Tuesday,
May 06, 2008
Feminism Emasculates British Men -Who Lose
Interest in Sex, Go for Preening
Follow Up Flag: Follow up
Flag Status: Red
The
ANNOTICO Report
Tears Before Bedtime for Preening Men
Telegraph.co.uk
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By Andrew O
May 6, 2008
Male vanity has a lot to answer
for. It can claim credit for every great conflict in history and most of the
intractable problems of today. Yet these facts shouldn
It appears, in Britain at least, that the masculine ego has never had it so bad, and male blubbing can now be considered something of a national pastime, with men forgoing the football field and the public bar in droves to be more completely in company with their inner turmoil. The value of manly men has been forgotten. Dismissed, even.
· When evidence is called for on these matters, one can immediately point to two new, great sources of male hysteria: recent figures suggest that the libido of the average British man is in freefall while, at the same time, the male cosmetics industry is enjoying a boom.
It is not that men can
For years, women have understood how to improve their looks as a way of making themselves feel better about themselves. Men have now learnt that lesson - so much so that in the past decade the sales of male grooming products have leapt by 30 per cent to over #800 million a year.
The traditional picture of the British man is being remade. Until recently (after a slow start mired in shyness and English reticence) he was considered a laddish, lusty entity - keen on Page Three girls, saucy postcards and blue jokes.
If the French had a bigger name for romance and the Italians more of a reputation for sexual dedication, British men were viewed as being more interested in sex as a key to happiness.
But not any
more. Not if you look at the
figures. One survey in a men
It would be too easy to put this down to the "am I bothered?" culture of New Labour Britain. There is a certain ennui, or malaise, or some other exotic-sounding dullness in the male spirit, but it becomes all the more interesting when viewed next to this exponential rise in grooming.
Like all great leaps in personal poofery, the habits of bronzing and plucking and exfoliating and moisturising were instituted by the British working classes. In some ways, it was ever thus.
My father
The new narcissism is a response
to something altered in the air of British life. Men
There can be no doubt that men,
more than ever, are subject to the kind of harassment that has defined women
And surely that
Their households are no longer exclusively set up to gratify their egos, which is good news for women and better news for children but bad news for men who still believe they must be kings of their castles to feel happy.
It may be hard to pity men in
circumstances such as these, for feminism (whatever else it did or didn
But for many men the happy process of feminisation is indistinguishable from emasculation, and the confusion has turned them inwards, and made them turn their backs when the lights go out.
I recently spent some time
talking to young British and American soldiers who had served in
I thought about it afterwards.
The men weren
I wasn
I don
To some extent, they had a kind
of self-consciousness about their manhood that might have seemed foreign to
their fathers. And I don
I imagined they would soon
pack up their grooming products and return to
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