Manhood is caught in a gender agenda, by Miranda Devine.
Among the intelligentsia, … overt displays of male aggression are decidedly on the nose, and beady eyes are always on the lookout for some indiscretion to crank up the outrage meter.
The fact is that masculinity is under threat like never before. The very existence of a Y chromosome gives rise to accusations of violence, aggression and patriarchy.
Between gender fluidity imperatives, girl power indoctrination, pretend gender pay gaps, and the characterisation of little boys as incipient wife bashers, the fragile wonder of boyhood is being demonised.
It starts in early school:
You might be five years old and interested in dressing up like Batman and playing bullrush in the playground. But in the classroom you will be told that your exuberance is bad. You are a “bad boy”, if that’s not already an oxymoron. You are a boy. Therefore you are bad.
I have seen eight-year-old boys kept in at lunchtime as punishment for jiggling in their seats. Needless to say they were climbing the walls by the end of the day.
My sons endured primary schools where every physical activity they enjoyed in the playground was gradually banned and their sense of adventure curtailed.
I once was helping out in a Year 2 classroom and watched a little girl reach over and smack a little boy on the hand and instruct him to stop doing whatever he was doing to annoy her. What was astonishing was that he accepted her physical rebuke and she was not the slightest bit chastened when I intervened. Talk about privilege.
The hypocrisy is outrageous:
Where once we used to lament that girls lagged behind boys and invent all sorts of strategies to right the imbalance, now there is untrammelled joy as boys fall further and further behind. Last year 82 girls topped the state in at least one subject compared with just 34 boys. And at university, 60 per cent of graduates are women.
Such a gender skew is now just taken for granted as the due of women who, we are constantly told, are the smarter sex. Never mind that the bell curve on any IQ test shows more girls clustered around the average and more boys at the top and the bottom; in other words males are more likely to be genii or imbeciles.
It would be a brave academic who raised such a point on any university campus today. A generation has grown up thinking there is something wrong with maleness. …
The whole gender pay gap is a hoax. Industries statistically dominated by men tend to attract better pay than those traditionally dominated by women. And then there is the choice women make, willingly, to trade career heights for job flexibility in order to raise children, which a lot of mothers would agree is a priceless privilege.
The war on men has been on the rise, coincident with the rises of feminism, the global elite, and political correctness. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but often it is.
