Berlin Zeitgeist

Let’s forget for a moment the debate on the wage gap between women and men and the various observations of gender inequality made by feminists. A handful of examples seem to indicate that men’s social situation is more dramatic than that of women. Indeed, the variables presented below are in most countries of the world all overwhelmingly male-dominated:

• victims of road accidents
• suicides
• school dropouts
• shortest life expectancy
• workplace death
• imprisonment rate

It is important to note that there is now a community of men speaking out through various organizations such as the Pick Up Artists, Warrior Week participants, or the Masculine Pro Active, all advocating one same thing – Masculinism to face a new adversity of men in a world of women. As the phenomenon exists in many parts of the world (Eastern Europe, South Korea, India, Israel, Japan or the United States), I will try to dissect it in the light of my French and American legal knowledge.

Since the 1990s and following the consequences of a radical feminist wave that went beyond the borders of the United States, a weakening of men’s rights can be observed — or at least it can be acknowledged they are not listened to as much as their female fellows on some subjects:

• Alternating child custody in the case of divorce is often refused for reasons that tend to alienate the father (distance between home and school, excessive overtime, alcohol consumption, etc.).
• Biological fathers in the United States do not have the means to decide anything about their child’s future. The mother can choose to have her child adopted without validation from the biological father.
• The Duluth model applied in the United States since 2006 to rehabilitate aggressors following domestic violence integrates a fundamental flaw by considering that only men can be guilty of domestic violence.
• Foster homes and helplines for beaten men have disappeared in France and in many other countries.
• In France the paternity test is almost illegal if the mother refuses.

It is obvious that the biological relationship to “child production” — a term used by a major branch of today’s feminists — is and will remain unequal between the two genders. One of the two parents is physically and economically impacted over time from the moment of conception, while the other is either not impacted or only secondarily during exercise of parenthood.

Giving a woman the right to have an abortion if she so wishes, without asking her husband’s opinion, is certainly unequal at first sight with regards to the other parent. But it is in fact quite logical since the child in the legal sense of the term does not exist outside the pocket belonging to the mother as long as the birth has not taken place. That is why in most societies the child is only recognized by its parents at birth.

It is therefore not possible to establish identical rules applying to both sexes.

But the law as it exists today regarding paternity has not changed since the last 1970s advances where maximum rights were given to the mother in order to compensate for the pre-war patriarchal policies. Thus, men in France are still not entitled to more than 11 days of paternity leave. Thus, any woman who has chosen to have a child on her own can assert her right to alimony, what is known as an “action aux fins des subsides” in France, from a father who has not recognized the child. Alternating custody only concerned 12% of children with divorced parents in 2010.

However, solutions do exist and are already taking place in Northern European countries: in Denmark, 32 of the 52 weeks of parental leave can be shared between the mother and father. In Sweden the father has up to 3 months leave.
We could make alternating custody a basic principle from which the judge could derogate only on a case-by-case basis. Fathers’ trade union rights could also be given more attention.
Such decisions have not been taken on the American continent or in Western Europe, and one can indeed wonder whether such a movement might or not be beneficial to men’s rights to full parenthood and to a better listening to their vulnerability.
However, we must be careful with the argument of masculinism, which is certainly not to be taken lightly, but must be relocated in a historical and political context.

Indeed, masculinism wants to blow the whistle about a deleterious state of the masculine condition in the face of an ever-increasing popularity of feminism which is reducing or even preventing the expression of their own stream of ideas.

They point to several signs of this male distress, cited in Cassie Jaye’s documentary The Red Pill: percentage of road accident victims, suicide rate, percentage of students leaving school, probability of autism, deaths at work, imprisonment rate…see table below:

However, it is necessary to put these elements into context in order to better understand them.

• Deaths on the job

The percentage of men who die on the job is huge compared to women. This number has an essentially historical explanation.
A century ago, women were not allowed to do material handling work or drive heavy goods vehicles. The Vichy law promulgated on 11 October 1940 in France excluded even married women over 50 years of age in both the public and private sectors. The status of female farmer was only recognised in 1965 although women had been farmers for a very long time, which did not encourage them to set up their own farms without marital guardianship.
The law on non-discrimination in recruitment wasn’t enacted until 1975, so before that time women had not been employed in the metal industry or in foundries. Meanwhile in the United States the first union for women workers was formed only in 1974.
Since most of the deaths at work occur on construction sites and in material handling [1], women are only marginally affected since they are not represented in these careers.

• 80% of suicides are committed by men

This figure is indeed very alarming. It should be noted that suicide attempts are twenty times higher than the number of suicides among women because they use firearms and hanging much less, and are therefore more likely to survive [2].
If we study the total number of suicides in France of 10,700 per year and subtract the share of male suicides, we obtain 2,675 female suicides. Let’s then multiply this figure by 20 to consider 1 successful attempt for every 19 unsuccessful attempts and we get 53,000 women make one attempt per year, i.e. twice as many as men.
This difference seems to underline the fact that women use less frank means, even though they are much more likely to attempt suicide. This could signal a form of hope in recovery, unlike men who would be more confident in their decisions. This allows us to evoke the difficulties of male socialization that can lead to dramatic consequences be we will discuss this later.

• Higher education

More men than women on the street, more school dropouts for men… indeed, women have tended in recent decades to do better in school through to higher education (except in math) and to die less on the street. Specialists :

• Quebec researcher Egide Royer, author of Pour la réussite des garçons à l’école (School and Behaviour, 2010), has shown that reading is one of the points that most differentiates male and female performance. However, it is also a major factor in school failure. Most of the boys surveyed consider reading to be a female activity and will therefore not be attracted to it.
• Boys who are not satisfied with their studies tend to drop out, while girls make up their minds or try to avoid future problems; in France, for example, twice as many women as men receive the minimum wage.
• The OECD estimates that boys in their studies are less “mature” than girls and less able to assess the urgency of anticipation. [3]

But these trends are reversed in the seven years following their exit from the education system, since twice as many women as men are unemployed for long periods, and 13% fewer of them obtain permanent contracts. According to the OECD, men eventually make up for their backwardness “both in the workplace and in their personal experience”.

Also if fewer women die on the streets even though 40% of the homeless population is female (in France), it is also because they die younger — the average age of homeless women who die between 2013 and 2018 is 45.6 years, compared with 49.7 years for homeless men — that they are subject to gender-based violence and that in 3 out of 10 cases children are with them. They are therefore more often placed in shelters and as a result leave the network of the “Collectif des morts de la rue” [organization counting dead people in the street in France]. The figures are therefore underestimates and it won’t be easy to know the real ones[3bis].

• Prison rate

Let us face it: while women face shorter sentences for the same offence, they are much less likely to be sentenced in absolute terms. See table below:

All ages combined, except under 13 years of age, as the figures are not statistically significant is the share of men always at least 80% of homicides, reaching 92% between 18 and 29 years of age.
Secondly, this leniency of the courts towards women is partly based on three factors:

• the nature of the offences committed, which are often less violent than those of men.
• the complexity of the case, approximated by the lower number of offences
• the offender’s offending past, which is often non-existent or less severe for women

I strongly advise you to read the French Justice study on this subject, which explains why sentences are often less severe [4].
We could also address the subject of homicides, since those committed by women against men represent 8% of all homicides. One could think that these murders follow the same logic regardless of gender, i.e. mate guarding gone wrong. However according to Martin Mary, professor emeritus of psychology, neuroscience and behavior at McMaster University who wrote Homicide in 1989, these murders committed by women are mostly the result of self-defence behaviour in the face of a violent male partner, in other words, self-defence of a woman subjected to prolonged violence and trying to get out of her husband’s grip. Mate-guarding behaviour is also rejected by two other arguments:

• men are on average 20% bigger and stronger than women and have the ability to retaliate in the event of an attack, which would make this behaviour very costly for women.
• Women do not have the problem of men’s assurance of paternity, they are sure that they are the biological mother of the child they are raising. Therefore, their partner’s need for sexual fidelity is biologically less.[4bis]
• Women live longer than men

Until recently, there was no exception to this seemingly genetic rule that women have an advantage because they live longer than men. This has long been true, however, this gap is narrowing in countries where men and women have increasingly similar consumption practices. This is demonstrated by this INSEE study, which shows that since 1994, the gap in life expectancy between men and women has decreased by three points.

For example, Swiss men now have almost the same life expectancy as women with the decrease of cardiovascular diseases caused by smoking and poor diet, as well as cancer diseases [5][6].

Thus, if the claims of masculinists represent a reality that must absolutely be remedied, it is important to look at the reality behind the statistics and not to jump to hasty conclusions.

Inthis light, how can we explain such a misunderstanding between the feminist and masculinist currents?

The two currents seem to want the same thing: equality in parenthood, recognition of male vulnerability, improvement of living conditions for men on the street, no rejection of men relying on their girlfriend’s income to raise their children…
But they are unfortunately only representative of a partial reality. If one asks ordinary woman and man if they are concerned about these respective claims, the answer is likely to be no.
Indeed, there are limits to the achievement of such a world, and they exist in both sexes.

• On the one hand, there is a sexist discourse among most of these men which suggests that although unfortunate in this situation, masculinists have difficulty projecting themselves in different values. As proof of this, I would like to cite the speeches of Alain Soral, a well-known representative of this intellectual current in France, for whom:

“The macho is a man who respects his mother, protects his wife and takes care of his children.”

The term “macho” or male chauvinist is used here in a truism. We might as well say that drinking milk is also drinking water. Certainly water is a component of milk, but that is not its primary definition. The primary definition of a macho is above all a man whose belief is that women are physically and intellectually inferior to men. Then, like any self-respecting human being, the macho is, eventually, a man who respects his mother, protects his wife and takes care of his children. With this sophism Soral wants to demonstrate that the macho is still necessary to our society, that he alone is capable of respecting the female members of his family, and dismisses the idea that masculinists wish to put an end to this figure of patriarchy. Alain Soral may be a very controversial person, this sentence illustrates very well the whole masculinist ideology which was spread in 2,5 million copies with Neil Strauss’s The Game in 2005.

Same with the words of Gavin McInnes, an American masculinist known from TV shows, who had declared:

“Women having less salary is God’s nature’s way of saying : women are feeling better at home” [7]

This fails to recognize the difficulties women face in negotiating their own wages, in asserting the quality of their work despite future pregnancies, or to work full time when they are not entitled to a place at a nursery.

His opinion is that while men would love to be free of the injunction to be the only one to bring money to the household, that is not what women seem to want.

• That being said, women are not innocent when it comes to changing the world order. Indeed, feminists tend to want to represent all women with an argument only a part of them are agreeing to. Thus according to a survey of more than 64,000 women in several countries around the world, money in a spouse’s bank account is important to more than 59% of them in Japan, Mexico and the United States. Moreover, one of the primary criteria that makes men attractive to women is still a size larger than theirs. This expectation goes completely against the feminists’ argument that women want to be financially independent and no longer expect the physical protection of their spouses. It thus perpetuates the injunctions on men to be attractive.

• Finally, men themselves have difficulty acknowledging their vulnerability. For example, many of them note the lack of reception facilities for beaten men in the United States. But why hasn’t any man started helping beaten men? Why was the only shelter for those in the United States created by a woman?

These men do not seem to identify the real complication in the fact that a man who is beaten by his wife hides it from others. Bleach burns, punches, slaps or insults are all ways women use to humiliate and dominate others. When we do not talk about rape by erection or penetration without consent. According to “SOS hommes battus” (French organism), out of 100 men assaulted, 10 lay down handrails and 1 files a complaint. For similar acts, 10 women out of 100 file a complaint.

The figures for women who dare to speak out are already very low compared to the actual number of assaults. However, men are ten times less likely to talk about their status as victims.

Similarly, in many cases of familicides, psychoanalysis reports a loss of control over areas considered “male” by the man who perpetrated the murder of his family. A desire and a sense of entitlement to control — especially over finances and the family unit — is a common denominator in many cases. The disruption of the elements making up his gender identity seem to generate a profound disturbance in the murderer [9].
It seems, therefore, that a man’s impotence, however real it may be, is a taboo, and that he may end up killing in order not to feel it.

We should admit that in general, men and women are not ready to empathize with vulnerable men. As shown in this ManKind Initiative educational advertisement featuring a man and a woman alternately victims of violence, the reactions of passers-by in the street are symbolic: they intervene towards the assaulted woman while laughing at the beaten man.

Masculinism has emerged as a reaction to recent feminist movements which have prevented certain actions in the direction of gender equality. But it is also the product of a society in which men are not prepared to relinquish a protective and powerful role. The ultimate will of masculinists, however, is the same as that of feminists: to put an end to men’s supposedly invulnerability, and to ensure that women take what is due to them. It also implies being prepared to work in a physically difficult job, to leave their child to the father if the law so decides, and to have slightly different expectations of the ideal man.
Is this really possible?

Feminism

Masculinism