I saw a woman on the street today wearing a t-shirt that brazenly claimed ‘Men Are Stupid’ in giant red letters. I watched her for a few seconds, secretly praying that she’d turn around so I could confront her about the slogan so blatant and unflinching in its sexism it would have had her sputtering with rage had it been aimed at her. Needless to say, she didn’t, and had she actually turned to face me, I wouldn't have known where to start. Attribute that to my apparent ‘stupidity'.
This brief encounter - or rather, passing - got me thinking. Is this really what women fought for, and still fight for today? Some Orwellian notion of equality whereby women are decidedly more equal than men? Were they waiting to turn the knives back on us? Do they see this as harmless, petty point-scoring? No. I don’t think it is.
Yet the slogan on the t-shirt disturbs me. There it was, brandished across her back as if she intended it solely for my eyes. I tried to imagine what would have happened had I worn the t-shirt, the slogan becoming ‘Women Are Stupid’ instead of its misandric equivalent. I’d have had a few funny looks, possibly a few back-pats from the more squalid members of the male gender, and an embattled feminist from the local rag would doubtless have run a story on the inherent misogyny in the fashion industry.
This particular slogan, however, received no such reaction. I see these anti-men statements everywhere, worn proudly and with total conviction. That’s the scariest part. There are even entire businesses set up solely to peddle the shameless idea that all men are stupid, ineffectual, idle and barbaric.
The next time you’re wandering through a garden center or a post office, take a look at the mugs, the novelty fridge magnets, the numerous badges and stickers that adorn many rucksacks and lunch boxes. Slogans such as ‘some mornings I wake up stupid. Other mornings I let him sleep’, or ‘all men care about is the size of my tits’, or ‘women first; men second.’ Then there's my personal favourite, 'Chicks Rule!'
Sometimes I despair and actually wonder whether the women who buy these novelty items actually believe what the slogans tell them. If they do, in fact, believe that all men are constantly staring at their breasts, or, indeed, that all men are stupid, then perhaps it’s time to temper equality with education.
Take the numerous TV sitcoms for instance. There’s the drug-addled, ineffectual father in Shameless; the hapless doctor in My Family; and the painfully idle dad in Outnumbered.
In film we have John Cusack’s character in the recent disaster movie 2012 - where it takes a global catastrophe to get him to give a shit about his children. There’s also Jim Carey’s haphazard lawyer in Liar, Liar, and how can we forget the numerous embodiments of ‘male’ in the horror genre, all braun and no brains, who are almost always responsible for any mishap or untimely murder.
On the other hand, women are constantly - and rightly, I might add - depicted as strong, ambitious, determined, funny, heroic and purposeful. They are always overcoming some life-changing obstacle or defying the very laws of the Universe to better themselves.
Why can’t this also be true for men? Why is my gender portrayed as dumb, stupid, lazy and lacking in any common sense? Why am I always shown to be responsible for fractured families or tear-away children? Where did gender equality go wrong?
Feminists have an answer that isn’t really an answer at all. At least not in the sense that it actually solves anything. They start by saying that contempt for men doesn't exist, and that all sexism stems from misogyny.
Nice try, but it doesn't quite work that way. They then say that such slogans and derogatory depictions are all said and made with a knowing wink - ‘they’re ironic’, apparently. But hold on for just a minute. If the kinds of jokes aimed at black people in 70’s sitcom Love Thy Neighbour appeared on our screens now, there would rightly be outrage.
Take a look at the glossy magazines today and you’ll find more glaring evidence of inverse sexism. We've got ‘Heat’ for instance, and their seedy ‘Torso of the Week’ page, where some impossible Adonis from the world of showbiz is lauded simply for being sexually appealing.
When the same thing happens with a woman, there are heated feminist conversations on overt sexualization, the unfair representation of an entire gender, and female exploitation. ‘Let’s focus on her education’, some may say. Or ‘there’s more to her than her looks.’ Quite right. But to see a man ogling a woman appears to be far more disturbing than to see a woman ogling a man. Heaven knows why.
Of course, just as the size-zero debate has provoked a storm about body image, this apparent female obsession with being able to get away with staring at a man’s perfectly toned arse without being held accountable must also be seen as an attack on the male form.
Larger women can proudly declare that they’re 'curvy', or ‘fiercely real’. Can men declare the same thing? Do we have magazines dedicated to your average man? Do we have internationally-renowned designers willing to take us and our beer-bellies on to the catwalk? No. In the precarious world of the glossy magazine, men are either massively successful and sexually competent Gods, or they're ineffectual slobs deserving of ridicule. And oh are they ridiculed!
Sadly, the double standards don’t stop there. You don’t need to tune in to watch a full episode of Loose Women to see men shown as gormless, dimwitted half-brains anymore. Now you can catch your daily dose of ‘female chauvinism’ in the advert breaks - bite-sized misandry for the masses.
Look at the advert for Feminax. A woman sits on the edge of a sofa with her husband, watching the TV. She looks over at him, and he’s fat, ginger, balding and picking his nose. As he pricks his face up in to a dog-like snarl, his wife literally ejects him from the sofa. The tag-line is this: ”If only getting rid of all pains was this easy.’
Then there’s the infamous advert for Oven Pride, where inverse sexism takes it up a notch. In it, a sour-faced woman glares at her husband as he tries to clean an oven. He then faces the camera, gurning and spluttering as he struggles to will his brain in to action. The female narrator giggles: ”Oven Pride, so easy even a man could do it.”
A staggering 673 people wrote in to complain about the advert. Given that level of action, a ban seemed imminent. Not so. The Advertising Agencies Watchdog said the advert was ‘intended to be humorous and not likely to cause widespread offense.’ One senior executive said that ‘all women had something in that wife they could identify with. It wasn’t sexist at all.’
Where to start? The blanket generalization that all women are chundering battle-axes intent on emasculating their husbands to within an inch of their sorry little lives, or the clueless denial of explicit sexism in an advert intended ‘to be funny’? Let’s turn the tables, and imagine we’re selling corned beef. The advert would feature Wayne Rooney, stamping on a prostitute's back whilst screaming ‘Make me a sandwich, bitch!’ in her world-weary, tear-stained face. The male narrator then cheerfully pipes in over Jay Z's '99 Problems': ”Corned Beef, so good it’ll have that lowly dog daring to taste gender equality in the air.” Where’s you humor and irony now?
All of this - which can only be boiled down to misandry, the mass spreading of contempt for men - confuses me greatly. The feminists from the 70’s argued that if you portrayed a gender as feckless and stupid you undermined their aspirations and limited their opportunities. You made them good for one thing only.
I dare say that this has happened to men today. In classrooms, it is a proven fact that teachers spend far more time tutoring female pupils than male pupils, and male examination scores have plummeted as a result. Female teachers believe underachieving male pupils are ‘lost causes’ and are more likely to be disruptive in class.
Then we have to face up to the effects of misandric advertising. I’m sure we will all want our eventual sons and daughters to have father figures they can look up to and respect, but all they’re going to see on the television are infantile specimens of little worth.
An Oxford University study that followed 17,000 children from 1968 found that an involved father meant they were far less likely to break the law or suffer mental illness later in life. 5-7 year-olds who had close bonds with a father figure had significantly higher educational attainment by the time they hit 20 than those who did not.
Yet despite this evidence that clearly displays the benefit of an active father we are allowing our children to grow up hating men. Young boys are often encouraged to fight and engage in rough-and-tumble behaviour because infantile violence is seen as a predominantly ‘male’ phenomena. Young girls are frequently told that they’re smarter than their male peers, in an ‘ironic’ way, of course. They’re also taught from a very young age to be wary of men.
Men are seen by parents with small girls as destroyers of innocence and fragility. Like bulls in china shops, men clumsily race from pillar to post, shagging everything with a pair of tits and then discarding girls like dirty underwear. As a result, many girls grow up resenting and even fearing men, without actually knowing why. Of course, some men are worthy of caution. As are some women. But if it is indeed equality to tar all men with the same dirty brush, then I despair.
We’re actively teaching our children to distrust and dislike men, whether they’re watching John Cusack in 2012 ignoring his children, or Frank from Shameless spending his children’s pocket money on drugs which he then smokes in front of them, or the Neanerthalish imbeciles in the WKD advert, who steal, play pranks and fart in each other's faces.
Now this isn’t all to say that this hasn’t been done a thousand times over to women. It has, and both men and women alike have fought endlessly to stop it. Women are still judged on the basis of their looks; women are still the victims of a horrendous pay-gap in most professions; and women are stereotyped just as chronically as men.
Indeed, what disturbs me isn’t the fact that the roles appear to have been reversed - I like to think I’m a little bit more logical than the majority of the ‘what about the men?’ brigade - it’s the fact that no-one is bothering to fight the male corner. It isn’t even seen as a battle worth fighting.
The majority of people in Britain today are totally oblivious to the blatant misandry men are facing. Many don't even know what the word means! They assume that men can simply suck it up and move on. I bet the countless fathers - who have been dismayed, shocked and appalled whilst watching men just like them flounder around like primitive animals in the aforementioned shows, films and adverts - would argue to the contrary.
It is these men who suffer when their children look to the television to see father figures portrayed as bumbling failures and absent monsters. It is these men who suffer when entire advertising campaigns are dedicated to making them look small, stupid and child-like. It is these men who suffer when they see impossible images of ‘male perfection’ they can never hope to emulate.
And that brings me back to the woman wearing the disgusting t-shirt, who I guess I wrote this for, as the response I would have given had I the inclination. Not all men are stupid. We all have our moments, but I question the intellectual capacity of someone who can proudly embellish a downright lie across her back.