ARE MEN OBSOLETE? (Ebury Press, £6.99)
A response to a published version of the Munk debate held in Toronto on Dec. 15, 2013, with Hanna Rosin and Maureen Dowd speaking for, and Camille Paglia and Caitlin Moran against, the motion that men are ‘obsolete’.
Caitlin Moran can be amusing, but her general attitude to the world is abysmally optimistic. She’s so thrilled with the ‘kaleidoscopic, dizzying wonder of everything’, and so devoted to the feminism-lite notion of ‘equality’, she can’t see the urgent need to restrain men and promote women before it’s too late. She seems to envision instead some kind of vast utopian future for humanity, and the environment. This is a surprising stance to take since, unless we do something NOW, there will BE no environment, or no habitable one, and humanity and all its accomplishments, be they male or female, will be consigned to the solar system’s trashcan. Is Moran unaware of the atom bomb, or the Industrial Revolution? Where in hell is this rosy future going to come from, if we can’t find a way to contain men and their sorrier, anti-life impulses? She also keeps talking about 100,000 years of male rule, but it is altogether more likely that they have only held such sway for about 5,000 years, during which they’ve done incredible damage. Patriarchy is a temporary and failed system that needs immediate reversal.
Camille Paglia meanwhile has the hots for Hitchcock and Rhett Butler, and can’t stop talking about construction workers and their pickup trucks – or about herself. Her self-referencing is unstoppable, but her obsession with blue-collar work is obscene. Telling men to keep on laying pipes and bricks and reveling in masculinity is no better than telling women, in the ’50s, to stay home with the kids. ‘I’ve studied the fate of Rome for my entire life’, she informs us. As a result, she fears that a more pro-female society will not be militaristic enough to defend itself against barbarians. So I guess we’re stuck with Rhett Butler?
Maureen Dowd doesn’t say enough, perhaps because the debate soon takes such a humourless tone. Her speciality – Washington politics – also narrows her scope. Better in the pre-debate interview, when asked what men should be doing, she says men should just do what women tell them to do.
Hanna Rosin seems the most effective debater, sticking to the point and rounding things up well enough to procure a winning vote-swing amongst the audience at the end. But she too does not go far enough. She wants the crisis in masculinity addressed. Huh?! This is NOT our biggest problem. What we need to do is concentrate on the crisis of female poverty, female impediments; the crisis of climate change, caused by men who seemingly will not fix it; the crisis of male-run religions that discriminate against women and against other religions. (Let’s just get rid of religion all together. It serves no useful purpose.) Rosin was forceful, but not angry enough.
It’s time to GET MAD.
LE
March 31, 2015
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