Friday, September 19, 2003

FEMINIZING MEN IS CORRECT

Miranda Devine says that attacks on the male identity in a post-feminist world have eroded men's sense of self-worth. Excerpts:

For instance, what is the average man to make of ads for hair-removal treatments in which a woman recoils from the embrace of a hairy-chested man in the before shot and, in the after shot, when he is hairless, she can't keep her hands off him?

Then there was the recent launch of two men's fashion magazines, Men's Style and the new GQ, along with the Herald's Good Living fashion magazine for men last week. All were jam-packed with cosmetic and toiletry ads and featured male models who looked positively girlish, hairless, hollow-cheeked, full-lipped, with a wispy long-haired languidness that used to be the province of the younger sister in a Jane Austen novel. The new masculine metrosexual ideal seems to be imposing the same tyranny of lookism on men which women have long endured.

Along with the changing roles of men in a post-feminist world, comes a new condition identified by British psychotherapists as the "Atlas syndrome", in which men crack under the strain of juggling a new role as superdad and perfect husband with the traditional role as breadwinner.

If advertising and popular culture is a reflection of reality, then ads which depict men as incompetent flakes are cause for concern. There is the ad showing a bumbling man bamboozled by a bra. There are the Baileys ads with men as the butt of the joke, incapable of doing laundry without shrinking it. The overall effect is of female empowerment at the expense of men.

"There are some very negative images of men at the present time," Terry Melvin, manager of the counselling service Men's Line Australia, said yesterday. "They are indicators of some important cultural shifts happening around men and masculinity."

As men have been encouraged to become more active fathers, conflict arises with women who may feel men are encroaching on their realm. "There is a challenge for women to let go of some of their control as homemakers and mothers. There is a grinding of the two templates of the man's and woman's world, each wanting to redefine who they are," says Melvin.

He says research into "gender role strain" has identified the internal psychological conflict experienced by men "when the reality of who they are hits up against the image of what a man is, the optimal masculinity".

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