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‘Manspreading?’ I’ve seen just as many men give up their seats on the tube

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This week “manspreading” surfaced once again from the depths of Tumblr to make one of its now regular appearances in the mainstream media, after two men in New York were arrested for taking up too much room on the subway, where this allegedly gendered behaviour has reportedly (and incredibly) been made an offence.

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the pop-cultural discussion of gender that takes place on twitter and in online organs such as Jezebel and the Huffington Post, will a) know what “manspreading” is supposed to represent and b) know exactly where they stand (or sit) on the issue.

For my part, it strikes me that if men can not only be publicly humiliated by women for the way they sit on public transport, but arrested for it as well, then it’s a very strange form of Patriarchal privilege indeed that they are apparently enjoying.

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But the dodgy ideological reasoning behind stigmatising men for the way they sit has been raked over plenty of times already. What I want to write about is the gulf between the alleged scourge of men sitting legs akimbo on the tube, and the behaviour of men that I actually witness on a daily basis while travelling on public transport in London.

I mainly take the bus at the moment, where for some reason “manspreading” is less forensically monitored by the Tumblerettes who post sneakily-taken phone images (creepy objectification anyone?) on their “Men Taking Up Too Much Space on the Train” blog. But during six months last year I commuted on the overground train that runs between  east London and west London.

The train is packed at rush hour and you would routinely find yourself standing for the full 50-minute journey. Almost without fail during the six months I made the commute, at least once during the two-way journey I would see a man either offer to give up a seat he was sitting on for a perfectly able-bodied woman, or demure to allow a woman to sit down if there was some confusion as to who had got to the seat first.

Occasionally a woman would politely refuse, but in the majority of instances she would smile with gratitude and happily take the seat to avoid standing for the best part of an hour.

Benevolent sexism?

Now, you might argue this is a form of “benevolent sexism”, in which these men don’t think women are strong enough to stand on their own two feet. Granted, occasionally there would be something a bit patronising in the exchange, but far more often it appeared to me that the man offering his seat was doing so out of a sense of the etiquette that he knew was expected of him. More importantly though, in the instances when there was uncertainty as to who got to the seat first, there was the unspoken weight of shame he would be subjected to as a man for “stealing” a seat from a woman.

Whether you agree with this gendered role play or not, what it certainly doesn’t show is that these men hold an inherent sense of entitlement over public space.

But the point I really want to make here is that I’ve never seen so much as a tweet or a Facebook post to acknowledge this small, but en-mass, daily display of self-sacrifice by men. Spend a day travelling on the tube in London and I guarantee you’ll see a man give up his seat, you’ll probably also see a man help a woman carry her pram up an escalator, or help another with her luggage.

But if you were to take your assumptions about how men use public space solely from the virtual world of social media and online commentary, you’d be forgiven for assuming that all men do is lounge and leer their way through the subways and streets of London and New York.

Of course it’s not particularly surprising that we don’t hear about men’s daily small acts of random kindness – no news is good news, after all. But what is a problem, is if the constantly-repeated negative messages about men start to become ingrained in our preconceptions about them too. After all, that is precisely what tends to happen when we’re constantly  fed negative messages about a particular group of people.

So I’ve decided there’s only one thing for it. I’m going to start a Tumblr. It’s going to feature selectively-taken phone clips that set out to prove a one-sided worldview and it’s going to be called: “Men Giving Up Too Much Space on the Tube.”

By Dan Bell

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We’re publishing a book!

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In just over a month, insideMAN will celebrate our first birthday. It’s been an incredible year in which we’re proud to have published literally hundreds of amazing stories about what it means to be a man today — stories that you simply wouldn’t have been able to read anywhere else.

So what better way to mark our first anniversary and celebrate this full-throated chorus of men’s voices, than by bringing the best of these stories together in one place as a ground-breaking, real-life, actually-hold-in-your-hands book?

insideMAN the book will contain everything from poignant first-person insights, such as one father’s experience of miscarriage and a young man’s battle with bulimia, taken from last year’s 100VoicesForMen series; to fascinating explorations of subjects that many of us simply take for granted – for example, why do men wear trousers anyway? It will also include practical advice from leading figures in the men’s movement on the best ways to raise awareness of the issues faced by men and boys.

But that’s not all. Oh no, not by a long shot. It will also contain new and exclusive articles from some of the UK’s leading thinkers and writers about men and masculinity, from across the political spectrum. We have articles from Martin Daubney, of Telegraph Men and former editor of Loaded; Guardian regular Ally Fogg; Tim Samuels from BBC Men’s Hour; Neil Lyndon, author of the seminal No More Sex War and the man who coined the term “metrosexual” himself, the brilliant Mark Simpson.

We just need your help to turn this into a reality.

We’re soon to launch an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to cover the £2,000 cost of publication, which we’ll promote alongside a series of specially-produced content to highlight the book’s unique and diverse stories.

Once it’s live you’ll be able to support the project by pre-ordering copies of the book as a paperback, hardback or eBook, and by sharing the crowdfunder link to anyone who knows a man or a boy.

In the meantime, you can support us by:

  • Adding your email to the sign up form to the right
  • Telling us what you think in a comment or a tweet using #insideMANbook
  • Following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook

As well as producing a powerful, diverse and ground-breaking volume of men’s voices, we want to harness the momentum of the campaign to continue to foster the community of people engaging in this important conversation and raise the profile of the many important issues covered by the articles.

A massive thank you to all of the amazing men and women who have got involved over the past year. Let’s take this to the next level and continue to pioneer new conversations about men and boys.

Watch this space.

The recently released Force Majeure shows shaming men for cowardice is now seen as a feminist act

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For nearly half a century, we have been told that the question of how gender roles are policed and by whom, is essentially a one-way street – something men do to women, and often also to each other. And that’s pretty much the end of it.

But a new film not only exposes another age-old, yet rarely-spoken truth — that women also use shame to control men — it also seems to say that this particular form of gendered expectation is perfectly OK.

In fact, Force Majeure goes even further, because it manages the extraordinary intellectual feat of implying that to shame a man for cowardice, is actually to strike a blow for equality.

In the opening scenes, the genteel skiing holiday of a perfect couple and their children is thrown into disarray as an avalanche threatens to engulf their ski resort. The disaster is avoided, but in the few moments of mayhem, the father instinctively jumps up from their table, leaving behind his wife and children.

Toe-curling laughs

The film explores how that split-second moment of fear strips a man of his wife’s respect, threatens to destroy their family and ultimately leaves him staring into an abyss of doubt and self-loathing.

But what’s most-telling, is that although the film lifts the lid on this uniquely male form of shame, at no point does it invite the audience to condemn the behaviour of his wife and their female friend who are entirely responsible for imposing it on him.

Instead, the film portrays a series of set pieces – all played for toe-curling laughs — in which the husband is effectively put on trial by his wife and their friends, as they unpick the moment to expose his cowardice and knock down what are shown as his pathetic attempts to portray an alternative, less unforgivable interpretation of events.

Both in its treatment of the issue of male shame and in how it has been received, Force Majeure proves this most-ancient of taboos has lost none of its force.

Bloated male ego

But the film and its reviewers also manage a particularly modern hypocrisy — often the very same voices who are happy to shame men for being afraid, are now also those who would never tolerate any attempt to impose traditional gender roles on women.

In fact, humiliating the lead male character for his fear is cast as a quasi-feminist act – a timely expose of the bloated male ego that long-suffering women have had to tolerate while doing the truly heroic work of holding together hearth and home.

In one scene, as a couple who are friends of the two lead characters go back to their room following the group excoriation of the husband’s cowardice, the girlfriend of the couple asks: “I wonder how I would react if you did that to me?”

She then tells her boyfriend, that as he deserted his previous wife and children, why should she expect him to stand by her in a moment of danger?

Worst Man Cry Ever

For reviewers too, the film has been framed as a timely dissection of fragile male egotism and puffed-up immaturity.

Director Ruben Ostlund, told the Times, “It’s men who act egotistically when it comes to a crisis” and said he drew inspiration for one viciously humiliating scene from a YouTube video called “Worst Man Cry Ever”.

Salon, while acknowledging that the wife is far from perfect, maintains that “Tomas is the person who has displayed unforgivable cowardice and solipsism” and Slate describes the film as “a biting critique of modern masculinity”.

But Force Majeure isn’t the only recent piece of pop-cultural entertainment to embrace the idea that shaming men for cowardice is a powerful expression of female emancipation.

A satisfyingly grizzly end

In the latest and last of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit, one of the most repellent characters isn’t an orc or a goblin, he’s a man.

At the heart of the film’s opening sequence, is the comical greed and cowardice of a despotic chief and henchmen as they try to escape with coffers of the town’s gold.

The chief soon meets a satisfyingly grizzly end, but one of his henchmen, Alfrid, is washed up alive and goes on to become a source of derision throughout the film. The reason? He’s a man who is an unrelenting coward.

In one key scene, we’re suddenly shown a group of townswomen huddled in a corner, before another woman charges in and declares they are as brave as the men and should go and fight alongside them.

‘You’re not a man, you’re a weasel’

One woman however stays bent over and whimpering, refusing to go. The other woman pulls her round, only to reveal it’s the villain Alfrid dressed in women’s clothing. She spits in his face: “You’re a coward. You’re not a man, you’re a weasel.”

In one short moment, the film simultaneously celebrates a woman for emancipating herself from the traditional female role of being weak and in need of protection, while at the same time she shames a man who doesn’t conform to the traditional role of brave protector.

But the most astonishing example of this ugly sentiment, is Sky’s comedy series, Chickens, about how a village of women treat the only three men from their town who have not gone to fight during WW1.

The show is essentially a series of set pieces in which the three men – a conscientious objector, a man who is medically unfit to fight and man who is simply afraid – are shamed, laughed at and humiliated by scores of empowered and emancipated women, including those who are Suffragettes.

Not so revolutionary, after all?

In one scene, after a woman demands that Cecil – who incidentally is the one discharged as medically unfit – justifies why he hasn’t enlisted, he says: “I really believe in this war and I’m really keen to help.” She replies: “Rubbish, if you were really keen to help you would have killed yourself to raise morale.”

The writers describe Chickens as “a quasi-feminist sit-com” and according to one of the lead actresses: “What’s great is to see a village full of women who are just really getting on with it, just couldn’t give a toss that the men have gone, really, except for basic plumbing issues and the occasional need for someone to shag them.”

There’s a line of argument that states feminism doesn’t really overturn traditional gender roles at all — that in both pre and post-feminist worldviews, women are seen as deserving of protection and it’s men who must step up and prove their worth.

If these recent dramatic offerings are anything to go by, that analysis seems pretty close to the truth. The question is, why are men still prepared to tolerate it?

By Dan Bell

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Men more likely than women to be cut off benefits due to “cruel” and “unfair” reasons, survey suggests

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Men are far more likely than women to have their benefits stopped for unfair or unjust reasons, a survey by a UK-wide food bank charity strongly suggests.

The Trussell Trust survey, submitted to a recent MPs’ inquiry into benefit sanctions, asked food banks if they had seen people coming to them because they were “sanctioned for seemingly unfair reasons” and if so to give specific examples.

Responses cited twice as many men as women who had been cut off benefits unreasonably, including as a result of missing job centre appointments due the deaths of family members.

Wimbledon food bank told the survey: “Single people are hit the hardest, with no money and housing benefit stopped for 12 weeks, many are being evicted and becoming homeless. A lot of homeless men we see have been put on the streets due to sanctioning.”

‘It has totally broken my spirit’

Renfrewshire Food bank cited nine cases, seven of which were men. They included: “Young man who only completed five searches when it should have been six. His words, ‘It has totally broken my spirit’. Young man with learning difficulties wrote, ‘My money keeps getting stopped for some reason and I don’t know why’.”

A Guardian report on the MPs inquiry, included a top-ten list from the Trussell Trust survey of what the paper described as “capricious, cruel and often absurd” reasons for which people had their benefits cut – eight out of 10 cases referred to were men.

The Guardian also cited further evidence submitted to the inquiry from sources other than the Trussell Trust – three out of four of these examples also referred to male claimants.

Despite this glaring evidence that men are being disproportionately affected, neither the Guardian story nor The Trussell trust survey acknowledged that vulnerable men appear to be being penalised far more harshly than women.

Repeated pattern

The Trussell Trust initially told insideMAN: “Anecdotally we are seeing an increase of single young men coming to food banks”.

However a spokeswoman then said they were not willing to officially confirm this statement, as the survey had not specifically gathered data on gender. She added that the charity believed that overall there was a 50/50 gender split in people who use food banks.

The apparent lack of interest in examining further whether men are hit hardest by benefit sanctions, despite evidence that clearly suggests they are, follows the same pattern as coverage at this time last year of government figures showing there had been a 37% rise in the number of people sleeping rough on the streets in England since the Coalition came into power.

The news triggered widespread headlines condemning the data as evidence benefit cuts were hitting the poorest and most-vulnerable in society hardest.

‘Extra burden’

However none of the articles mentioned that nearly all of those who sleep rough are men. According to the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN), in London just under 90% of rough sleepers are male.

At the time, I contacted the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), the department that released the data, to ask if they had figures on the gendered breakdown of rough sleepers and if not, why not.

They said: “It’s simply a count – the national rough sleeping statistics – there’s no other information required from councils as that would be an extra burden and every extra burden we need to compensate with extra funding.”

If 90% of rough sleepers and eight out of 10 people listed by the Guardian as being hit by “capricious and cruel” benefit sanctions were women, it would be a cause of national outrage and immediate action.

Why is the fact these people are nearly all men something that’s not even worth mentioning at all?

By Dan Bell

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Go and see X + Y, it’s funny and it says good things about men

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I saw a film at the weekend that was the single most positive portrayal of men that I can remember seeing on the big screen. In it there are no fewer than four – count them, four – key male characters who are unfailingly decent and inspiring.

As such, I felt I should bloody well shout about it and tell as many people as possible to go and see it too. So that’s what I’m doing.

The film is X + Y, a perfectly-formed little bitter-sweet British comedy about a teenage boy who is both autistic and brilliant at maths. As a young boy Nathan’s dad, who was the only person who could communicate with him, is killed in a car crash.  Nathan is brought up by his lovely but devastated single mum, who not only carries deep grief for the loss of her husband, but also struggles to connect with her autistic son.

Not an oaf or a cad in sight

The central thread of the film follows Nathan’s gradual emergence from his shell, as he’s given the opportunity to compete in the International Maths Olympiad. Along the way, the film shows how both he and his mum grow personally and so does the relationship between them.

But the element of the film that’s so refreshing is that all of the core male characters are shown to be mature, loving and well-rounded men. There isn’t a bumbling oaf, or sneering cad in sight. And it’s still very funny.

From the loving dad, who we get to know through flash backs, to the sensitive therapist who first diagnoses Nathan’s autism, right through to the headmaster who’s first to recommend he takes special tuition in maths, and the maths teacher who goes on to become Nathan’s mentor, not to mention Nathan himself, there isn’t a dolt or a git in sight. Even the slightly officious maths coach, who leads the team in the International Maths Olympiad, is still basically a lovely bloke.

Hot Fuzz Vs Knocked Up

The closest the film comes to having a villain, is in the cruel rivalry between two of Nathan’s male maths team members, but even these two young men are presented as complex and ultimately decent, even if they are flawed.

The male characters in X + Y aren’t sliced-white perfect, it’s just the writers have chosen to sidestep the tired old man-child clichés that so often appear in contemporary film comedies. (To be fair, British film comedies have a better track record at creating decent male characters than the ones cranked out by Hollywood – compare Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, to Dumb and Dumber and Knocked Up, for example.)

But the depth of the characters in X + Y gave me the feeling that this time the writers had actually gone out to say something decent about men.

Over the last year, there’s been a real shift in the way dads are portrayed in adverts — both on TV and in the cinema, we’re starting to see advertisers targeting men by actually showing how much they care for their families. On “Super Bowl Sunday” in January, known as America’s highest-revenue advertising slot, ad firms seemed to compete with each other to run the most dad-friendly ads.

Wouldn’t it be great if X + Y were to herald a shift in the way men are portrayed in the main attraction as well?

By Dan Bell

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A teenage boy shamed into volunteering to fight isn’t a hero, he’s an exploited victim

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Earlier this month an analysis of Royal Navy records revealed that more than 100,000 of the volunteers who enlisted to fight in WW1 were boys aged 14 to 17, too young to either fight or vote.

In addition to these boy sailors, as many as 250,000 underage recruits enlisted to the Army. Their service records showed that the younger the soldier, the more likely he was to be killed.

By any common moral standard – by which I mean precisely the same moral standard we use to judge the actions of gaolers who force-fed Suffragettes – you’d think we would say those boys were victims of brutal state-sanctioned exploitation and vicious gendered discrimination.

You would expect national outcry and soul searching into what callous insanity could have led both society and the government to divide a generation of children along gender lines and decide one half was worthy of protection and safety, while the other should be subjected to unimaginable brutality.

Sepia-tinted tragedy

Except the story barely raised a ripple in the sea of voices that make up the mainstream conversation about gender, a conversation which focuses almost exclusively on the problems men cause, rather than those they face.

As an added irony, the news that one third of WW1’s Navy volunteers were in fact boys, appeared just two days before International Women’s Day, a day on which the only permissible narrative about men is one that describes their power and privilege.

There have been a handful of articles and documentaries addressing the issue of WW1’s boy soldiers to mark the centenary of the war, but I’ve yet to see a single account that frames the issue as one of gendered discrimination, let alone express outrage at that injustice.

Instead, they fall into a cosy narrative of sepia-tinted tragedy and heroism – it’s terribly sad that all these young lads lost their lives, to be sure, but that’s just how it was then, don’t you know. And anyway the main thing to remember, with misty eyes, is what heroes they were.

Image: BBC

There are two things these articles always emphasise – that the boys were heroes and how enthusiastic they themselves had been to enlist. By the same token, there are two things that are always glossed over – the horror and terror of combat and the social pressure imposed on boys and young men to prove their manhood.

In other words, these reports employ pretty much exactly the same techniques that have always been used to disguise both the reality of war and the state coercion and social stigma that forces men to sign up for it.

But at the heart of this obfuscation and spin is the need to show these boys – boys who by today’s standards were too young to consent to sex, let alone make informed choices about going to war – ultimately made the decision to enlist of their own free will.

Rarely is there any mention of the psychological impact of the ever-present Kitchener’s finger, of the music hall propaganda songs, of the vicious shame of the White Feather, of the pride many parents took in being able to say their son was doing his bit, or of the girls giggling at the sight of young men in uniform.

Playground propaganda

I have a hunch why there is such reluctance to acknowledge the immense pressure these boys were under to sign up — it’s because that way both traditionalists and feminists get to hold on to their beliefs about men.

Traditionalists are able to maintain the idea that any right-thinking man and boy knows his duty as provider and protector, while feminists get to continue to perpetuate the myth that the history of gender politics can be reduced to one long saga of men’s agency and privilege.

Meanwhile, no-one is forced to confront the fact that virtually within living memory, Britain’s attitude to its boys was not so different to that of a Central African war lord.

One recent BBC documentary included a segment in which an actor read out extracts from a propaganda comic of the time, over a line-drawn image from the comic of a shell exploding in the middle of a make-shift football pitch.

“It would take a lot to put a British Tommy off his football. Here a German shell exploded right on the field of play. To show their contempt for the enemy’s fire, they continued their game.”

Kitchener’s finger

Incredibly, the segment was simply used as a colourful illustration of what one boy soldier asked for when he wrote home – a comic. Neither explicitly or implicitly did the programme question the messages or motives behind the comic, or how a diet of this kind of reading matter may have influenced boys to enlist.

(This, just to be clear, is the same BBC that regularly provides a platform for outrage over the harm caused to girls by half-naked women in Lads Mags.)

Another report in The Times, about the youngest soldier to have gone to the front – a 12-year-old boy who ended up fighting at the Battle of the Somme – emphasised how he and other underage boys managed to “trick” recruiting sergeants into believing that they were older than then they really were. Those poor recruiting sergeants, outwitted by children who were so determined to get to the front.

“What could have impelled a young boy to place himself in such danger?”, asks the article’s author, wide-eyed.

The real question is, why are we still so determined to pretend that when young men join the military, it has nothing whatsoever to do with what society expects of them.

By Dan Bell

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Wanted: Stupid male writers to say why women are more intelligent than them. Paid.

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At the end of last week, as I skimmed through a few of the people I follow in twitter, I came across a tweet from a glossy women’s fashion magazine — it was a RT, honest — asking for single male writers for an article on what it’s like as a man navigating the desolate wastes of the dating scene. I added the bit about desolate wastes.

Anyway. Not only do I happen to fit very neatly into that demographic — and when I say neatly, that’s in the sense that a noose fits neatly around a condemned man’s neck – the 140 characters included the only four that matter: Paid.

What’s more, I optimistically thought to myself, as an editor for a men’s issues magazine, this might even be a great opportunity to reach out to a new audience of women and offer them an insight into what it’s like when the Nike Air Classic is on the other foot, so to speak.

So, I cheerily fired off a quick email: “Totes. Can do. Wotchuafta? How much you payin?” (Or words to that effect).

Clooney and Amal

This came the reply:

“So basically I need to find a single guy to write an opinion piece about deliberately dating women who are cleverer than him – hooked off George Clooney’s comments about Amal being smarter than him, and some new statistics also saying that men deliberately date women who are cleverer than them too.

“If this sounds like something you can relate to, and you’re interested, could you write me a few quick sentences about what you think on the subject and wing over a headshot, and I’ll pitch you to my editors this afternoon!”

Having read and carefully considered this offer, my first impulse was to “wing over” a couple of other four-letter words, connected with a couple of three-letter ones.

Instead, I decided to ask if I could see the research she was referring to, and having noticed they were also looking for a single woman to describe her experiences of dating, I asked what angle they’d be looking for in her dating story.

Teachers now mark down boys

For some reason they ignored my questions and said they’d found someone else.

Now, I know it’s a stretch to try and base some kind of devastating social commentary on this squalid little exchange, but let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the first time and it’s way too much fun for it to be the last, so just bear with me on this.

You see, I couldn’t help but notice that just the day before the magazine’s interest in smart women and stupid men, there was a major news story that addressed exactly the same stereotypes.

According to the BBC, an international report found that not only are boys falling behind girls in education across the globe, there is evidence of widespread prejudice against boys by teachers, who are marking down boys in comparison to girls, even if they are of the same ability.

Woman rolls eyes. Cut.

In another study in 2010, this prejudice was found to start very young, with both girls and boys believing girls are more intelligent than boys by the time they are seven or eight years old.

Meanwhile, there is the near-universal media trope in adverts, TV and film, of smart women and stupid men. (It’s so pervasive in fact, that there’s now a visual shorthand that tells us everything we need to know in a split second: woman rolls eyes. Cut.)

So why I wonder, would the editors of a women’s magazine think their readers would be interested in reading about men who fancy women who are more intelligent than them?

Could it be that the magazine’s readers now believe men in general are less intelligent than women, and despairing of finding a partner, want to be told there are men out there who don’t mind this intellectual power imbalance? Or perhaps, less charitably, these women like the idea of a nice-but-dim hunk, who looks pretty but won’t answer back?

Who knows. Whatever the reasons, none of them seem very pleasant for either women or men.

By Dan Bell

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Kangaroo courts on campus: How ‘rape culture’ panic is undermining due process

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In 2011, the US Department of Education’s assistant for civil rights, Russlynn H Ali, wrote to universities across America instructing them that they must aggressively investigate all allegations of sexual assault on campus, regardless of whether the police chose to do so.

The directive, now infamously referred to as the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, stated that if university disciplinary procedures failed to pursue allegations of sexual assault, they would be in violation of US equality legislation and would be stripped of government funds.

The directive, fuelled by a popular panic around an alleged ‘rape culture’ on campus, triggered a proliferation of a Kafkaesque tribunals and kangaroo courts across US universities. Four years on, dozens of railroaded male students are suing their Alma Maters for breaching their constitutional right to a fair trial, and in October last year, 28 Harvard Law professors published an open letter stating that the new procedures, ‘lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process [and] are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused’.

‘Culture of fear and misogyny’

So far, so American. Except, astonishingly, there is now a drive to impose this discredited system of parallel justice on to campuses in the UK. This year, the End Violence Against Women commission (EVAW) – which includes the Fawcett Society, Rape Crisis England and Wales, the Women’s Institute, Amnesty International UK and the TUC – has published a legal briefing warning universities they could be breaking the law if they refuse to investigate sexual-assault allegations in the belief that such investigations should be left to the police.

Their argument is essentially the same as the one in the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter – that because under equality law universities have a responsibility to protect students and staff from gender-based discrimination, they are required to investigate such allegations, even if the evidence would not support a criminal investigation. Or, as the EVAW briefing puts it, ‘disciplinary procedures should not apply a criminal burden of proof’.

The campaigners’ attitudes to the rights of accused male students were spelled out by one of the professors leading the charge. Professor Nicole Westmarland wrote in the UK Telegraph‘s Women section: ‘The criminal process can take months. If universities refuse to investigate or take action during this time, then the victim is forced to live and study alongside their attacker… Our students cannot be left to study in a culture of fear and misogyny.’ Due process just takes too damn long – much easier just to find the student guilty as charged and kick him out, right?

Ideologically-driven journalism

The campus anti-rape campaigners have already shown their penchant for mob justice in the case of then Oxford Union president Ben Sullivan. Sullivan was subjected to an aggressive resignation campaign – led by Oxford University Student Union’s vice president for women – after he was accused of rape by two female students. Following a police investigation, not only was there insufficient evidenceto charge Sullivan, it appears one of his accusers knew she had made a false allegation against him.

But it’s not just the campaigners’ disregard for due process that is of concern – there’s also the quality of the evidence they’re using to justify the reforms in the first place.

In the US, hysteria has been fuelled by the claim that one in five female students will be a victim of rape or sexual assault while attending university. But the statistic has been repeatedly thrown into question and more reputable research suggests that closer to 1-in-53 college women are victims of rape or sexual assault – obviously still far too high, but nowhere near a figure that justifies the idea of a ‘rape culture’ on campus.

Here in the UK, we have our own cottage industry of advocacy research and ideologically driven journalism that’s been pumping out alarming and distorted statistics about campus sexual assault. The EVAW campaign was launched alongside a series of articles in Telegraph Women, with the shocking headline: ‘A third of female students in Britain have endured a sexual assault or unwanted advances at university.’

Male victims ignored

Leaving aside just what constitutes ‘unwanted advances’ – being asked out by someone you don’t fancy? – much later, the statement is qualified by ‘most assaults were more minor offences, including groping’. The headlines and ensuing articles also downplayed the fact the survey found one in eight male students had been subjected to groping or unwanted advances and that one per cent of students of either gender had been raped at university. The Telegraph does not provide a link to the report, so it’s not possible to explore the claims in more detail.

Just days afterwards, the same journalist published another article on the predatory tendency of male students – this time in Telegraph Men – stating that ‘a third of male university students would rape a woman if there were no consequences’. The implication that a third of the UK’s male student body would rape a woman if they could get away with it, published in a respected national broadsheet, is based on a study of exactly 73 students at an American university.

But the group that’s most committed to vilifying the UK’s male students is the National Union of Students itself. The key report the EVAW uses to justify its demands is the 2010 NUS survey, ‘Hidden Marks’, which openly states its ideological agenda: ‘The survey did not ask about violence experienced by male students. Whilst we recognise that male students have a heightened risk of being a victim of violent crime, and can be subject to the full range of behaviour surveyed in this research, the primary aim of this research was to explore women students’ experiences, focusing particularly, although not exclusively, on men’s behaviour towards women and the impact of gendered violence on women.’ Glad that’s clear, then.

Since ‘Hidden Marks’, the NUS has relentlessly pedalled the idea that there is a widespread climate of sexism against female students, producing a series of high-profile reports, consultations and surveys, including a Lad Culture Summit last February, complete with live updates by the Guardian.

‘Martial law against men’

The most recent of these surveys, which claimed harassment of female students ‘is rife on campus’, found that 37 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men who responded said they had faced unwelcome sexual advances, while 36 per cent of women who took part said they had experienced unwanted sexual comments about their body, compared with 16 per cent of men. Once again, as with the Telegraphsurvey and ‘Hidden Marks’, if a third to 50 per cent of those experiencing sexism are male students, why is this just being presented as an issue of male perpetrators and female victims?

Meanwhile, from the banning of ‘Blurred Lines’ and lads’ mags on campus, to relentless social media propaganda such as the Hollaback video and ‘consent classes’ for new students, campus culture increasingly seems to find young male sexuality inherently pathological.

Sexual harassment and assault on campus is a real problem – victims must be taken seriously and know that they can expect justice to be done. But that is not what these campaigns are about.

Back in 2011, when first reporting on the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, American feminist Christina Hoff Sommers warned: ‘The new regulations should be seen for what they really are. They are not an enlightened new procedure for protecting students from crime. They are a declaration of martial law against men, justified by an imagined emergency.’

These ideologically driven campaigns by the NUS and others have fostered a climate primed for witch hunts and mob justice. In this context, the last thing universities should be doing is undermining due process.

By Dan Bell

Photo: StockMonkeys.com This article first appeared in Spiked-online 

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‘More UK men have killed themselves in the past year than all British soldiers killed since 1945’

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More men in the UK have killed themselves in the past year than all British soldiers fighting in all wars since 1945, according to a new edition of Newsweek magazine dedicated to the issue of male suicide.

The edition, which is published alongside an in-depth e-book on the crisis, follows new figures by the ONS that show men are now killing themselves at their highest rate for a decade.

According to Newsweek “Across Europe, men are around four times more likely to die by suicide than women” and suicide kills “three times more people than road accidents, more than leukaemia, more than all infectious and parasitic diseases combined.”

“More than 6,000 people in the UK died by suicide in 2013; 78% of them were men.”

Failure of services

In addition to a stark and detailed breakdown of the figures, the magazine outlines the failure of UK authorities to address the crisis.

The magazine reports, “In 2002, following the release of a report, The Sadness of Young Men, detailing Scotland’s disproportionately high male suicide rate, the Scottish government announced its intention to reduce suicide by 20% in the space of 10 years. When 2013 came around, rates were down by 19%.”

In London in November last year, a community-based mental health facility considered a lifeline to its members, was threatened with closure in a cost-cutting drive by the local council.

‘Provide and protect’

In early January, with the council’s decision still pending, one of its male members threw himself under a train, the magazine reports.

Newsweek quotes a number of the leading figures in the UK movement to address men’s mental health, including Jane Powell of the Campaign Against Living Miserably and Dr Martin Seager of Men’s Minds Matter.

Seager told the magazine that there is a danger in approaches to tackling men’s mental health that tells them they should me more like women.

He told Newsweek: “The way I look at it, if men have evolved as fathers, protectors and survivors, they are going to feel life is worth living to the extent they can provide and protect.”

Image credit: Newsweek

Article by Dan Bell

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Why The Hobbit shows we still think it’s OK to laugh at men who are afraid

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There are a lot of ugly characters in the latest and last of Peter Jackson’s over-blown adaptation of The Hobbit, but one of the most repellent isn’t an orc or a goblin, he’s a man.

At the heart of the film’s opening sequence, in which the dragon Smaug lays fiery waste to a lake-side town, is the comical greed and cowardice of the town’s despotic chief and henchmen as they try to escape with coffers of the town’s gold.

The chief soon meets a satisfyingly grizzly end, but one of his henchmen, Alfrid, is washed up alive and goes on to become a source of derision throughout the film. The reason? He’s a man who is an unrelenting coward.

Now let me be clear, I loved the first three Lord of The Rings films, in which evil is defeated by loyal friendships, high ideals and shining deeds – there are heroes and cowards in all of them. But unlike slippery villains such Wormtongue, the sole purpose of Alfrid’s character is for us to jeer at his cowardice.

Hate figure

With hunched back and revolting yellow teeth, Alfrid is essentially a gendered hate figure – it’s because he is a man and a coward that we’re invited to hate him. Even the goblins and orcs, revolting as they are, command more respect as fierce warriors.

Or to put it another way, Alfrid’s character could not have been played by a woman. Firstly, our culture does not shame women who are afraid and run away – in this sense cowardice is a uniquely male shame. Secondly, two hours of ridiculing and vilifying a female character simply wouldn’t be funny, it would be offensive.

But it’s when you see Alfrid in light of the female characters, that it’s clear this isn’t just an expression of outdated gender roles, but something altogether more complicated and unpleasant.

To be sure, most of the primary characters are male, but of the female characters, there are those who are heroic – such as the elves Tauriel and Galadriel – and those who are afraid and deserving of protection, such as the townswomen; but none are shamed or ridiculed. The women can be either strong or weak, while the men have only the age-old choice between bravery or humiliation.

‘You’re not a man, you’re a weasel’

All of this was dawning on me in a peripheral kind of way, until one completely contrived scene threw the whole tangled knot right in my face.

We are suddenly shown a group of townswomen huddled in a corner, before another woman charges in and declares they are as brave as the men and should go and fight alongside them. One woman however stays bent over and whimpering, refusing to go. The other woman pulls her round, only to reveal it’s the villain Alfrid dressed in women’s clothing. She spits in his face: “You’re a coward. You’re not a man, you’re a weasel.”

In one short scene, the film simultaneously celebrates a woman for emancipating herself from the traditional female role of being weak and in need of protection, while at the same time she shames a man who doesn’t conform to the traditional role of brave protector.

But The Hobbit isn’t the only recent piece of light entertainment set in a mythical past that argues both ends at once. In the first episode of the second series of the BBC series The Musketeers, a show based almost entirely on the male characters maintaining their honour by wise-cracking in the face of fear, we’re suddenly offered a soliloquy by one of the female characters on the unique shame faced by unwed women.

‘Chickens’

“If I left my husband, my family would cut me off and my friends would cross the street to avoid me. I would be nothing more than your whore… I’m a woman, d’Artagnan, a woman in a world built for men.”

OK, fine, but what about the two dozen-odd men that just got slaughtered rather than face the shame of cowardice? Why didn’t the writers invite us to have a look at that through the lens of gender too?

But the most astonishing example of all is Sky’s comedy series, Chickens, about how a village of women treat the only three men from their town who have not gone to fight during WW1.

The show is essentially a series of set pieces in which the three men – a conscientious objector, a man who is medically unfit to fight and man who is simply afraid – are shamed, laughed at and humiliated by scores of empowered and emancipated women.

Clunking double standards

In one scene, after a woman demands that Cecil – who incidentally is the one discharged as medically unfit – justifies why he hasn’t enlisted, he says: “I really believe in this war and I’m really keen to help.” She replies: “Rubbish, if you were really keen to help you would have killed yourself to raise morale.”

The writers describe Chickens as “a quasi-feminist sit-com” and according to one of the lead actresses: “What’s great is to see a village full of women who are just really getting on with it, just couldn’t give a toss that the men have gone, really, except for basic plumbing issues and the occasional need for someone to shag them.”

The thing that’s frankly bizarre, is that the people who wrote each of these clumsy dramatic expositions on gender, seem to think they’re actually making a stand for equality. It seems they don’t even realise the clunking double standards and ethical inconsistencies of what they’re saying.

There’s an old saw that says science fiction tells you a lot more about the values and prejudices of the present, than it does about the future. It seems the same can be said for stories set in the past.

By Dan Bell

— Picture credit: PinkMoose

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.

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