In his deservingly scornful review of the book Iron John, Robert Bly’s absurd bible of the men’s movement in the United States, British author Martin Amis describes the comical pilgrimage made by maladjusted men into the American woods to sniff each other’s armpits, channel negative energy into circles of hate and howl at the moon at the fact that mum had them circumcised.
Happily, this quest to unleash what Amis ridicules as “the hairy satyr within” does not appear to have any formal and organised equivalent in Australia.
This is probably because most Australian men have nothing of any real magnitude to get off their chest, or simply find that the odd night at the pub or the occasional fishing weekend provides ample therapy for any lingering sense of gender injustice. That, and the fact that we’ve got too wry a sense of humour and too much self-awareness to engage in anything that silly.
But while Australia does not have a men’s movement it does appear to have a number – perhaps a growing number – of maladjusted men.
It’s obviously a hard thing to quantify. There’s no box you can tick on the census (Anglo-Saxon, agnostic, salary 75k-100k, male, maladjusted) which provides a reliable statistic.
But they are out there. And unlike their macho cousins in the US, they’re not dancing like the Navajo or making a humpy out of twigs. To put a deliberately sexist spin on it, they’re whining like girls.
As more and more of our conversations take place online, it is cyberspace where the stroppier blokes among our number are giving voice to a range of emotions.
Some of it, in all sincerity, is genuinely moving stuff, involving family court battles where a man who claims to have been wronged by his wife has lost all access to their children.
But a lot of it is a combination of excuse-making and blame-shifting by men who’ve probably made stupid choices, or just haven’t got their act together, or have themselves destroyed their own marriage and lost contact with their kids through alcohol abuse and domestic violence. And a distressingly high portion appears to be unadorned misogyny, where men will seize on any suggestion that women can ever face a specific kind of hardship as a result of public policy, health issues, crime or the economy.
Cyberspace is a moshpit and we had an eye-opening experience on our site The Punch some months back where a perfectly innocent and reasoned piece about the impact of the global financial crisis on women became the spark for a boys-on-girls sandpit brawl.
The author (who probably doesn’t want me to rev the stink up again, so I’ll keep it vague) chronicled a number of pointers to the special type of hardship which women had suffered as a result of the downturn. One of these was the fact that, to their credit, many bosses had resisted the temptation not to sack workers but reduce their hours. But for many women, who were already employed part-time anyway, the adjustment was too great on their personal budgets, unlike men on full-time who found their hours being trimmed. On the flipside, women who had been out of the workforce for years were finding themselves going through the anguish of trying to re-enter work, having lost their occupational skills through motherhood, and feeling torn at having to juggle their children with this new pressure to provide.
This perfectly sensible article triggered a series of embittered responses from a bunch of blokes, some of whom used it to expound on a raft of tangential topics relating to their apparent emasculation at the hands of the sisterhood.
It’s become a recurring phenomenon, around similar themes, whenever the word “woman” appears in any article. The hostility is at its most pronounced in the following areas:
Illness: Even something as noble and benign as Pink Ribbon Day is held up as a sinister plot to draw more attention - and more donations - to the issue of breast cancer at the expense of the desperately unsexy prostate cancer. This (obviously) male condition has become the (allegedly) unsung cause of choice for angry men who feel that all the support and coverage is going in the direction of the fairer sex.
Sport: In a year dominated by sex scandals involving everyone from Matthew Johns to Wayne Carey to Brendan Fevola, there’s a view that these guys are actually the victims in a society where it’s the alcopop-fuelled teenage starlets who line them up as some kind of quarry. Any suggestion that the clubs could do more to get women involved in administrative positions, or that the players could just experiment with acting like humans, is dismissed as a politically-correct lecture.
Management: Sport aside, the assertion that women are perhaps under-represented on the board of pretty much everything is denounced as demeaning tokenism. The specious argument runs that nothing would insult women more than some concerted attempt via affirmative action, or just a collective act of goodwill, to slot them into a rare position of serious authority. Which means it’s easier to keep insulting them in the traditional way, by exclusion.
Crime: The idea that domestic violence and sexual assault has been somehow exaggerated or even concocted, while the men who are apparently victims of such treatment by women go unheard.
Family law: Mixed with liberal doses of all of the above to establish the men-as-victims case.
We spend a large part of our day umming and ahing as to whether we will publish the comments from these angry blokes who slot into the above categories. We run many of them because they’re indicative of a mindset which should at least be reflected. But you can’t help but think it would be healthier if these Australian guys could spend a weekend in the woods, rather than taking it out on whoever happens to be listening in cyberspace.
The saddest aspect in reading the missives from these angry men is the way their sense of isolation comes through. Many of them are in a predicament of their own making. But that should not absolve us from trying to find a way to bring them back into the community, perhaps initially by suggesting that sitting alone in front of a computer, randomly venting their fury, is the least social way to take part in society.
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