Book review: Stand By Your Manhood: A Game Changer for Modern Men
Peter Lloyd
Biteback
We can be rampantly promiscuous without being called ‘slags’ and we rarely have to worry about being groped on a packed bus. Nor, on the whole, are we expected to choose between raising children and pursuing a career.
But for all the advantages of being male, thunders Peter Lloyd in this angry, funny, provocative book, we are these days considered the ‘overrated, unfashionable gender’. Man-bashing, of which we are largely innocent victims, has become so lucrative that ‘people build entire careers on it’.
By ‘people’, it’s safe to assume he means the other gender. But Lloyd protects himself from charges of misogyny, using interviews with some clever, high-achieving women to construct a persuasive case, on the back of his opening three-word premise that ‘men are brilliant’, to suggest that our brilliance goes not merely unrewarded, but downright punished.
Men, he argues, suffer from sexism too, both casual and institutionalised. He cites the British Child Support Agency, so hopelessly skewed in favour of mothers that some men are forced to subsidise children that aren’t actually theirs, without any redress against so-called paternity fraud.
Nor are the famous exempt from the iniquities of the law. Bob Geldof tells Lloyd that he was very nearly bankrupted by the fight for access to his three daughters by Paula Yates.
‘The whole system is disgusting,’ says Geldof. ‘I remember a court clerk at my trial telling me: “Whatever you do, don’t say you love your children.” Family courts consider men who articulate this as extreme.” It was madness.’
For further evidence of a gender imbalance, Lloyd turns to the NHS. Prostate cancer kills four times more men than cervical cancer does women, yet still there is no official screening programme.
On average, men die five years earlier than women and are more vulnerable to nine of the ten deadliest killers, yet receive quantifiably worse care. A leading professor of genetic epidemiology assures Lloyd that Britain’s healthcare system actually discriminates against men.
Then there’s the workplace. We might throughout our lives be drip-fed the statistic that men are better-paid than women, but it is thoroughly misleading. Yes, there’s a wage gap, but it’s the difference between the average earnings of all men, and all women, not taking into account different occupations, or varying levels of expertise and experience.
The notion of a male-female pay disparity has been debunked by world-renowned economists, adds Lloyd, name-checking Harvard professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz – but not, alas, providing us with their respective salary details.
His barrage of indignation is at its most entertaining when it dives under the duvet. We hear all the time that men are crude, mechanical and goal-driven in bed, he says, whereas women prefer to operate more lovingly. That might in general be so, but it’s a result of physiological differences, not a clash of sensibilities.
He hears from a (female) psychologist, Dr Tara Palmatier, that: ‘This idea of innate “goodness” in women and innate “baseness” in men is one of the most emotionally destructive feminist fairy tales.’
But it endures, all the same. Lloyd notes that fully 38 percent of victims of domestic abuse are overlooked by most campaigning groups and refuge charities. Why? Because they are men. Despite what we’re constantly led to believe, domestic violence is not, it seems, overwhelmingly perpetrated by the male of the species. Lloyd claims validation from the Office for National Statistics, no less, in stating that in 2012/13, more men than women were abused by a spouse.
Ah, the spouse. With uncharacteristic reticence, Lloyd does not dwell on his own family set-up (though his acknowledgments credit the ‘kids and in-laws’) but he does have a right old downer on marriage. He doesn’t quote Homer Simpson, who observed: ‘Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail’. But he might have done.
For Lloyd, marriage is ‘the fraud of the rings’. In Britain the vast majority of divorces are filed by women, and no wonder, he asserts, given how indulgently they are treated by the courts.
He quotes the comedian Robin Williams, for whom divorce was so costly and traumatic that he described it as ‘ripping your heart out through your wallet’. And Lloyd wrote his book before Williams committed suicide. Is matrimony even a natural state for human beings, he further asks, declaring that the quantity and quality of sex invariably ‘dwindle’ after the exchange of vows.
Well, my own 22-year marriage has yielded three wonderful children and plenty of contentment, and fun, so on this particular issue I’m not about to accompany Lloyd to the barricades. Moreover, to condemn the institution because of what happens when it goes wrong seems gloomily cynical.
But it fits perfectly into his stimulating 300-page rant, and also provides him with what we might perhaps describe as some unlikely bedfellows. The illustrious presenter of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Dame Jenni Murray, famously once described marriage as ‘licensed prostitution’.
Like those extreme Left-wing and Right-wing idealogues whose views eventually coalesce, Lloyd is echoing one of the tenets of ultra-feminism; he just got there from an entirely different direction.
His book certainly offers plenty of food for thought. And if, to paraphrase Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, the fellow doth protest too much, methinks, then that is his prerogative as a polemicist. I can’t say I support his assertion, in a chapter memorably called The Politics Of The Penis, that men these days ‘are rated, denigrated and humiliated by their penises in every facet of life’. But maybe I’m just one of the lucky ones.
Certainly, his is an eloquent riposte to the decades of bad press that we chaps have had to endure, literally so in the case of all those women’s magazines that continually berate our inadequacies around the house, from the kitchen to the bedroom. Especially the bedroom. So, while I might stop short of burning my briefs, I am stirred by his rallying call for us to become ‘suffragents’.
After all, it’s unarguably true that men have become the derided sex. I was once at a dinner party where one woman scoffed at her husband for not being able to multi-task, and another insisted that hers certainly could, he could ‘poo and read at the same time’. ‘No,’ said the first, wearily, ‘you’ll find he’s just reading’.
Well, I’m with Lloyd, who reckons that in the fatherhood branch of manhood, men have to be ‘teacher, doctor, social worker, entertainer, banker, removal man, therapist, driver and mediator, for ever, without pay, while working full-time and being told to do “more round the home” by journalists with nannies’.
Yes! And then, in what little spare time we have, we switch on the TV and even in the advertising breaks we find dads being routinely ridiculed as irresponsible, feckless layabouts, claiming ‘man flu’ and otherwise whingeing. It’s not fair, I tell you. It’s just not fair.
Daily Mail