Transforming Men: : Changing Patterns of Dependency and Dominance in Gender Relations

Citation

Birks, S. (1998), "Transforming Men: : Changing Patterns of Dependency and Dominance in Gender Relations", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 25 No. 10, pp. 1572-1574. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.1998.25.10.1572.1

Transforming Men is a thought‐provoking but far‐fetched book. In the first paragraph Dench redefines the war between the sexes into one between competing strategies by women to mould men into “useful members of society” (p. xi). The backlash is thus a response by women objecting to the failure of feminism to achieve the desired results.

The book is also an attack on feminism, but from an unusual angle. “Men are, I suspect, always a problem” (p. xvi) says Dench, speculating that traditional methods of handling men might be more effective than the feminist alternatives. It is not that feminism paints too black a picture of men, but that men are even worse than feminists contend, “The case against feminism is male frailty, fecklessness and capacity for sheer obstructiveness” (p. 239).

His methodology for analysing the situation is explained: “I believe that adopting a fairy tale as framework for the discussion can bring us closer to traditional women’s perspectives” (p. xvii). Apparently fairy tales are primarily conveying women’s accumulated wisdom, although many classics of children’s literature (Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Treasure Island) have been written by men.

Bly chose Iron John, Dench chooses the Frog Prince. Dench’s woman is the princess, his man the frog. The woman/princess has to lower herself to transform the lowly frog/man into a useful member of society. She has to make sacrifices, he benefits. It is the wise older women who would persuade “princesses” to do this for the benefit of society. The princess’s kiss transforms the frog. Feminism has undermined this process. I wonder what accumulated wisdom is conveyed when the prince kisses Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty, and how Dench would explain Hansel’s responsible gathering of pebbles, the wicked stepmother and the witch who tempts the children with her gingerbread house (a far more subtle way to catch and eat children than that of the lumbering giant in Jack and the Beanstalk).

Dench has a very low opinion of men in comparison to women. Women bear the children. They need support and protection. They therefore have an interest in community. “Reciprocity is an elaboration of self‐interest” (p. 5). Dench’s men can manage alone, so they can be more selfish. They need only shallow, undemanding relationships. Women willingly take care of children, men have to be rewarded. A man can be domesticated by making him the head of the household. He gets special privileges, and there is “an unequal exchange rate in their favour” (p. 8).

Dench claims that: “… divorce and separation are neat ways for a man to shed his domestic responsibilities” (p. 14). He asserts that separated fathers are not contributing domestically. Dench fails to see the contribution made by non‐custodial parents, ignores the fact that they have to care for themselves, and does not look critically at the studies on relative contributions of men and women (which show men in a far more favourable light than feminists, and he, would have us believe). He also routinely ignores the importance of children to fathers, even suggesting that there is a problem determining how to make men emotionally responsible for their children (p. 16). Dench’s focus is primarily on restoring men’s provider role, commenting favourably on child support requirements and suggesting that men and women could satisfactorily have children by several sexual partners, simply ensuring that each man pays his share for his children. Presumably there are no birthdays, Christmasses, family holidays, etc., in his world.

Among the most unsettling aspects of Dench’s analysis are the assumptions about men and women. He suggests that men seek only short‐term opportunistic sex. Kingma (1993) suggests that, on the contrary, sex exposes men’s vulnerability as it is one of the few ways in which they are permitted to express emotion. Dench’s view is an example of the unspoken conspiracy which limits men and excuses their harsher treatment through a denial that they have feelings.

He also suggests that women’s methods of guidance and influence (“magic”) are beneficial. Pearson (1997) puts it another way:

… as soon as girls hone their verbal and social skills, at around ten or 11, they become aggressors of a different kind. They abandon physical aggression, even though their pre‐pubescent hormones are still no different than boys’, and adopt a new set of tactics: they bully, they name call, they set up and frame fellow kids. They become masters of indirection.

Indirect aggression, as the Finnish psychologist Kaj Bjorkqvist defines it, is “a kind of social manipulation: the aggressor manipulates others to attack the victim, or, by other means, makes use of the social structure in order to harm the target person, without being personally involved in the attack” (p. 17).

How much of feminism’s negative portrayal of men and its emphasis on women’s disadvantage and victimhood is actually indirect aggression against men, using the state as the instrument? How much of men’s gravitation to the fringes of society is due to banishment by women, including emotional distancing by their mothers as described by Kingma? Dench suggests that men would walk away from their children unless given special rewards. He should read the literature on parental alienation and the pain that fathers and children feel when the parenting relationship is obstructed by mothers. These actions by mothers have been described as emotional abuse of children. Dench is wrong to assign the moral high ground to women when there are those among them who would act in this way while fathers are denied a more responsible role.

While on the face of it Dench is criticising feminists, he adopts many of their beliefs and is merely questioning the viability of their methods. Perhaps he too is an instrument of indirect aggression.