WHY MEN DONT IRON EB

Anne Moir, Bill Moir

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780006531005
• eBook ISBN: 9780007468911
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why Men Don't Iron is an eye-opening, mind-blowing book on how the major sex differences in our brains impact on our daily lives and behaviour.

Men are not women and yet for the last decade have been told to get in touch with the feminine side of their nature. Men have in fact been told to connect to parts of their brain that do not exist. So what are the essential, unique qualities of men?

In a time when the debate on the 'feminisation of education' and the nanny state, 'the feminisation of the state', is just beginning, this book is timely and highly controversial.

CHAPTER ONE

He’s Not Part One, Part Another

The bisexual fallacy

We hear a lot these days about the ‘new man’. He is more sensitive than the older model, more ready to help about the house or to spend time with his children. He is civilized, de-clawed and gentle. He can still be strong, of course, but his strength is manifested by patience and emotional warmth. This paragon sounds suspiciously like a female; indeed, it is often said that the new man is ‘in touch with his feminine side’. The supposed compliment betrays a fin de millnium unisex ideal. It is RuPaul, supertransvestite, advertising M.A.C.’s Viva Glam lipstick (all profits to an AIDS charity). It is Generation X – with a splash of Calvin Klein’s CKOne – cruising the line between sexual identities and possessing the best traits of both with none of the old male’s inconvenient faults.

Today New Man is updated by another: Postmodern Man, the new man dressed to the hilt in academic theory. He is also a sharing, softer sort of guy, less competitive than the traditional male, and at home with his amorphous sexuality. He too is meant to be in touch with his female side. It might seem, then, that there is a biological component to his makeup. But no, he is entirely moulded by social forces. He is a human object of whom no part is given by nature. Postmodern man is a boy-child of intellectuals who teach gender studies. New man is a creation of popular feminism, media hype and out-of-touch copywriters. What is common to both postmodern man and new man is that they are aspirational figures: neither exists outside the academic mind or Gucci perfume ads. There is one big obstacle to the whole theoretical caboodle: a realistic account of sex differences will close the door on the intellectual postmodern republic.

‘My squeeze, what do you call a guy who irons a blouse?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Anne. ‘I’ve never met one. But this sounds like a bar-room joke, a hostage to fortune if ever I –’

‘He’s a postmodern man.’

‘Eyes glaze at the word.’

‘Maana man, then,’ says Bill. ‘Like tomorrow, he never comes.’

‘But how can he be postmodern? Post-all-that’s-present. Post today? Post now?’

‘Post the present era. Us male humans are to be transformed. We’re all to be part one and part another: the world of both. It’s a world in which the dividing lines of opposition – oppression or competition – are no more. It’s a land of blur, of ambiguity. Little wonder the eyes cloud over.’

‘I get it,’ says Anne. ‘Postmodern means post men.’

Some cynics may doubt whether this gender-bending new postmodern man truly exists outside advertisements, women’s magazines and a few urban enclaves, but the ideal persists. It is based on the assumption of bisexuality: that within each of us lies both a male and a female nature, and that the male can be tamed by getting in touch with his feminine side. A man who succeeds in doing so will be less threatening, especially to women and gays, and it is hardly surprising that most of the strident headline pressure for men to cast off their old macho image and become sensitive, caring, new-model males stems from the women’s and homosexuals’ lobbies. Women and gays, after all, have most to fear from the old, unreconstructed male who can be intolerant, crude and show a frightening capacity for violence; the new man, if he can be fetched into existence, will be a much pleasanter creature. We have turned Professor Higgins’s question on its head. Now we ask why a man can’t be more like a woman?

The straight answer would be that it is not in most men’s nature to be like a woman, nor in hers to be like him. That assertion, however, ignores another fashionable belief which insists that our sexuality is not natural at all, but a social construct. This belief, which goes hand in hand with claims about bisexuality, insists that we all have the capacity to be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, and the only thing which determines our sexual orientation is social pressure. At first glance this might seem an odd assertion, but increasingly the western world is being driven by the belief, often enshrined in law, that the only differences between men and women, other than their obvious physical attributes, are those caused by privilege, opportunity and influence.

Social reformers, with their aim of eliminating oppression, now think they have found a way to eliminate male aggression. The male is to be socially transformed. He is to be turned into a non-hostile, uncompetitive type. There is an obstacle: any realistic account of gender differences which denies the male competitive world denies the nature of men. Does that bother the social reformers? Not at all. What cannot be changed can be swept under the carpet. It is to this end that the male is found by the liberal arts academics to be a social, cultural construct – open to deep transformation. Only sexual orientation does not wash away in the communal bath; human nature is not biodissolvable.

‘Nothing is transmitted but the social?’ asks Anne.

‘It’s in the vested interest of the social sciences to find all things socially transmitted,’ Bill answers.

‘You mean,’ Anne asks, ‘that if we transform man’s social world then we transform him?’

‘Those who believe in the perfectibility of man do not want to know about the masculine as natural.’

‘There’s evidence to support the social hypothesis…’

‘… but only if you don’t look beyond the external.’

Scholars are no longer allowed to imply that heterosexuality is the norm for sexual attraction. In the standard US handbook for avoiding bias in language (Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses, 1995) we are not to talk of husband, wife, spouse or marriage. We are asked to substitute gender neutral terms like domestic companion, longtime partner or primary relationship. Language is freighted with splendid deceits, and to impose rules of thumb as to what can (cannot) be said is to put one’s finger on the point of a tack. To the average male the language of the thought police is disparaging, offensive and prejudicial. There is fear and loathing in the new sexism: it is both anti-sex and anti-male.

The male is pre-judged – as prejudiced. Here is the belief that all should conform to the bisexual ideal: a social idyll in which sexual differences are eliminated. He is wrong-footed at the starting line. He is accused of homophobia. But what of heterophobia? What if it is not the average male who is prejudiced but all those who assume that straight is potentially bent – unisexual, bisexual, part-one-part-another, desexed, androgynous, queer, both/and, homosexual, crossing over, in between.

‘The word police will get you.’

‘The charge?’ asks Anne.

‘Heterosexism.’

‘Because we say that the heterosexual male is normal? Or the norm?’

‘To be born Chinese is the norm in China.’

‘A gay might stand out as abnormal.’

‘My green eyes might stand out in Mongolia,’ says Bill. ‘Would that be queer? You know I’m no more likely to change my sexual orientation than the colour of my eyes.’

‘Lots of people think everyone’s a bit unisex.’

‘Like being a bit pregnant?

“‘DELETE, DELETE, DELETE,” say the word police. We are all potentially bisexual.’

‘One in a hundred, more like,’ says Anne. ‘Those who include speak only for themselves.’

If women, the argument goes, are given the same opportunities as men, and are not restrained by the dead hand of ‘old boy networks’, then they can achieve all that a man can achieve. It is hard to argue against that well-meaning assertion, even though a dangerous and unscientific assumption lies behind it: that men and women are the same.

Perhaps the most extreme and obvious example of this assumption is seen in America where, in the last few years, lawyers have forced the hitherto male-dominated military to open all its doors to women. The result has been legal equality and constant trouble. The men are consistently accused of insensitivity or, worse, of sexual harassment – and it does not take much for a serviceman to be accused of that most heinous crime. Indeed, according to guidelines laid down by the Pentagon, if a soldier merely looks at one of his female colleagues for more than three seconds then he is harassing her. The US Navy even closed itself down for a whole day so that its men could be lectured on the evils of sexual harassment. The whole experiment, which rushes on with the inevitability of the Gadarene swine nearing the precipice, can be simply summarized: women demand equal opportunity, gain it, then complain that the men behave badly. ‘Sensitivity training’, or even disciplinary action, then follows to change the men’s behaviour to make them gentler; in fact, to make them more like women. It would be easier, surely, to recruit only women?

The homosexual lobby is as eager as some women to blur gender identities. It is axiomatic among many gay lobbyists that everyone’s sexuality is a mix of male and female, and that where any one person ends up on the sliding scale depends solely on social pressures and influences. Homosexuality, they tell us, is a convenient social label, no more ‘real’ than heterosexuality. Ten years ago a conference devoted its entire agenda to just that assertion. One of the conference’s published conclusions was that ‘homosexuality is not inherent in an individual but constructed’.¹ No wonder such people believe that a little social pressure will shift all the old, crude, uncomfortably macho males along the continuum to a place where they will be subtly feminized and so become less threatening. Violence against women and gays would drop dramatically, and no one will deny that this would be a desirable outcome. Men’s violence against women is well documented; perhaps less well known is the growing intolerance shown by heterosexual males for gays, an intolerance that has certainly led to a dramatic increase in assaults on homosexuals by ‘straight’ men.²

The growing incidence of anti-gay violence is even adduced as further evidence for our bisexuality. A Dutch study of anti-gay violence noted that the victims were usually ‘the least manly’ in appearance.³ Without citing evidence (no questions were directed to the attackers) the study solemnly reported that ‘it was presumed that [the attackers] victimised this group of men … because they themselves were homosexual and could stamp out the fire within them by the use of violence against “obvious gays”.’ So straight men attack gays because they are really gay themselves? Freud and his followers have much to answer for in this tortuous reasoning. Not one to cling to a single fallacy when he could hold two, Freud asserted that men were partly women (they have nipples, don’t they?) and that they repressed their ‘natural bisexuality’. That notion has given intellectual respectability to the claim that we all have the ever-present possibility of being gay or straight.

To be anti-gay is thus explained as a reaction to the male’s fear of his own latent homosexuality, an explanation that is supported by the word used to describe such prejudice, homophobia, which means ‘fear of sameness’. ‘People are homophobic because they fear their own latent homosexuality, or because they are insecure in their own masculinity. This answer represents one of the most popular “common sense” explanations for homophobia. It is a theory that guides our practice.’⁴ Homophobia, another learned journal says, ‘reflects three assumptions; that anti-gay prejudice is primarily a fear response; that it is irrational and dysfunctional for individuals that manifest it; that it is primarily an “individual aberration” rather than a reflection of cultural values.’⁵ This is now received wisdom. In every straight man there is a gay screaming to be let out.

‘The heterosexual norm is taken as Enemy Number One,’ says Anne.

‘Mere heterophobia,’ says Bill.

Collins’ dictionary defines homophobia as: ‘intense hatred or fear of homosexuals or homosexuality’. Thus to use the word ‘homophobia’ is to imply that the aversion that most straight males feel towards gays is a psychological disorder. The word is a description of the extreme – ‘intense fear’ and ‘hatred’ – and to employ it as a description of the average male’s reaction to homosexuality is absurd. His feelings are not of hatred, but of aversion. The aversion might include an element of disgust, but never of fear. Nor is it a psychological disorder, rather it is the normal straight male’s instinctive revulsion from the idea of same-sex relations. That reaction is innate, natural, so prejudice it is not.

You will note that this ‘latent homosexual’ explanation is described as common sense, not as a scientific finding – hardly surprising, for there has been too little research into the aversion that most men feel for homosexuality. But what research does exist suggests that straight men do not fear gays, nor do they fear the possibility of gayness within themselves. ‘Common sense’, indeed, suggests the very opposite: gays, as a group, are not perceived as threatening, and since most men are oblivious of any homosexual urges within themselves, why should they fear such urges? Fear, or phobia, does not seem to play any part in the average man’s dislike of gays. The bisexual explanation of homophobia might be ‘common sense’ to the gay lobby, but it also might be plain wrong.

Heterosexuality is the norm for sexual attraction. This is not to assume or imply that homosexuality is deviant. It too is natural. Although most Americans still believe that our sexual orientation is a matter of choice,⁶ it is not. But that is a society in which you are meant to be free to become what you want – not least when that want implies a moral choice. And where there’s a choice, one should choose to be upright: straight. There is a confusion here. Gayness is no more a matter of choice than being born American or Mexican, black or white.

A new explanation is required for the average man’s anti-gay attitude. And the word ‘average’ is used deliberately, for research reveals that a majority of heterosexuals do have negative attitudes towards homosexuals. Those attitudes range from mild distaste to the extremes described in the dictionary definition, but their widespread existence suggests that ‘homophobia’, far from being an ‘individual aberration’, is in fact a reflection of something more than cultural and biological values. But what values?

One study correlated the masculinity profiles of male college students with their attitudes towards homosexuals and discovered, unsurprisingly, that the most masculine students were the most anti-gay. This might suggest that those who argue that ‘macho’ men fear their feminine side are right, but the survey did not uncover that fear. Instead the ‘homophobic’ subjects complained of gay harassment. Gays were ‘getting too close’ or ‘brushing against my body’. Another complained he was being ‘checked out’. Such homosexual behaviour made 42% of heterosexuals move away.⁷ A common het...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: He’s Not Part One, Part Another: The bisexual fallacy
• CHAPTER TWO: Foodsex I: Perhaps he’s a rabbit
• CHAPTER THREE: Foodsex II: Where’s the beef?
• CHAPTER FOUR: Brainsex I: Bottom of the class
• CHAPTER FIVE: Brainsex II: The malady of boyhood
• CHAPTER SIX: Brainsex III: The neurological edge
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Extremes Are Not Rules: Top and tail at work
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Painting Him Green: He resists her dream
• CHAPTER NINE: Sex: His drive and her drive
• CHAPTER TEN: The Real New Man: Home truths
• References
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher