Sarah Ingham: The real trouble with men is we’ve spent so long denigrating them all

Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.

 Netflix’s Adolescence has prompted five-star reviews and anxious parents’ scramble to work out the difference between being red-, blue- and black-pilled. For some, it reveals the manosphere, an alien landscape of Ultimate Fighting Championship, incels (involuntary celibates) and influencer Andrew Tate.

A chain reactionhas been underway. Prime Minister Keir Starmer absurdly describes Adolescence as a documentary (twice) and wants it shown in schools. Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch is berated for not watching it.

This tale of a 13-year-old boy stabbing a girl to death is less Romeo and Juliet, more Psycho. As a state-of-the-nation drama, it highlights teenagers’ social media use and parents’ refusal to take responsibility and monitor screens at home. Schools are scary holding-pens where staff struggle to impose any control. If this is Britain, it is deeply depressing.

But more positively, it has rekindled the debate about men.

“The fear that the gender issue has now come full circle with men the new victims, discriminated against by a legislative framework of equal opportunities, and a climate of political correctness which skews power too much in the direction of women and an economic climate which needs their skills.”

 Swap “political correctness” for “woke” and this could be written today. It is from No Turning Back: Generations and the Genderquake, a paper by Helen Wilkinson for the think tank Demos, first published in 1994.

Wilkinson examines the impact of women’s participation in the workforce which overturned traditional gender roles. The economy had been feminised since the 1950s, with manufacturing and industrial jobs replaced by more female-friendly work in services. Women’s greater economic power fuelled social change. Men were being overtaken.

At the time of her writing there was Britpop, Loaded, football mania and Men Behaving Badly …in the mid-1990s men dominated Britain’s culture. So, with all that laddishness, from today’s perspective it might seem to have been an odd time for warnings about the impact of girls outperforming boys at school and university; about the suicide rate among young men doubling in a decade; about resentful men suspecting covert positive discrimination as women were promoted.

Nonetheless, Wilkinson suggested a rethink of educational policies and equal opportunities strategies “to improve the performance and confidence of a growing number of young men who are being left behind.”

Three decades on, progressives dismiss claims that masculinity is “in crisis”. But defined as “the qualities that are considered to be typical of men”, masculinity is now routinely linked to the word “toxic”.

The casual denigration of men is hardly noticed. With dads invariably dismissed as “sad” – i.e. inadequate – why the surprise if they’re unhappy-sad? The all-round uselessness/fecklessness of blokes remains a sit-com staple, surely as dispiriting as rants about the patriarchy from fourth-wave feminists.

In the context of health, being a man can indeed be toxic. The Men’s Health Forum highlights that one in five men die before the age of 65. Men commit four out of five of the rising number of suicides, the biggest cause of death among men under 35. Men have a 67 per cent higher chance of dying of the cancers which affect both sexes.

The Forum has long supported a national Men’s Health Strategy, initially backed by the Conservatives in 2019, which Wes Streeting, to his credit, will deliver.

The Brown government’s divisive 2010 Equality Act has helped bankrupt Birmingham and led to the current rat-infested Winter-of-Discontent reprise. In 2012, a successful pay claim by some of the City Council’s female employees was based on the Act, which was interpreted as mandating equal pay for work of equal value. How can a job in a centrally heated school or office be of equal value to collecting stinking refuse?

Intrinsic to the Equality Act are “protected characteristics”. They do little to protect straight white men who, progressives claim, are top of the “hierarchy of privilege” – regardless of their financial status or class. This corrosive nonsense deems a pale male on the minimum wage to be more privileged than a mixed-race royal duchess.

Men previously went to war, now they tread on workplace eggshells to avoid being trapped in the identity minefields of the culture war. “Where are you from?” could lead to an industrial tribunal. Can this partly explain why almost 4 million men have dropped out of the workforce?

Feminised teaching in schools, their clubs taken over, pubs closing, branded as “gammons”

The manosphere represents a masculine fight back.

Less radically, men can turn to podcasters like Chris Williamson. Academic Jordan Peterson has provided a lifeline to many. Condemning the concept of toxic masculinity, he is robust in his defence of men, especially working-class men. “They’re under the streets working on the sewers: they’re up on the powerlines in the storms and the rain … They work themselves to death, often literally. And the gratitude for that is sorely lacking.”

There is indeed no turning back. Women are not returning to domesticity – and their fathers, sons and friends surely would not wish them to. But women’s fulfilment should not come at men’s expense.

The Conservatives’ Policy Renewal Programme could be radical – and focus on the neglected needs of men and boys.