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Is the law becoming increasingly feminine and is this bad news for men?

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There were two pieces of news yesterday that me made consider the gendered nature of our legal system.

The first was the news that Justice Minister, Simon Hughes, wants to halve the number of women in prison because they are a ‘special case’ who should be treated differently to men.

The second was the news that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, has issued new guidance to police forces which place a greater burden on men accused of rape to prove they are not guilty (as distinct from being assumed innocent until such time as the prosecution proves them to be guilty).

Together, these two items of news are symptomatic of an ongoing trend that is seeing the increasing feminisation of our legal system in the UK. And by feminisation I mean it’s:

  • Increasingly dominated by women
  • Increasing dominated by women’s concerns
  • Increasing dominated by feminine values
  • Increasingly dominated by feminist thinking
  • Increasingly dominated post-modern (a worldview that tends to be more feminine and feminist)

This evolving, feminised approach, which puts “women and girls’ first, is being built on top of a paternalistic system that already treated women as a “weaker sex” and in need of men’s protection (and protection from men). Together these two worldviews are combining to create a legal system that increasingly seeks to favour women and discriminate against men.

 How girls and boys play

In thinking about this article, I was reminded of an observation about the way that children create rules when they play. I think it was the linguist Deborah Tannen who made this point. She said that girls will tend to break the rules to protect each other’s feelings; whereas boys are prepared to hurt each other’s feelings to protect the rules of whatever game they are playing.

When I first heard this idea, it instantly reminded me of a game of boys’ football I arranged with a friend who was a Guardian journalist. We both took a side and not long into the game his son (who was on my team) fell over as the result of a good, clean tackle. We all knew it wasn’t a foul but because his boy turned on the waterworks, dad gave him a penalty and we scored an undeserved goal.

This, to me, was a gross miscarriage of justice, particularly to the boys on the other team who had been disadvantaged to save anther child’s feelings. So I took the law into my own hands and the next time I had the ball, I kicked it into my own goal to even things own.

So who was right? Was it my masculine concern for the rules, or Guardian dad’s more feminine concern for his son’s feelings?

Making up the rules as we go along

The truth is, we hadn’t agreed what the rules of engagement were between us so we ended up just making it up as we went along and trying to enforce our own rules on each other. And that’s how our legal system evolves, we simply make it up as we go along, which each new generation inventing and enforcing new rules on everyone else.

So it’s not surprising that as more women enter the legal system, the more feminine the law becomes. The rise of the female lawyer in the past 40 years has been phenomenal. In the late 1960s, fewer than three per cent of lawyers were women. As of July 2013, 51.4% of qualified solicitors are women and 65% of students entering university to study law in 2014 are female.

This gradual feminisation of the legal system is manifesting itself in unusual ways. A recent US study by linguists and lawyers found that male lawyers who sound very masculine are less likely to win a US Supreme Court case than their more gentle-sounding peers. The more feminine the presentation, the more likely the lawyer is to win.

The rise of postmodern law

And it’s not just at the personal level than feminine qualities seem to be gaining precedence in legal proceedings, the rise of the post-modern worldview also contributes to the creeping feminisation of the law.

According to David Noebel, author of Understanding the Times: The Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews:

“Postmodernists insist that Western law, which grew out of Christianity and the Enlightenment, reflects white male bias. They attack ‘the concepts of reason and objective truth, condemning them as components of white male domination. They prefer the more subjective ‘ways of knowing’ supposedly favored by women and minorities, such as storytelling. As to the rule of law, it is an article of [Postmodern] faith that legal rules are indeterminate and serve only to disguise the law’s white male bias’.”

In a sense, all legal systems are subjective. Concepts like “beyond reasonable doubt” and the “balance of probabilities” are ultimately subjective judgments based on objective facts.

The shift towards feminine laws

But the feminine shift towards greater subjectivity in the legal system much goes further. Concepts like “fear of crime”, “feeling harassed” and “emotional cruelty” are postmodern constructs that have risen to prominence in the past 20 years.

So the fact that more women on average say they are subjectively scared of crime becomes more important than the fact that more men are objectively victims of crime. Worse still, you can become legally responsible for someone else’s emotional response. So if someone subjectively feels distressed by your actions, even if it wasn’t your intention to distress them, you can be charged with harassment.

This shift towards feminine, subjective laws is particularly notable in family proceedings when parents split up. Having been to court with many fathers as a McKenzie Friend, I’ve seen how family law operates at first hand—and in my experience (and we’re all about feelings now) it’s cruel.

The cruelty of family law

Dads generally expect the law to be fair an equal and rational and objective. They expect court to be about their rights and they tend to believe that if they simply sit down with the judge and explain everything logically then justice will prevail.

Family law, however, operates on a subjective, feelings-based principle called “the best interests of the child”. It sounds wonderful, until you realise that there is no presumption that the interests of the child are best served by ensuring mums and dads have equal rights.

In fact, the “best interests of the child” is such a fluid construct that in a famous case a good father was denied contact with his child because it upset mum too much—and so the decision was taken that because mum being upset was felt to be bad for the child, it was deemed to be in the child’s best interest to be denied contact with her father.

Feelings-based justice

Masculine, rights-based justice would contend that every parent should be automatically allowed to be part of his or her child’s life unless there was tried and tested evidence that he or she was a risk to that child—innocent until proven guilty.

Feminine, feelings-based justice says that if mum doesn’t feel like letting dad be involved, then those feelings should be honoured—and any dad asserting his right to be involved in his child’s life is an example of a man seeking to dominate a woman and exercise his social privilege.

The same principle is applied by social workers who have unfettered freedom to gradually remove a child from a parent’s life because they “feel” the parent is a risk. I have watched in horror in the past 12 months as I have observed social workers supporting the removal of a dad I was working with from his child’s life, without any consideration for the child’s or the father’s rights and without any need to go to court.

Male and female logic

The way that feminine, postmodern, subjective law operates seems unnatural and illogical to many men. It’s an approach that says you don’t just award penalties to boys playing football because the rules are broken, you award a penalty to save the boy’s feelings from being hurt.

It’s an approach that says you don’t treat male and female prisoners equally, you treat women more favourably because you feel more empathy for them than male prisoner.

It’s an approach that says a female witness whose story is inconsistent and has a poor memory of events, is not an unreliable witness but a victim whose inconsistency and poor memory is evidence of trauma.

Of course, evolving and improving the way the law operates so more victims are protected and more perpetrators are brought to justice is a good intention that most right-thinking people would support. However, the way the feminised legal system is shaping up seems to be creating more injustice (particularly against men) in the process of trying to make the system fairer.

—Photo: Flickr/Tori Rector

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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Why you must never treat a man with a pram like a lady

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A street encounter with a man with a pram prompted Glen Poole to ask, why do some men and women react differently to the kindness of strangers?

A strange thing happened to me the other morning. I was marching up the hill on the way to a meeting when I spotted a man with a pram coming down the hill towards me. Between us there was an impending bottleneck created by the unlikely triumvirate of a lamp-post, a crash barrier and a wheely bin.

I’m pretty good at spatial awareness (I’d say it’s man thing but I’m sure my partner would say I’m deluded as I am clearly less aware than her of the dust that accumulates in our shared space). By my calculation, even if I increased my acceleration by 23%, I still wouldn’t make it through the gap first without causing pram dad to have to slam on the brakes and risk catapulting his toddler into oncoming traffic.

As I’m always keen to prevent involved dads from needlessly cocking up, I did the gentlemanly thing and I stood to one side to let man, pram and baby go first. I even stared at the ground to make the whole scene a little less awkward for all concerned, but when I looked up, the dad had come to an abrupt halt on the other side of the bottleneck and—in a very erect, gentlemanly fashion—was holding out his hand to allow me to pass by first.

And then I remembered the golden rule for men at the pramface—never treat a man with a pram like a lady!

I grew up at a time when young women were beginning to resist all manner of seemingly innocuous social etiquette such as refusing to walk through a door that a man held open for them out a sense of chivalry. I’d forgotten about these random acts of defiance until last week when my other half got into a bit of a doorway duel with an old gent at a charity shop. He was leaving the store as she was entering, so they both tried to let each other go first and ended up in a temporary state of etiquette impasse, on the threshold of a building full of second-hand tat.

For clarity, my partner doesn’t have an issue with men opening doors but the timing and context was such that it felt entirely appropriate for her to do the kind and polite thing and let the elderly gent go first. But he was having none of it. In fact he became quite agitated:

“No, no, no, no,” he protested “can’t a man be allowed to let a lady go first anymore, chivalry isn’t dead you know, I insist, you go first”. In the end, she did the only thing she could do if she wanted to rifle through dead women’s blouses in search of a bargain, she agreed to play by the old man’s social rules, based on a view of gender that assumes women are the weaker sex and it is men’s role is to protect them.

And this is how the man with a pram probably felt when I stopped to let him pass. In this fleeting social interaction, I unwittingly positioned myself as the chivalrous gent, the protector of women and children and may as well have added the verbal challenge: “you go first because you’re a big girly wimp, Pramboy!”

It’s no wonder he resisted!

In her classic book on gender and communication “You Just Don’t Understand”, the linguist Deborah Tannen presents her theory on the hidden meanings in such gestures. Women, she claims, are more likely to strive for intimacy and use the symmetry of connection to create a sense of community when they communicate. Men, on the other hand, favour the struggle for independence and are more likely to communicate through the asymmetry of contest and one-upmanship.

The simple act of allowing someone to go first, says Tannen, can imply status. It can send the metamessage “I am one up for you and I grant your permission to go first”.

When a man makes a protective gesture, it can communicate the traditional alignment of men protecting women and children. When women make a protective gesture it suggests a different scenario, because women traditionally, protect and nurture children.

This is why some women resist men’s chivalry as the metamessage they receive is that women are the weaker sex and need protecting by men. This is also why old men in charity shops resist being allowed to go first by a woman, because they don’t want to accept the metamessage that they are treated like children. And this is also what you should be mindful of when you  let a man with a pram go first.

If you’re a woman, you’re unwittingly sending the message “I’m treating you like a child” and if you’re a man you’re unwittingly telling him that he is a woman with a child who needs your manly protection.

And no man with a pram needs to be treated like a child or offered your manly protection, because any man who is macho enough to impregnate a woman and then push the resulting offspring around town with him is all the man he ever needs to be (and he’s certainly no lady)!

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—Photo credit: Flickr/Nicolas Raymond

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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