If women are rising, it doesn’t mean men are declining

By Judith Timson, Toronto Star, November 29, 2012

But what about the war on men? We hear dire warnings about boys failing and how we are failing them by trying to make them more like girls, about how men are psychologically diminished by the “feminization” of the workplace, and how quotas for women in science will erode excellence.

We read, in provocative books like Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men, that many women are earning more than their male partners, creating a new ruthless matriarchy in which men are left in the dust.

But of course it’s far more nuanced than that. Male psyches have been more damaged by the collapse of the manufacturing industry and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs than they have been by a campaign to lure young women to the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines.
Still, I don’t doubt the concern of a twentysomething man who says, “if I am up for a job and an equally accomplished woman is, she will most likely get it.”
Women of my generation would mutter, welcome to what our world used to look like. But of course we want our husbands, our sons, our daughters’ partners — to succeed.
It doesn’t have to be binary. It’s a retro conservative notion that if women are on the rise, men must flail and fail.
Yes, men have to adjust psychologically — they have to walk back a sense of entitlement that has been nurtured in them up to and including this current young adult generation.
The difference is, this new crop of young men know in their hearts that it’s b.s. and that they can’t get what they want any more just because they are men.
That’s what equality looks like. Imagine that.
What would Ms Timson say to the guidance teacher, recently retired, who noted, sadly, that boys, upon learning that there were (and are) different admission standards for male and female students entering engineering in some universities, shut down their ambitions, because they knew they were not playing on an level playing field?
What would Ms Timson say to the indisputable evidence that far more boys are administered drugs for ADHD, too often because they do not "comply" with the classroom culture that is designed by female teachers for female students?
What would Ms Timson say to the comparative drop-out rates for male and female students....just that boys are both lazy and undirected?
Telling males to "adjust psychologically" is one of the most arrogant and presumptuous, parental admonishments I have heard or read in the last several years....and with respect, it merits a retraction, which, of course, it will not get....
Some women actually believe that men were actively and co-ordinatedly conspiring against women over the last two thousand years....as if the many generations of men could be herded, like sheep, into a single and pure point of view about either superiority or inferiority. Ms Timson must be one such female.
And the perspective of such women is anathema to any hope for gender equality, now or in the long-term future. It SUCKS!