind of, personal integrity. Of course, some will but you fear, as you look at the statistics or even look at them, there’s a hard time ahead for them. GILL In what ways? WELDON I think young men are having an increasing problem facing up to the future. Their testosterone driven creatures in an oestrogen driven society. By that I mean men have all those old fashioned virtues or problems such as courage, fortitude, consistency, elitism, patriotism - lots and lots of ‘isms’ which are just not fashionable any more in a world which is increasingly feminised. GILL 'Men are in crisis', we’re told all the time, whether the topic is educational attainment, crime and violence, the long hours culture, or family breakdown. Crisis talk has become the new common sense of the age, with all our anxieties about gender projected onto men. The loyal company man, made redundant at 53 after 30 years of service, with no hope of another job. His sense of loss and shame perhaps exacerbated by the fact that his wife has a successful career of her own. The man who was married to his job, hardly saw his children when they were young, and now, divorced, sees them only once a month and bitterly regrets it. And the problem youth - failing at school and getting into trouble with the police. Adrienne Katz is Director of the charity Youth voice and has listened to the accounts of 1400 boys and men in Britain today. KATZ Simon was quite a typical. He was 17, he had been, according to his report, quite a good student. His parents split up 2 weeks before he wrote his exams. He was so distraught by his family falling apart in every possible way that he failed every single one of his GCSEs. He got a terrible shock. He had to re-evaluate his whole sense of who he was and where he was going next and what he would do. His home split up - he had nowhere to live, he was moved into a hostel. Within the space of 3 or 4 months, factors cascaded on Simon like dominoes. He plummeted into depression very very quickly. Many of the young men we spoke to described a strategy for coping with the stress as going out and getting irritable and picking fights after having a drink. So, he too found himself in trouble with the police who locked him up. He was immediately at risk of suicide. GILL Talk of a crisis in masculinity may seem to give us a handle on the experiences of men like Simon. But how robust is the notion of a crisis? And how much does it actually help us to understand and address the problems faced by contemporary boys and men? The first problem for those who talk the language of crisis today is how to account for the fact that we’ve been here before. Paul Johnson, Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics: JOHNSON There have been several moral panics about the bad behaviour and, possibly, the criminality of teenage boys over the last 100 years. In the Edwardian period, say, just before the first world war, there was a great concern about what was called the boy labour problem. The teenage boys would go into dead end jobs as messengers then they would, at age 15 or 16, be thrown out of work, would end up on the streets and get into criminal activity. This was one reason why there was a lot of support for the formation of the boy scout movement by Baden Powell as a way of both training boys and getting them off the streets. And then there was another wave of panic in the 1930’s about teenage gangs, particularly in areas in Manchester and Liverpool and in London; in the 1950’s, great concern about Teddy boys fighting on the streets of seaside towns. So, it seems almost every generation has its desire to invent some sort of great panic or fear or concern about the activities of teenage males. GILL Concern about teenage male behaviour is not the only thing with a history - there have also been many previous anxieties about the effect of feminism on men. John MacInnes, Reader in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and author of a recent book on masculinity. MACINNES If there is a crisis of masculinity it’s been going on for a very long time. For example, if you look back to the first couple of decades of the 20th Century in America, which was a period when women in America started moving into the labour force in large numbers, and you find newspapers and magazines with things like cartoons of women dressed up in business suits and smoking cigars and men with pinnies or aprons on washing dishes or holding babies and things like that. GILL The fact that concerns about men’s behaviour have been around for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean that we should write off the notion of crisis altogether. After all, aren’t there some features of the current crisis that are new? Worries about the end of stable work and career patterns, job insecurity and a long hours culture that means men are increasingly absent from home, unable to provide positive role models to young children. Paul Johnson. JOHNSON If we take a long run view, it’s simply not true. We go back a hundred years, say, the average fully employed man worked about 55 hours a week and throughout the course of the 20th Century, this length of the working week has gradually come down. It fell to about 44 hours a week by the late 1940’s, down to around 40 hours a week by the late 1960’s and in the 1990’s fell, marginally, to 39 hours a week. So, it simply isn’t true that men, on average, are working longer, more hours a week now then they have done in the past. GILL So, are men complaining about nothing then? JOHNSON Yes. GILL In fact, Paul Johnson argues that most men are also having more time off work than ever before - 7 weeks (including public holidays) compared with only a week a hundred years ago. So we have to ask: if men are having a worse time at work - compared with when? Unemployment is low, there’s greater affluence and men are still earning nearly a third more than women. You might well think that men have never had it so good. So if the causes of crisis are not in work culture are they in education? A record number of pupils have been excluded from schools in the last few years, and 83% are boys. Fay Weldon. WELDON They now live in a culture which increasingly makes it difficult for them to express themselves. Their experience of education, I think, in which they’re taught by women from nursery school up - there are fewer and fewer men teaching and, again, the oestrogen perceptions, if you like, of the teachers are imposed upon the boys so that even musical chairs will seem too rough and tumble and be too noisy. And the general, kind of, physical roistering, tumbling kind of nature of the male child is very much confined within these schools. GILL This oestrogen culture is also on trial for the inferior exam performance of boys, whose GCSE results have lately fallen behind those of girls, prompting a period of national soul searching. But here, Paul Johnson suspects a hidden bias: JOHNSON This puzzled me because this was a very small minor change. Why should we be concerned if girls are doing marginally better than boys when we haven’t been so outraged or concerned in the past that boys were doing marginally better than girls. I mean, there’s a bizarre bias in the public reaction. These sorts of minor changes are what we would expect on a year to year variation in exam results. MACINNES We've become very aware of gender issues when there are often other issues around that are just as important and yet we somehow fail to notice them. GILL John MacInnes. MACINNES There's been a widespread debate in Britain over the last 10 years or so of the way in which girls are out-performing boys at school and it’s certainly the case that, for example, in Scotland in the last couple of years, girls have about a 7% greater chance than boys of getting qualifications that will take them to higher education. However, if we, instead of looking at that situation with a gender perspective, looked at it with a class perspective, we’d find that if we compared the sons and daughters of professional workers with the sons and daughters of manual working class workers, you’d find that the former group had a 600% greater chance of getting to university than the second group. Now, that’s just one small example of a situation where class has a much greater effect on people’s life chances than gender does and yet almost all the discussion and attention focuses on gender. GILL Perhaps John MacInnes is right. The figures for school exclusions show that children living in local authority care and from households in poverty are 10 times more likely to be excluded from school than the rest. And black boys are also disproportionately represented. Have we become so obsessed with differences between girls and boys that we fail to see the big picture? What’s more, do we actually misinterpret growing inequalities between men as gender differences rather than class differences? It may be that one reason we think there is a crisis in masculinity is that we don’t talk about class anymore. Lynne Segal, Professor of Psychology and Gender at Birkbeck College, University of London SEGAL Once you bring class back into it, you see that many of these problems have been around for a long time but were understood rather differently. I do think that the problems have deepened because inequality between men has deepened. And that doesn’t mean it’s just a class issue because it has a particular coding, a particular way of being felt by men because of gender because they’re supposed to be the winners when they’re so clearly not winning and not likely to be winning, then they are likely to suffer even more. Whereas for women and girls in the past, at least, where they didn’t have quite the same expectations if they didn’t have jobs or if life wasn’t as they wanted it, I think they’d be a lot less surprised than, you know, they didn’t receive the same ideology that, you know - you know you’re masculine if you’re on top. Because when people are talking about a crisis of masculinity what they’re really talking about, always, are changes between how we understand the relations between men and women. And, clearly, relations between men and women have changed a lot. But one thing that had happened by the end of the 20th Century, was that it was absurd to think womens’ place was simply in the home. Women were out there in the world, obviously, able to be in most of the spaces and places that men were in. And so given that, given the new visibility of women and certainly certain women in positions of authority and skill and with certain levels of economic independence, then the desire to blame women for men’s problems gets stronger and stronger. GILL Clearly some men are very angry - and blame women or feminism for their problems. But those who have lost stable work identities or even been restructured out of work altogether are victims of economic globalisation and technological change, not some kind of gender war which has left women on top. It doesn’t make much sense to regard these problems as evidence of a crisis in masculinity? So it’s not work and it’ s not school. Could it be biology? Is it that men are ill- adapted to modern society - out of fit because their natures were formed millennia ago on the African Savannah. Men just can’t help their lecherous, thuggish natures. One notorious example of this kind of thinking from evolutionary psychology is a recent book by two American academics who argue, based partly on their observations of scorpion flies, that rape is natural. Hilary Rose, Professor of Physic at Gresham college is one of its fiercest critics. ROSE Under certain circumstances, all male scorpion flies were moved to force sex. What they’re constantly doing is trying to move the language of natural selection and to claim that therefore this is somehow adaptational; that men rape. Now, there isn’t any proposition that you can make about human beings that you can say under certain circumstances all men will proceed to rape. And one of the worse things is that they really wipe the voice of victims from the record. I mean the women in all of this have rather little say - they actually wipe out all other than fertile aged women from the category of rape. So, if you’ve suffered oral rape or anal rape, according to these two men, you have not been raped - nor has a man who’s experienced same sex rape. So, it’s the most horrendous, brutal treatment of the social world in order to stuff it into their wretched animal categories and they still can’t make it stick. GILL But not all evolutionary psychologists have the crude view of masculinity that so angers Hilary Rose. Geoffrey Miller, from the University of California, is author of The Mating Mind. MILLER It’s certainly easy to think of evolutionary psychology as offering a very simplistic portrayal of the human male as innately brutal, violent, risk seeking and poorly adapted to modern society. I think that’s an inaccurate view because men have been adapted to very unnatural conditions for thousands of years. We ploughed fields 12 hours a day as medieval peasants, we faced French knights on the fields of Agincourt, we did all sorts of highly unnatural things. And we’re pretty flexible as long as we get some status or prestige but the ways in which we attain status or prestige are infinitely varied and hugely dependent on the cultures that we live in. A very funny thing about the modern internet economy is the way that things which would have sounded incredibly unmasculine to any sort of self-respecting prehistoric hunter, can now be made to appear incredibly macho and successful. For example, the idea that a man could make his living by begging other men to give him money in order to launch an internet start up company which requires huge amounts of networking skill and financial analysis. It could be selling women’s cosmetics. This is not the sort of thing that would have sounded particularly macho a thousand years ago, much less fifty thousand years ago and yet it is held up as an example of, you know, the shining new internet male. So I think what that illustrates is the flexiblity of definitions of masculinity even within this evolutionary framework where, yes, it’s still true that men are seeking status and prestige, it’s just we’re flexible enough to do it in many, many different ways. GILL For Geoffrey Miller, then, the factors that confer status on men can and do change. There’s nothing innate about men that makes them ill-adapted to modern society. But his insistence that status-seeking is still at the heart of male behaviour does give support to the popular view that men are intractably - perhaps disruptively - competitive, and that we will all feel the consequences. This assertion of essential differences between women and men, leads Hilary Rose to suspect that a political agenda is at work. ROSE They’re trying to return us to a past which looks a bit … a little bit like 1950’s America and it’s gender relations. I mean, it’s not for nothing that they’ve been compared to Flintstone sociology and that, I think, is sort of quite a good joke because, like good jokes, it does tell. GILL Where a century ago it was women who were deemed to be constrained by their natures and ruled by their hormones, today it appears to be men for whom 'biology is destiny'. Does Geoffrey Miller think that’s true? MILLER When I teach evolutionary psychology to students, it resonates very powerfully with them and both the young men and the young women recognise themselves being portrayed accurately and simply laying that on the table and saying, ‘yes it’s true, that’s okay, now what do we do about it - how can we discuss it explicitly and soberly and maturely?’ I think that’s enormously beneficial. It’s much more comfortable to sweep these things under the carpet and to say, ‘let’s pretend that men aren’t that way and try to create some sort of social norms that convince them that men are naturally just the same as women’. I don’t think that’s very constructive because men will rebel against that kind of ideology or that kind of propaganda and when they rebel they’ll turn to the men’s magazines, they’ll turn to pornography, they’ll turn to anything that offers an alternative vision of masculinity that they find better fit to themselves - even though it isn’t. WELDON It is true, I suppose that you hear men saying … ‘oh, I’m like this because I’m male’ or ‘I can’t help being this creature, I’m a man aren’t I’. You very seldom hear women saying, ‘oh, I’m like this because I’m a female, I’m a poor little timorous, helpless, muddling, lying little creature’, do you? Which is what the man would be suggesting. You see, 30 years ago, you heard exactly the opposite. We women would say, ‘oh, well I’m only a woman’, which meant she didn’t have to try or make an effort or wasn’t very responsible. Again, this is just part of the switch, I think. The weaker gender protects itself by referring to its gender and asking for pity. GILL Fay Weldon. Maybe some men feel comforted by these unflattering images of themselves. But is it really tenable to suggest that men are driven by biology while women are constructed socially? Hardly - and Lynne Segal detects another peculiarity: SEGAL It may seem strange mighten it that the image that we get of men from evolutionary psychology does like to compare them to a predatory ape. Robert Wright described them as your average wife-beating, beer-swilling, fat-bellied male. Thanks guys … that’s how you like to see yourself is it? Why on earth do men want to see themselves like that given that there’s no reason to see them like that. Many men are not like that so why is this the image that they want? Well, I guess, nevertheless, it’s a soothing image because it allows men to accept all their frailties. And, the one thing that isn’t new about men is being worried about their manhood, being worried about how to be the sorts of people they ought to be and it’s incredibly reassuring, I think, to say, ‘well boys, we have no choice really, you know, we’re just programmed to be these little thugs’. GILL So does evolutionary psychology just offer an excuse for men behaving badly? It chimes with the culture of laddism found in magazines like Loaded - with its byline ‘for men who should know better’. Presumably they don’t, or maybe just they just find it more fun to act the lad. So what are we left with? A variety of anxieties about men and boys - some of which paint them as thugs and others which portray them as the new victims of a feminism that has gone too far. But most of the explanations offered have turned out to be highly suspect. You have to wonder whether there is a crisis at all. And yet we’re left with the rather troubling image of Simon - someone vulnerable and in distress but also a statistic about young male violence. Adrienne Katz is an expert on the lives of boys. Her research found that while the majority of boys were coping well or even very well, a worrying proportion - 13 percent - were experiencing serious problems. They had very low self-esteem often accompanied by problems at school, with drugs, alcohol or crime. Most worrying of all 11 percent were deeply depressed or suicidal. Surely , then, she would agree that there is a crisis? KATZ Obviously when young men in a society are killing themselves, it’s a serious wake up call to the way we treat young people, the way we treat young men in particular and it’s extremely alarming. But, I think, there’s a danger in running crisis headlines and, also, combining that with messages that young men are failures in some way or they’re no good or they’re a problem to society. And lots of young men we spoke to were deeply offended by the press treatment of a situation in which they felt if young men are in trouble, why aren’t they helping us? Why are they just saying girls do better all the time and young men are a problem? They came forward in droves talking about the way they are treated, the way if 3 boys after school go even into a sweet shop, they’re treated with suspicion. The way, if they walk down the street, police stop them even if they’re doing nothing. Eventually, what happens is they get an idea that if we’re treated as being so bad, we might as well be bad. GILL For Adrienne Katz, crisis talk becomes a kind of labelling which stigmatises boys and produces precisely the kind of behaviour it purports to be concerned about. The pressure to conform to a particular image of masculinity was particularly acute for the boys with low self-esteem who were most at risk of suicide. Indeed, a particular image of manliness as tough, strong and silent was responsible for many of their problems. The boys who are suicidal are much more likely to have been told by their fathers that men should not talk about how they feel, that they must stand on their own two feet and shoulder their own problems. To break away from that mould, represents for them a failure to be a real man. KATZ I'm sure we're all responsible from the moment our son is put into our arms and we look at him and say, ‘doesn’t he look a wonderful little man - look his shoulders are broad - he looks like a rugby player’. We’ve all said these things and we mean them very lovingly. That’s fine unless we make them into some sort of trap in which the child is not free to behave naturally but has to conform to some ideal that maybe parents and society are setting for him. But, we should keep in mind, as many boys explained really painfully, that boys are allowed only one groove along which to travel and there’s no opportunity for them to explore multi-faceted qualities they may have. They said, jealously, that girls could be a tom boy, macho, very feminine, motherly, a great traveller but they felt that for them there were fewer roles to play. And we should just be a little wary of closing down and narrowing the emotional landscape. The gender script is too tight. The gender script should be, in today’s world, be whatever you really want to be or your true self. There’s a slight danger that while we’ve broadened it for girls, we’ve narrowed it for boys. GILL One of the ways we’ve done this is by repeatedly telling them that they’re in crisis at a time, as teenagers, when they feel particularly vulnerable and exposed. Policy measures which buy into this image of men don’t help - ideas like zero tolerance and tough love mimic rather than challenge the macho posturing which boys use to hide their vulnerability. KATZ You have to work with children as early as primary school to show both boys and girls that they can have a broader emotional landscape. Many of the boys explained to us that if you took concepts of strength - male strength - and turned around this image - in other words, they suggested that a slogan might be, ‘it takes bottle, not to bottle it up’. So, what they suggested was that we use these attributes which are, in fact, admirable. Loyalty was another thing which is a very strong male characteristic and that if you could teach peer groups to be supportive of one another, you would be using manly qualities to a good end. So, it wasn’t that we had to re-educate boys not to be macho or manly, it was that we had to try and harness those powerful, I call them myths - but indeed they’re not myths, they’re realities for them - harness them to work towards a more productive outcome. GILL But in a programme about masculinity shouldn’t we give the last word to a man? MACINNES We’re liable to fall into the trap of thinking, ‘oh, there’s a crisis of masculinity’, as if masculinity was something which previously was well defined or stable or secure and has now become problematic. And you can resolve that crisis or solve that crisis by discovering what masculinity really is. Whereas I would argue that assumptions that we’ve carried around in our heads, in the past, about what men are good at or what women are good at or what it is to be a real man or a real woman and so on, are just that - they’re assumptions that kind of make sense of particular arrangements that are rationalising inequalities that we’ve been used to in the past but they don’t have, actually, any basis in fact. And so, rather than saying, ‘let’s solve the crisis of masculinity’, I would rather say, ‘let’s look at what limitations there are on men or women doing different things’. And the more we look at these limitations, the more we discover that men and women are just as capable of doing all kinds of activities that in the past have traditionally been associated exclusively with one sex or the other. GILL John MacInnes, Feminism helped women break free from many of the chains of gender stereotyping. What have men got to fear? Nothing except freedom from an impossible set of expectations which they could never live up to anyway. What have they got to gain? The possibility to be whoever they want to be - unconstrained by narrow definitions of what it means to be a man. 15