Male-bashing

When it comes to the Opinion page, apparently we need to know women’s opinions about gender, but not men’s. Feminism is discussed, and varieties of feminism given intelligent treatment. Of course, there are other viewpoints that women can take up, and it would be interesting to hear more from some of the women who are not feminists. But men - and non feminist women - have to fight hard to get journalists to listen to them.

Journalists (males included) are too often ignorant and lazy. They often don’t care about telling a complex truth, and often hammer the facts around to fit the story they want to tell. One expects this from the crass TV shows; but not from the Herald and The Australian. It’s all too much like George Orwell: all ideas are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Does this matter? Of course it does. We need to understand the full spectrum of human behaviour - not a full picture of one sex and a caricature of the other. That doesn’t mean that men are all the same. If we men are so poor at relationships, then let’s encourage men themselves to talk about their experience of relationships: from fatherhood to love and dealing with partners who are physically or mentally ill. But no, it’s easier for journalists to berate men for being incommunicative while preventing men from telling their side of things.

Discussions of divorce are reduced to battles between sensible women and their children and angry fathers demanding access and refusing to pay their way: villains and victims again. Someone from the far-out fathers’ groups can usually be dragged in to say something outrageous. There you go - fathers need to be kept in their place. There has been a long battle to get boys’ education difficulties recognised because educated opinion shut its eyes to any problems that boys have in schools (refer to earlier On Line Opinion article). Girls are championed, so boys must be a nuisance stopping girls from learning. Universities must be made more accessible for women. That might be desirable, but journalists don’t see that in the process, they are made less accessible to men.

The movie Brokeback Mountain has encouraged people to discuss intimate relationships between men. It’s significant that so many journalists have misunderstood the movie as being about gay men. It’s not. That’s the point. It’s a story about two ordinary men who develop an intimate relationship because of the circumstances they are thrown into. Read the story by Annie Proulx that the movie is based on. But there it is again: men must be either gay or straight. Discussion of male behaviour is cast into simple categories because men can’t and won’t tell their stories in ways acceptable to journalists. And the mainstream media make little attempt to let men into the discussion.

We can look back at the Cold War era and laugh at the media of the time. The language on each side was set in stone because it was pitting one ideology against another. “Running dogs of US capitalism” versus “commie stooges” and so on. Today’s media are no less biased in favour of fashionable views and against unfashionable ones. And men’s issues are not fashionable among most educated people. Bias against men is so ingrained and so common that most people don’t even notice it. George Orwell would recognise that his nightmare has come true.