This hard-hitting editorial makes many of the points I’ve been making: the combination of feminism and the welfare state is making fathers a thing of the past. The UK is further along this path than we are, but we could go this route, if we aren’t careful.
Men from the employable and educated classes are still in strong demand among women. But much lower down the socioeconomic
scale, among the least privileged, men have become — or have come to seem — entirely optional. …
In a study presented to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the sociologist Geoff Dench argues from the evidence of British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983 that there is a growing number of such extended man-free families: “Three-generation lone-mother families — extended families without men — are developing a new family subculture which involves little paid work.” …
The problem with this new type of extended family, Dench says, is that it is not self-sustaining but tends to be parasitic on conventional families in the rest of society. In fact, it appears to lead inexorably to the nightmare of an unproductive dependent underclass.
Clearly one of the worst problems with such a subculture is that although it’s not self-sustaining it has a powerful tendency to replicate itself. A boy in such an environment who grows up without a father figure is much less likely — for many well documented reasons — to turn into the sort of young man a girl could see as a desirable husband. A girl who grows up without a father never learns how important a man could be in her own child’s life. She will not see her mother negotiating an adult relationship with a male companion, so she won’t know how to do it herself or imagine what she is missing. …
At a discussion of women and childcare at the CPS last week, a Conservative MP made the conventional suggestion that the workplace ought to be more feminised. Actually it is feminisation that is the problem; we have far too much of it already. Schools are feminised, run largely by women in ways that suit girls, not boys; exams have been feminised, and now girls do better in them; workplaces have been feminised; conversation and jokes have been feminised to sneer at testosterone-driven male aggression; and the entire welfare and benefits system has a bias against men. This is particularly hard on the poorest of men.What we need now in society and in family life is not feminisation, but a new masculinisation. Otherwise yet more men will become institutionally redundant.