Masculinity in the moral maze
How can we tackle male violence? Should we even frame the issue in that way?
On this week’s BBC Moral Maze, we discussed whether men were intrinsically toxic. This question has been in the air since the dreadful abduction and murder of Sarah Everard as she walked home one night recently in south London. To me, the very question is as absurdly offensive as asking “When did you stop beating your wife?” — indeed, it is in effect asking “When did you stop beating your wife?”as I observed in the run-round at the start of the programme.
We found ourselves grappling with such concepts as the “patriarchy,” “gendered differences,” “man-boxes,” “redeemed masculinity,” “othering” and the etiquette of personal pronouns. Are masculine attributes based in biology or are they “social constructs”? Can boys be guided towards the better angels of their nature by being told to discover their feminine side, or does that destroy their sense of sexual identity? Should gender differences be scrapped altogether?
Well, it was a journey.
My co-panellists were Anne McElvoy, Ash Sarkar and Matthew Taylor. Our witnesses were Tom Ross-Williams, actor and “gender equality activist”; journalist Madeleine Kearns; Dr Lucy Nicholas, Associate Professor of Sexuality and Gender Studies at Western Sydney university and author of The Persistence of Global Masculinism and Queer Post-Gender Ethics: the Shape of Selves to Come; and therapist Dr Andrew Smiler, author of Is Masculinity Toxic?
You can listen to the programme on the BBC website here.
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