A rchive Date
[ 23-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/byfield.html
Women are powerful, men gutless
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun
March 23, 2003
The United States went to war last week without France as an ally, something it has practically never done in its entire history. From its 18th century Revolutionary War onward through the War of 1812, two world wars, Korea and the Gulf War, France has always been an American ally. But not this time. So what has changed?
Not the United States so much as France, I think. True, France has heavy investments in Iraqi oil, but one suspects the explanation runs deeper than this, that there has been a fundamental change in France itself.
It's noteworthy that just such a transformation was described this month in the feminist magazine Elle, which marked International Women's Day with a study of modern France's manhood. It portrays a hapless male population that couldn't go to war with anybody.
"French masculinity is in crisis," says Elle. "There is no longer a model for building a masculine identity; men no longer exists."
It describes what it calls three "generations" of men:
- "Wise married men." They are 45 to 55, guilty about male domination, afraid of being rejected as replaceable "throw-aways." They characteristically capitulate to women as the dominant half of the couple.
- Bitter, complaining divorced men, 35 to 45, who spend time in the kitchen while women shop in designer stores. They search for women of another culture willing to submit to male domination.
- Co-operative married men, 25 to 35, whom it calls the "new eunuchs," who set virility aside for a conflict-free life in a matriarchal family.
"Men of all generations are suffering," says Elle. Having been offered since the '60s a series of unattractive role models - Golden Boy, House Husband, Gay and Rambo - they "feel diminished, devalued, in a society where things feminine are perceived as positive and all-powerful values."
I find this altogether believable. It's the deserved and predictable fate of the males of the '60s generation. I notice also that they don't have a description of my own male generation- i.e., of us 70-year-olds and up - we who continue to boss, dominate, oppress and otherwise abuse our downtrodden 70-and-up women.
Elle has omitted the other half of the story. France has another problem. As in every western European country, the birthrate of its caucasian population, meaning the part that was once Christian, has dropped to such a dismal level that by 2025 France will be a very different country.
The immigrants pouring in from North Africa and the Middle East, who still have children in large numbers and who do not subscribe to Elle or anything it stands for, and who show no inclination whatever of ever doing so, will form a majority of the nation. In other words, Elle is not describing French manhood. It is describing only part of it. The other part, the rapidly expanding immigrant part, doesn't fit any of these categories.
It's ironic that in the same week this description of French manhood came out, the government of Quebec announced new measures to bolster the province's birth rate, which is now the lowest in Canada.
Quebecers who have a child within five years of finishing college are being offered a 50% refund on student loans. Young couples are also offered an interest-free $5,000 government loan for the purchase of their first home.
It won't work, however, not if the experience of western European countries means anything. Every European effort to bribe women into having children has failed. An editorial in The Montreal Gazette last week blames the dismal birth rate on economics. Quebec couples won't have kids because the Quebec economy is too unstable, they fear. However, Europe has the same birthrate problem and its economy has never been better.
Obviously the real explanation is the one implicit in the Elle article. The New Woman is powerful because the New Woman is childless and the New Man is gutless.
It's hard to see a great future for such a society.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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