Feminism has turned UK men into second-class citizens, but have women's victories come at a price?

by ROSIE BOYCOTT



From the office to the marital bed, millions of men say feminism has turned them into second-class citizens.

Here, one of the movement's high priestesses asks: have women's victories come at too high a price?

What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century?

If you'd asked a man living in the mid-20th century - someone like my dad for instance - he would have breezily given you a quick answer.

It would have gone something like this: "I'm a provider - I look after my wife and children. I go out to work and make money for my family to live on."

From that, he would have derived his sense of self, of who he was in society. What's more it would have been one of the main motivators driving his life; a force, as history shows us, that allowed men to be the dominant sex in our world.

But according to a recent survey, today's young men don't share their forebears' sense of entitlement.

Indeed, 52 per cent of them believe they have to live by women's rules, and a staggering 82 per cent feel they have lost their traditional male role in society.

For most of them, this means feeling undervalued, their voices and opinions unheard.

This is an astonishing reversal, and one that we can no longer ignore, underscored as it is by several facts. For example, for the first time in history a majority of American women are not living with a spouse.

In Britain, the Office of National Statistics revealed recently that the number of marriages taking place in the UK had fallen to an all-time low.

So marriage and being the 'Dad around the house' aren't something a young man growing into adulthood can look forward to as a cast iron certainty.

Furthermore, one of the bastions on which a man could depend in the ongoing tussle between the sexes - earning more than his female counterparts - is also changing.

At the end of last year, a survey revealed that 39 per cent of women who work full-time earn more than their partner.

That means 1.8 million women in full-time work across the country now earn more than their partners.

These figures are both important and potentially critical: they indicate a very real change sweeping through the professional ranks of twentysomething men and women.

And these changes affect men and women in all areas of their life - from the bedroom to the boardroom.

We were once very different: women stayed at home and reared the children, men went out to work and earned the money. It was, in many senses, a simple world.

The sharp differentiation of the sexes that was once so all-pervasive has - as women's roles have expanded into male territory - considerably weakened. What has happened, in effect, is that men and women have become more, not less, alike.

This was brought home to me forcibly the other day when I was talking to a friend in her early 30s.

She's been married for eight years and has two young children, both now at school. Her marriage is far from happy and she was recounting to me a recent argument she'd been having with her husband about who should do the school run in the afternoon when both of them wanted to be at work.

It wasn't the first kind of argument of that sort they'd had. Over the years, there had been rows about who got up in the night with the baby or whose responsibility it was to see to the childcare arrangements.

They both feel an equal right to pursue their careers, and as a consequence, they are, in effect, in competition with each other over pay, job status and their leisure time and personal freedom.

I'm not sure how many times I listened to her tales of woe before one day a thought struck me forcibly. This sort of row would never have taken place between my mum and dad.

The idea of Mum arguing with Dad about who should be looking after my sister or me, or whether he'd done his share of the household tasks, or remembered to buy the milk, is completely unthinkable.

My mother - a clever but unfulfilled woman - would never have entered into such a conflict.

They both knew exactly what their roles were and they lived them out. My mother's passivity and her clear lack of fulfilment were among the spurs that led me to start the feminist magazine Spare Rib 30 years ago.

In those days, the lot of women was very distant from today's reality: a woman couldn't get a mortgage without her husband's or her father's signature. Universities were predominantly for men, as were medical schools and colleges of law.

Women were meant to be their father's daughters until they became their husband's wives.

As a young and enthusiastic feminist, I wanted to change all that (and I am very proud to have been part of a movement that did) but I also felt that men lived in a trap of their own: having to earn the money singlehandedly and, as a consequence, being denied the right to spend time with their children and to become emotional beings in their own right.

But if we started out hoping to bring an improvement to the lives of men as well as women, by the time the Seventies came round, the idea of the women's movement being of possible benefit to men had withered on the vine.

Women's rights became just too urgent and too immediate, and though everyone knew that whenever women change there must be a reciprocal change for men, it was somehow assumed it would all work itself out in the great melting pot of life.

I remember thinking that it would be wonderful for men to be able to express their emotions in the way that women traditionally did. It seemed to me that to feminise society in this way must be to the greater benefit of all.

But was it? More than half the young men surveyed in this recent report all think that society has tried to feminise them, to turn them into coiffed metrosexuals, and they do not like having to live according to women's rules.

Of course, it is true that women have become more visible in the past 30 years: there are women in every sphere of life - from the boardrooms of FTSE 100 companies, to the High Court benches - which were once the preserve of men.

Women now often out-perform men financially and especially educationally.

What has actually happened, it seems to me, is that society, far from being feminised, has in fact been made more masculine, as both men and women fight to claim the ground that was once the preserve of men - that of high-flying, well-paid careers and glamorous lifestyles.

The aspirations of today's women are no longer confined to just being wives and mothers - they want (and can have) professional satisfaction as well. No wonder men are feeling threatened and redundant.

The women's movement turned all the old assumptions about men and women's roles in society on their head - and that seismic shift coincided with a fundamental shift in the nature of work itself, as Western countries changed from labourbased to knowledge-based economies, thus eliminating the need for brawn and physical strength.

Indeed, the new demands of the workplace, requiring multi-tasking and human interaction, positively favour women over men.

And during the past 35 years, women have excelled, able to earn their own livings as well as bring up children, coping with lives and situations that my mother would have found wholly impossible.

But where does that leave the men? No longer required to fulfil basic needs like providing food and shelter for a wife and children, they're being forced to fight it out on the same playing field as the girls because, as a society, our perception of success is still so connected with the outward symbols of money and power and prestige.

When I was 21 and writing the first editorials for Spare Rib, I remember thinking that men would leap at the chance to become more involved with bringing up children.

What I failed to understand was that in order for this to happen, society itself needed to make a huge and fundamental shift. Because today, while we all applaud a woman who enters a man's world and succeeds, no such plaudits are afforded to the man who strays too far into the world traditionally thought of as female.

A man who stays home and keeps house, who brings up the children and does the shopping, who lives off his wife's money, is seen in our judgmental times as a loser - not as a pioneer of a new way of living.

Most people believe that blokes who 'work in the home' have only ended up there because they've been fired or can't get a good (ie high-paying) job which would allow the couple to afford childcare.

When I first began to campaign for a woman's right to work and to succeed in whatever profession she chose, I never imagined that one of the casualties would be the status given to those who rear children.

In part, I think, this is the fault of a government which, unlike its equivalent in Scandinavian countries, has never made childcare a priority.

But it is also a product of a society which values financial status over and above the more mundane requirements of providing happy and stable homes in which children can be nurtured.

Our modern world, which often forces new mothers back into the workplace within weeks of giving birth, and which sees the business of raising children as somehow 'second class', has meant that neither men nor women now take the same sort of pride in being Mums and Dads as I think my parents' generation did.

The gradual merging of roles and the subsequent similarities between the ambitions of men and women - which now leave men feeling marginalised in professional life - have left this alltoovital task at the bottom of the heap so that it is now something which even the moderately successful farm out to someone lower down the financial ladder.

Much is written about the socalled 'new man' and his commitment to domesticity and active parenthood, but all surveys find that, in fact, men actually perform few household tasks.

Women are still shouldering the burden, although today they - like my young friend - are arguing about it, questioning why the business of running the home and taking on the lion's share of childcaring should always fall to them.

And these sort of arguments represent a deep social dislocation.

In order to deal with them, we have to stop thinking about what men do and what women do and accept that, in fact, we no longer live on Mars and Venus, but in fact we all live together, here on Earth.

No one wants to return to the days when women, like my mother, lived deeply unfulfilled lives, but nor do we want to live in a world where both sexes try to claim a narrow central ground, one defined solely by money and outward status - and which scorns women who dare to stay at home with their children.

For the feminist movement, this is not the sort of victory we envisaged at all.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-512550/Feminism-turned-men-second-class-citizens-womens-victories-come-price.html

show me ONE MAN that was turned into 2nd class citizen....feminisim dont turn men into 2nd class citizen, thats the BS that these femininst would like you to believe.

PLEASE stop asking questions to deluded simps who are under the thumb of women (whether feminist or not)

Can someone summarise this for me?

I bet this a 101 problems and not 1 single solution.

Feminism will be the best thing that has happened to men if men can stop deriving their self worth from slaving away their lives in the name of providing and protecting.

I’m happy somewhere along the write up how the writer recognized the foolishness in what she was saying. Didn’t stop her from writing more foolish things though.

Ilekokonit:
Feminism has turned UK men into second-class citizens, but have women's victories come at a price?

by ROSIE BOYCOTT



From the office to the marital bed, millions of men say feminism has turned them into second-class citizens.

Here, one of the movement's high priestesses asks: have women's victories come at too high a price?

What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century?

If you'd asked a man living in the mid-20th century - someone like my dad for instance - he would have breezily given you a quick answer.

It would have gone something like this: "I'm a provider - I look after my wife and children. I go out to work and make money for my family to live on."

From that, he would have derived his sense of self, of who he was in society. What's more it would have been one of the main motivators driving his life; a force, as history shows us, that allowed men to be the dominant sex in our world.

But according to a recent survey, today's young men don't share their forebears' sense of entitlement.

Indeed, 52 per cent of them believe they have to live by women's rules, and a staggering 82 per cent feel they have lost their traditional male role in society.

For most of them, this means feeling undervalued, their voices and opinions unheard.

This is an astonishing reversal, and one that we can no longer ignore, underscored as it is by several facts. For example, for the first time in history a majority of American women are not living with a spouse.

In Britain, the Office of National Statistics revealed recently that the number of marriages taking place in the UK had fallen to an all-time low.

So marriage and being the 'Dad around the house' aren't something a young man growing into adulthood can look forward to as a cast iron certainty.

Furthermore, one of the bastions on which a man could depend in the ongoing tussle between the sexes - earning more than his female counterparts - is also changing.

At the end of last year, a survey revealed that 39 per cent of women who work full-time earn more than their partner.

That means 1.8 million women in full-time work across the country now earn more than their partners.

These figures are both important and potentially critical: they indicate a very real change sweeping through the professional ranks of twentysomething men and women.

And these changes affect men and women in all areas of their life - from the bedroom to the boardroom.

We were once very different: women stayed at home and reared the children, men went out to work and earned the money. It was, in many senses, a simple world.

The sharp differentiation of the sexes that was once so all-pervasive has - as women's roles have expanded into male territory - considerably weakened. What has happened, in effect, is that men and women have become more, not less, alike.

This was brought home to me forcibly the other day when I was talking to a friend in her early 30s.

She's been married for eight years and has two young children, both now at school. Her marriage is far from happy and she was recounting to me a recent argument she'd been having with her husband about who should do the school run in the afternoon when both of them wanted to be at work.

It wasn't the first kind of argument of that sort they'd had. Over the years, there had been rows about who got up in the night with the baby or whose responsibility it was to see to the childcare arrangements.

They both feel an equal right to pursue their careers, and as a consequence, they are, in effect, in competition with each other over pay, job status and their leisure time and personal freedom.

I'm not sure how many times I listened to her tales of woe before one day a thought struck me forcibly. This sort of row would never have taken place between my mum and dad.

The idea of Mum arguing with Dad about who should be looking after my sister or me, or whether he'd done his share of the household tasks, or remembered to buy the milk, is completely unthinkable.

My mother - a clever but unfulfilled woman - would never have entered into such a conflict.

They both knew exactly what their roles were and they lived them out. My mother's passivity and her clear lack of fulfilment were among the spurs that led me to start the feminist magazine Spare Rib 30 years ago.

In those days, the lot of women was very distant from today's reality: a woman couldn't get a mortgage without her husband's or her father's signature. Universities were predominantly for men, as were medical schools and colleges of law.

Women were meant to be their father's daughters until they became their husband's wives.

As a young and enthusiastic feminist, I wanted to change all that (and I am very proud to have been part of a movement that did) but I also felt that men lived in a trap of their own: having to earn the money singlehandedly and, as a consequence, being denied the right to spend time with their children and to become emotional beings in their own right.

But if we started out hoping to bring an improvement to the lives of men as well as women, by the time the Seventies came round, the idea of the women's movement being of possible benefit to men had withered on the vine.

Women's rights became just too urgent and too immediate, and though everyone knew that whenever women change there must be a reciprocal change for men, it was somehow assumed it would all work itself out in the great melting pot of life.

I remember thinking that it would be wonderful for men to be able to express their emotions in the way that women traditionally did. It seemed to me that to feminise society in this way must be to the greater benefit of all.

But was it? More than half the young men surveyed in this recent report all think that society has tried to feminise them, to turn them into coiffed metrosexuals, and they do not like having to live according to women's rules.

Of course, it is true that women have become more visible in the past 30 years: there are women in every sphere of life - from the boardrooms of FTSE 100 companies, to the High Court benches - which were once the preserve of men.

Women now often out-perform men financially and especially educationally.

What has actually happened, it seems to me, is that society, far from being feminised, has in fact been made more masculine, as both men and women fight to claim the ground that was once the preserve of men - that of high-flying, well-paid careers and glamorous lifestyles.

The aspirations of today's women are no longer confined to just being wives and mothers - they want (and can have) professional satisfaction as well. No wonder men are feeling threatened and redundant.

The women's movement turned all the old assumptions about men and women's roles in society on their head - and that seismic shift coincided with a fundamental shift in the nature of work itself, as Western countries changed from labourbased to knowledge-based economies, thus eliminating the need for brawn and physical strength.

Indeed, the new demands of the workplace, requiring multi-tasking and human interaction, positively favour women over men.

And during the past 35 years, women have excelled, able to earn their own livings as well as bring up children, coping with lives and situations that my mother would have found wholly impossible.

But where does that leave the men? No longer required to fulfil basic needs like providing food and shelter for a wife and children, they're being forced to fight it out on the same playing field as the girls because, as a society, our perception of success is still so connected with the outward symbols of money and power and prestige.

When I was 21 and writing the first editorials for Spare Rib, I remember thinking that men would leap at the chance to become more involved with bringing up children.

What I failed to understand was that in order for this to happen, society itself needed to make a huge and fundamental shift. Because today, while we all applaud a woman who enters a man's world and succeeds, no such plaudits are afforded to the man who strays too far into the world traditionally thought of as female.

A man who stays home and keeps house, who brings up the children and does the shopping, who lives off his wife's money, is seen in our judgmental times as a loser - not as a pioneer of a new way of living.

Most people believe that blokes who 'work in the home' have only ended up there because they've been fired or can't get a good (ie high-paying) job which would allow the couple to afford childcare.

When I first began to campaign for a woman's right to work and to succeed in whatever profession she chose, I never imagined that one of the casualties would be the status given to those who rear children.

In part, I think, this is the fault of a government which, unlike its equivalent in Scandinavian countries, has never made childcare a priority.

But it is also a product of a society which values financial status over and above the more mundane requirements of providing happy and stable homes in which children can be nurtured.

Our modern world, which often forces new mothers back into the workplace within weeks of giving birth, and which sees the business of raising children as somehow 'second class', has meant that neither men nor women now take the same sort of pride in being Mums and Dads as I think my parents' generation did.

The gradual merging of roles and the subsequent similarities between the ambitions of men and women - which now leave men feeling marginalised in professional life - have left this alltoovital task at the bottom of the heap so that it is now something which even the moderately successful farm out to someone lower down the financial ladder.

Much is written about the socalled 'new man' and his commitment to domesticity and active parenthood, but all surveys find that, in fact, men actually perform few household tasks.

Women are still shouldering the burden, although today they - like my young friend - are arguing about it, questioning why the business of running the home and taking on the lion's share of childcaring should always fall to them.

And these sort of arguments represent a deep social dislocation.

In order to deal with them, we have to stop thinking about what men do and what women do and accept that, in fact, we no longer live on Mars and Venus, but in fact we all live together, here on Earth.

No one wants to return to the days when women, like my mother, lived deeply unfulfilled lives, but nor do we want to live in a world where both sexes try to claim a narrow central ground, one defined solely by money and outward status - and which scorns women who dare to stay at home with their children.

For the feminist movement, this is not the sort of victory we envisaged at all.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-512550/Feminism-turned-men-second-class-citizens-womens-victories-come-price.html

So, what do they want us to do?
Always shifting blames on men and government but not themselves.

On the surface, what this article is saying may appear to be correct, but when you think about it for a second, you will realize that it is a load of bullsh*t.
This is the kind of reactionary propaganda that you would expect from a conservative news outlet.
They're basically calling for a return to "simpler" times when women stayed at home all day and men worked. That basically it.

The poster two spots above didn't read the full text but thought it smart to comment.

What a waste of education.

Anyways, I am glad she has seen the folly of utopian beliefs.

Those are not real men.

Infact, feminism mostly occur on social media not in real life.

Majority of those feminists are those who have never experienced real love before, neglected in love or jilted in love.

A real man should know the needs of her woman without turning her into a beast ( feminist)

Shoutout to those that read that epistle
Ya all the real ones

addictiv:
Feminism will be the best thing that has happened to men if men can stop deriving their self worth from slaving away their lives in the name of providing and protecting.

In a way i agree with you

Gmajor:
On the surface, what this article is saying may appear to be correct, but when you think about it for a second, you will realize that it is a load of bullsh*t.
This is the kind of reactionary propaganda that you would expect from a conservative news outlet.
They're basically calling for a return to "simpler" times when women stayed at home all day and men worked. That basically it.

it's written by a feminist. I do agree with her surprisingly, considering the fact that majority of feminists are brain dead

helinues:
Those are not real men.

Infact, feminism mostly occur on social media not in real life.

Majority of those feminists are those who have never experienced real love before, neglected in love or jilted in love.

A real man should know the needs of her woman without turning her into TV a beast ( feminist)

feminism is very real in the western society. The Scandinavians have literally handed over government to women

Walkee:
feminism is very real in the western society. The Scandinavians have literally handed over government to women

The reason why feminism rate is high in Western world is because their men stop caring. The love of money/power have made some men to neglect their responsibility when it comes to women.

African men are still keeping some of the caring aspect real hence less feminism or probably exist on social media in Africa

TBH i dont know what your point is

helinues:


The reason why feminism rate is high in Western world is because their men stop caring. The love of money/power have made some men to neglect their responsibility when it comes to women.

African men are still keeping some of the caring aspect real hence less feminism or probably exist on social media in Africa

In actuality it's the opposite. In countries where feminism thrives, men have become castrated from power and wealth. Made to believe that aspiring too much for such is giving into chauvinism and patriarchy.


The same is coming to Africa in subtle forms like the writer posited about her own experience. Though harmless and utopian at first but the imbalance cannot be remedied by mere wishes.

iboboyswag:


In actuality it's the opposite. In countries where feminism thrives, men have become castrated from power and wealth. Made to believe that aspiring too much for such is giving into chauvinism and patriarchy.

Who made them to believe that?

Can those people be referred as true men?

helinues:


Who made them to believe that?

Can those people be referred as true men?

Society, main stream media.

That's what you get when you criminalize a man for being a man.

It is evident today on our social media spaces. That alone should tell you the operative consciousness of the people that is yet unraveled.

Are you still waiting for when it would manifest physically? My guess is as good as yours, we won't have to wait for too long.

iboboyswag:


Society, main stream media.

That's what you get when you criminalize a man for being a man.

It is evident today on our social media spaces. That alone tells you the operative consciousness of the people that is yet unraveled.

Are you still waiting for when it would manifest physically? My guess is as good as yours, we won't have to wait for too long.

And you didn't answer my question.. Can those brainwashed men by the society still be referred as real men?

helinues:


The reason why feminism rate is high in Western world is because their men stop caring. The love of money/power have made some men to neglect their responsibility when it comes to women.

African men are still keeping some of the caring aspect real hence less feminism or probably exist on social media in Africa

yes in Africa it is all social media noise. That nonsense can't get a foothold here for the foreseeable future. People are too busy trying to get food to eat

helinues:


And you didn't answer my question.. Can those brainwashed men by the society still be referred as real men?

Of course... They are men. Maybe not in your kumbaya chest-beating fashion but men they are physiologically and otherwise.


But what's your self-defination of a real man? So I don't prejudge you.

iboboyswag:


Of course... They are men. Maybe not in your kumbaya chest-beating fashion but men they are physiologically and otherwise.


But what's your self-defination of a real man? So I don't prejudge you.

You stylishly ignored the real about the men.

A real man don't necessarily have to be an alpha male but at least be in control of things around him.

helinues:


You stylishly ignored the real about the men.

A real man don't necessarily have to be an alpha male but at least be in control of things around him.

So this is your definition of a real man? So if a woman decides or in some way is thrust up to be this way, then she can be said to be a real man? Or don't you think so?

You see the problem here is trying to ignore physiology and view only from your cultural and primordial Lens. The world doesn't revolve around how you feel.

A man is a man. Medically and by all known standard a human with a penis is a man. There is no real man or unreal man except we are talking of sex changed men.

But not to digress, it is social conditioning that have created your unreal-men. Now, that's because they live in societies where being a man with all the trappings of manliness is criminalized socially and legally in some instances.

Double0h7:
Can someone summarise this for me?
I bet this a 101 problems and not 1 single solution.

No single solution bruh!

iboboyswag:


So this is your definition of a real man? So if a woman decides or in some way is thrust up to be this way, then she can be said to be a real man? Or don't you think so?

You see the problem here is trying to ignore physiology and view only from your cultural and primordial Len. The world doesn't revolve around how you feel.

A man is a man. Medically and by all known standard a human with a penis is a man. There is no real man or unreal man except we are talking of sex changed men.

But not to digress, it is social conditioning that have created your unreal-men. Now, that's because they live in societies where being a man with all the trappings of manliness is criminalized socially and legally in some instances.

To start with, who are those redpillers and feminists if not the inferior minds.

If those people meet some who can can provide things they have been easily, they have no choice than to have a change of mind.

That's the capability of real men

99 problem but a b*tch ain't one.

helinues:


To start with, who are those redpillers and feminists if not the inferior minds.

If those people meet some who can can provide things they have been easily, they have no choice than to have a change of mind.

That's the capability of real men

I think you should look beyond the surface. Becoming a Feminist or repilling isn't just about how people were treated.

There is a deeper conspiracy at play here. Feminism and Redpilling breaks the very fabric upon which society is built which is the family.

And to understand the power of social conditioning and how people can be socially conditioned in whatever way, I would suggest you go research how Nestle got the Japanese to drink Coffee.