My son Winston has always adored and respected girls. He invited his entire fifth grade class to his 10th birthday party because he liked them so much, at an age when his male classmates generally shunned the opposite sex.
And by the end of his coeducational high school, he came to the conclusion that he was glad he had so many female friends because they were much more mature than he was. His self-awareness pleased me. Being a feminist through and through, I set about raising Winston and his older sister equally, raising them to see themselves as equals in their ambitions and self-confidence. As a result, Winston always had rewarding friendships with the girls at school. Now 21, he is at university, studying international relations, and he came eager to study alongside young women (and men) as intellectually curious and open-minded as he is.
But my poor son was in for a rude awakening. Not only is there a set of arcane rules that young men must abide by in the dating world, but he is generally treated like a toxic person simply for being a man.
In any political debate I have with a girl, at some point she will say, “That’s just the patriarchy talking,” or “You’re a man, you don’t understand anything.”
As a feminist, Susannah Jowitt dedicated herself to raising her son Winston in the same way she raised her older sister.
Culturally, he is discovering that if he shows any kind of initiative, he could be accused of asserting an oppressive, “male, pale and stale” entitlement.
“As much as I try to contribute to the solution,” he tells me, “I am seen as simply part of the problem.”
And I get angry. I’m angry at my own sex. I know men have gotten away with it for centuries, but why do we women have to fall for that same unevolved view that one gender has to be above the others?
But I’m also angry with myself. I did everything I could to raise my son to be fair, but I didn’t warn him that the scales had tipped.
I failed to toughen him up or teach him to speak for himself in a time and world where he is presumed guilty before being proven innocent.
Let’s face it, feminism has become colder: gone are the days of joyful celebration and feminine triumphs of my youth.
I have been a feminist since I was about 12, when my mother got a senior job at the Independent Broadcasting Authority (the equivalent of Ofcom today) and I saw how incredulous many of her acquaintances were that she had been entrusted with such responsibility.
I then worked in the House of Commons when I was 20, where I encouraged women in politics to break the glass ceiling without any quotas giving them an advantage.
But today, rightly horrified by the revelations of #MeToo — with its twin evils of abuse of male power and sex — and the regressive repeal of abortion rights in the United States, young women have come to see men as the archenemy.
The “patriarchy” is seen as a monster that must be crushed at all costs, and Winston and his companions find themselves caught in its wake.
Innocent young men trying to do the right thing are required to be deferential and passive if they want women to see them as allies. For Winston, this means toning down his natural exuberance in favor of the new masculine meekness.
Winston notes that young women view him as “a predator until proven otherwise,” simply because he is a man.
Passivity and deference do not come naturally to our family. Twenty-seven years ago, I asked my now husband what his next move would be in the backgammon game we were playing.
In an attempt to show his interest, he jumped up and said, “This is it!” as he swept the board aside, pulled me into his arms, and kissed me. Today, that might have gotten him into trouble, but three months later, we were engaged.
The dynamic couldn’t be more different now. At college parties, Winston says, everyone understands that it’s the woman who makes advances on the man.
“I have to walk a fine line,” he tells me. “I can’t look at a girl flirtatiously for more than a moment; if I look at her for longer, I might be accused of staring, of objectifying her.”
“It’s like, just because I’m a man, I’m a predator until proven otherwise. So I look at her and only if she responds firmly and positively for more than a few seconds, do I dare approach her and ask if she wants something to drink.”
I do note, however, that the old sexism that says the guy has to pay for the girl’s drink is clearly still in force.
We’d had family conversations about consent, so he’s able to handle mixed signals pretty well. And he got a taste of the new order when he encountered the strange omertà at school that said you couldn’t kiss a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend, even if she wanted to.
Luckily, on that occasion, she had some wonderful friends who knew how to mediate peace between all parties, so the balance was restored. But her older sister was fulminating: “You’re an idiot. Just follow the rules.”
However, that is nothing compared to what he has encountered at university. His friends have been ostracised by their peers for being “too aggressive” and have only been slowly rehabilitated when the girl in question admits that she may have exaggerated the wrongdoing in question.
In 2022, a YouGov survey for charity Future Men found that 40 per cent of young UK men feel society still expects them to be the breadwinner.
Making your interest in a woman obvious may be forbidden, but a girl rubbing my son’s groin backwards is an acceptable expression of her interest in him.
Winston admits that he has been lucky to be able to navigate his way through this minefield.
A young woman who made the first move with him on the dance floor is now his (lovely) girlfriend, so they laugh about it, although they admit that if he had done the same, she would have run away.
My daughter, now 23, and her boyfriend had a similar beginning: she asked him to kiss her after he didn’t take her cues. He admits he was too afraid of making a mistake and didn’t want to ruin the friendship they already had.
They have all expressed how happy they are to be together and to be out of the ring of sexual politics, with its distorted rules and taboos, but there is a tacit consensus among them that girlfriends are the ones who rule in any relationship.
Is it any wonder that women are increasingly being placed “above” men in culture, and that men are being belittled, dismissed or eliminated altogether?
In Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power, recently turned into a big-budget drama on Amazon Prime, women gain the power to rule the world, and they do so by taking the planet back to the Stone Age and virtually wiping men out of existence.
And of course, last year, when the blockbuster movie Barbie came out, with its simplistic view that all men are useless and that there is no place for them in a world ruled only by women. Yes, it’s pink, plastic and a parody, but what are young people supposed to think? Meanwhile, watch virtually any movie starring Adam Sandler, recently named the highest-paid movie star on the planet, and you’ll see how he has profited from making movies that glorify male immaturity and ineptitude. In the UK, employment prospects for young men, both black and white, compared with those for young women, have never been worse.
This is despite the fact that in 2022 a YouGov survey for the charity Future Men found that 40 per cent of young UK men feel society still expects them to be the breadwinners.
So how do you solve that conundrum and make enough money in a market where your masculinity is holding you back? It’s simple: downplay that masculinity.
Winston is learning that lesson even before he enters the workforce. A few months ago, a talent scout discovered him on the street as a model, but his boss ruefully told him he was “too much of a man” in an industry where decadence fits better.
A prominent headhunter told me that of the young male graduates he sees trying to enter the job market, the ones who succeed are the kindest, calmest and obviously most empathetic.
“You might want to tell Winston to tone down his brash persona,” he said.
“She has to be more metrosexual to fit in.” Once again she has been asked to water herself down (in a way we would abhor if a woman were asked to change her ways) and this saddens me.
Winston admits that some of the things Andrew Tate says about men taking back power may resonate with him and his friends when they feel forgotten or abandoned by society.
Ultimately, these new norms are bad for women too, because they are unnatural. And nature abhors a vacuum, so in the space left by the death of acceptable masculinity comes the caveman.
In the United States, there are the MAGA (Make America Great Again) rednecks and anti-abortionists; here, there are self-confessed misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate.
Even Winston, who despises Tate, admits that some of the things Tate says about men taking back their power may resonate with him and his friends when they feel forgotten or abandoned by society (as 29 percent of young men in that 2022 YouGov survey admitted to feeling).
This is a truly horrifying thought.
In a world where polarization seems more attractive than ever, I fear a backlash.
A jump from the seesaw to the other side, and to think of what our young people will have to become to achieve it is a terrifying thought.
Of course, the only way to avoid this is real equality. We must accept that it is not necessary to crush men in order to elevate women.
Mothers like me should teach our sons to respect women, yes, but also themselves. Empowering women is obviously the way forward, but why do we have to smother men in our path?
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