Comment: After years of being deconstructed, desensitised and criticised Marie Murray believes it is time to redress the balance and celebrate men.
Men are magnificent. They grace the lives of women with their presence, their perspective, their protection and their love. They give to those they love the security of their attendance, the balance of their perception, the humour of their viewpoint, the audacity of their conviction, the strength of their bodies, the benefit of their skills, the angle o'f their intellect, the exhilaration of their individuality and the pure male energy that emanates from men.
To the ears of women few sounds can compete with the hearty laugh of men, few comic sketches with the quirkiness of male imagination, few decisions with the vigour of male verdict, few analyses with male assessments, few poems with the words with which men speak about their lives.
Yet few injustices can compete with the current ever increasing injustice in the construction of men, of masculinity and of manhood. It is time to challenge these descriptions of masculinity as a negative homogeneous and unchanging category.
Deficit defined masculinity, like media defined femininity diminishes men and women, sets them in competitive combat and reduces to a gender war their social roles, their heartfelt concerns, their cognitive distinctions, emotional expressions, their justifiable anger, their personal interactions, their complementary cohesion and their love for each other. It diminishes them in how they speak about each other. Like the fictional "The Female Man", it defines relationships as antagonistic rather than a shared challenge.
That challenge is how to be men and women together in the world today. The question is not what terrible traits lurk in men or in women but what expectations do men and women have of themselves and of each other? What social roles do they embrace or discard, what shared goals and aspirations, what injustices to each other and to themselves do they identify and defy and what unity lies in their fears?
Postmodern psychology increasingly understands that trait views of intrinsic individual differences must expand to recognition of the interactions between gender, class, race, society and the cultural context in which men and women live. The days of dichotomies are over. Relativity, Uncertainty Principle, Chaos Theory and Postmodernism have ended the era of absolute truths. But they have not yet rescued men from negative gendered attributions.
Men have been analysed and "therapised", constructed, deconstructed, neutralised, desensitised, sensitised and particularly, personally and harshly criticised. They bear the brunt of blame for patriarchal privilege: they carry ascriptions as abusers, rapists, plunderers, warmongers and perpetrators of violence.
The boy becoming a man finds himself the object of fear and of suspicion to women as he walks home alone. He is the subject of derision if he chooses macho male interpretations and of contempt if he opts for alternative definitions. He struggles with an oversimplified stagnant stereotype within which violence by males is portrayed as normative masculinity, as predator and terminator with poor impulse control, inadequate anger management, limited expressive language and restrictive emotional literacy.
Market forces in the interests of the sale of services portray men as domestically inept, socially untutored, emotionally moronic, globally irresponsible, irrepressibly corrupt and personally exploitative. These are outrageous definitions of the men whom women love. Because while most violence may statistically be male: most men are never violent. Violence is not an inevitable trait lurking in men it is a behaviour that is first learnt and later chosen by some people. The task for men and women together is to investigate the contexts in which violence occurs not to level gender accusations at each other.
Clinical experience reveals that few people are as strong as a strong woman or as gentle as a gentle man: that many men are as willing and as able as anyone to enter into respectful facilitated psychotherapeutic discussion about the dilemmas in their lives.
Men are neither afraid to feel nor feel afraid to express their feelings. They are not victims of the "despotism of fact". They do listen. They do talk. They form attachments, they will ask directions, they may be romantic, they read more than maps, they are not from Mars: they are of this earth, which many have farmed, tended, respected and resourced.
Men have worked for, worked with and loved women since the dawn of time and it is time to appreciate them. Many enrich the lives of women with their special humanity, their extraordinary vitality, their unique physique, their physical strength, their modern heroism, their unparalleled gentleness, their masculine energy and their exuberant love. They are our sons, our brothers, our uncles, our nephews, our grandfathers, our fathers, our husbands, our companions and our friends.
"Men" must not be abstracted from the men we know. They are much loved by women and it is time tell them so.