VIEWPOINT
K. A. Javid
 
 

ONCE UPON A TIME  

Once there was a world when males and females were taught what was expected of them. Males earned the money. Females looked after the homes. Father brought home the flour and mother made the pakoras.

Think clearly what the male understands of this now. As their sperm count plummets across the European world, the modern male is ripped between dramatising like an old fashioned guy or a doll impersonator.

Today there are a vast number of cosmetics for males. There are magazines and television programmes devoted totally to male's health. From the nineties we have grown accustomed to the crumpled faces of men crying in public. Has something inside softened the hearts of men? Is the modern male as in touch with his emotions and as obsessed with his facial pores as females? Some of the males are only interested in examining the lumps, which belong to the likes of Pamela Anderson.

The choices facing males at present are between smiling in silly or affected ways and unreconstructed lout. That is no choice at all. Note that confusion among female's runs just as deep.

Females, rather state women, have been told for so long that they are morally obliged to have both a career and a family that anything less seems like settling for disaster.

The career minded woman who chooses not to bear children is made to feel unfulfilled. Yet the woman who decides to devote herself to her family is made to feel second-class. The populations of women who try to balance both are made to feel guilty.

The response from younger women to this situation has been an adjuration of femininity. But if women are free only to behave as badly as men, that would seem a curiously unacceptable sort of freedom.

We have striven so hard for equal pay, equal rights and even equal orgasms, that we have forgotten that there are other things in life apart from equality. We have forgotten that men and women are equal but different. Back in the 1960's the gender roles were equally defined. Then every Dad was a Mr. Right, he was given the automatic respect and his chapatti was on the table. The phrase "Wait till your father gets home" always meant something that even the worst behaved child feared. So think just how good the good old days were.

In many, the old man was a distinct, solitary figure, discouraged from the display
of emotion. As for the women, economic subservience meant that they were trapped in abusive and unhappy marriages.

But these were also the good old days when women ruled their homes in a way that would be unthinkable today. With the mother off at the office and her domestic duties taken over by hired help or "masies". In the good old days, a woman was the ALMIGI-ITY in an apron.

This all had to change - and yes it did. Many of the changes were good. Men became involved in parenting and women entered the workplace. But the end of the sexual apartheid brought its own problems. The old roles as breadwinner may have gone forever, but they have to be replaced.

Neither men nor women are free to be what they want to be. Men are still expected to work- how would you STARE at a father who wanted to stay at home with his children and let his wife to out to work. Women are still obliged to give birth. A man without a job or women without children are still considered incomplete. Men and women have all assumed extra responsibilities but the myth of having it all has become the messy reality as doing it all.

Is there no way back to the ways of our parents? Once men would kill and die for their country. But the manly virtues of courage and grace are more difficult to justify to the generations who never fought for their freedom.

A woman is not free to devote herself to her children. Society and friends conspire to make the best homemaker feel inferior to the worst typist. Yet the childless career woman might openly be despised. Feminism should have increased female options. In reality it has restricted them.

Girls with attitudes. Boys who worry about which moisturiser they should be using. Women who are hopelessly torn between home and work and men who cannot decide if they were cavemen where do we go from here?

A generation of empowered women should have bred a race of neutered males. But neither should it provoke men into adopting the manifestation of masculinity. The women who grew up with feminist rhetoric should realise that they have become slaves to its outmoded dogma.

Men and women should stop trying to resemble each other. We should remember that heterosexuality is a celebration of differences. The way forward is for men and women to realise that we are unfortunately still not that equal, but thankfully very different. You can fake an orgasm. But you cannot fake an erection. For that we should be grateful.