Kristen Gyles | Who emasculated the men?

A woman once related a story to me of how, during the later stage of her pregnancy, she boarded a bus from Half Way Tree to Portmore and ended up standing the entire journey notwithstanding many men being seated on the bus. She, like many other women, was decrying the decline in the ‘quality’ of men nowadays. We have all at some point heard a testimonial like this one, and more than likely from a woman who was disappointed when her car broke down and she had to figure it out all on her own.

Another woman, perhaps in her 50s, explained her late arrival to a work-related meeting by lamenting how she ended up changing her car tyre by herself, right in the presence of two men in a residential area. They sat and watched her, perhaps because the television programming that morning wasn’t very exciting. She had insisted that she was not going to ask either for their help.

This is a topic that men and women appear to see from two different vantage points. Whenever these conversations come up, the men say the bid for equality killed chivalry and any sense of male responsibility, and the women say the death of male responsibility makes equality necessary for their survival.

There are a few key things that society conveniently ignores where gender roles are concerned:

1) Women have no choice but to learn traditional male-oriented skills if men cannot be depended on to perform these skills.

2) Many men cannot be depended on to perform these skills.

3) Gender roles cannot be alive and dead at the same time.

Let’s start with numbers one and two. Many women who have to get out their vehicles and push like there is no tomorrow when their cars need a jump start wrongfully assume that all the men sitting around are good-for-nothing and who have no concept of gentlemanly graces. That’ is not necessarily true. I genuinely believe that the upcoming generation of men (especially) doesn’t possess half the skills we assume they do.

Boys and girls today grow up doing relatively the same things and are taught relatively the same skills. The culture does put slightly more pressure on boys to learn skills of a certain nature, but that culture is dying gradually. No longer are mothers prioritising their daughters for cooking lessons and no longer are fathers leaving their daughters out of the change-the-tyre 101 lessons.

UNLIKELY TO DO THAT

And rightfully so. Parents who want the best for their children are unlikely to do that. Why? Because to leave Sue out of the car-maintenance lesson would mean she goes on the road, gets a flat tyre, and sits there waiting on help, which might just come in the form of a big white van, ready to pick her up and give her a free ride to an unknown location where she may or may not be found. And if little Johnny doesn’t learn how to cook, he may find himself spending more on fast food every month than rent.

Of note is that in today’s society, it is more socially acceptable (hypocritical or not) to teach girls to behave ‘like boys’ than it is to teach boys to behave ‘like girls’. This is partly because a staunch and rigid approach to gender roles is more likely to disadvantage the woman than the man.

The change in culture is pretty cyclical. Women begin learning more valuable life skills that will make them more self-sufficient. Then men start reasoning that they are no longer needed. And the more they are no longer needed is the more ‘wukless’ and undependable they become. And the more undependable they become, the fewer expectations there are for men to be any different from women. Instead, we reason that boys should learn the skills they need in order to survive and girls should do the same. Since boys and girls survive in the same ways, they end up learning the same skills.

But recognise that if today’s generation of kids, male and female, are being grown with the same skills and being taught the same things, they will make the same contributions to society and to the lives of those around them. A young man will, therefore, not necessarily know how to fix a car any better than a young woman.

Our expectations, on the other hand, are still stuck in the medieval era. If what we expect is dutiful young men who will climb the mango tree and swing from limb to limb like Tarzan, we will need to teach our boys that it is their job to climb the tree when the mangoes are ripe.

That brings us to number 3. Make up your mind, please. For your sanity and your children’s. A man who embraces gentlemanly qualities is attractive but is the unlikely outcome of a campaign to eradicate gender roles. And if we keep the gender roles, both genders will have roles. If we agree that women should be no more expected to iron the clothes or cook the dinner than the man, then the men should be no more expected to cut the grass or wash the car than the woman.

So do we want the roles? Yes or no?

- Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Email feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com.