The male backlash
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A Mensline counsellor takes another call.
Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones
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What has made the dominant sex feel like victims?
Paul Black is not the sort of bloke to take to the streets in protest. But this week he did something atypical: fuelled by intense feelings of frustration, he got in his car and made the long trip from Mulgrave to Canberra to attend a two-day conference of the Lone Fathers Association.
"I don't see myself as a radical, I'm not the sort who wants to go ripping out letterboxes or shouting slogans," says this new recruit to the men's movement. "But the inequalities that were there for women 20, 30 years ago are now there for men. The pendulum has swung from too many opportunities for men to too many opportunities for women."
Black has entered the organised men's movement along a well-worn path: relationship breakdown. There are up to 200 men's groups in Australia, according to estimates - and many could be called estranged fathers' groups. They bear names from Dads in Distress to the cuddly sounding Fatherhood Foundation, and typically attract men in midlife. While the groups claim a growing membership, the extent of their support is unknown. The Lone Fathers Association says it helps 30,000 men a year, but their paid-up membership is 9000 nationally. However, La Trobe University researcher Michael Flood says the number actively agitating in the men's movement would be no more than 2000.
What makes them remarkable is that they subvert the traditional paradigm of social activism in that they represent the interests of the dominant group in society. Or do they? The argument these men's groups mount, with growing political muscle, is that they are getting an unfair deal, not only when it comes to family law issues but in other areas such as men's health. There is a growing lobby for free prostate screening, boys' education - crystallised in a federal push for more male primary teachers - and even domestic violence.
Blokes in their 30s and 40s who are on low incomes and are not partnered are in a diabolical situation."
Bob Birrell, demographer
In Canberra, over two days of sometimes torrid testimonials, Black, 39, took heart from the shared experiences of men who, like him, had undergone unexpected separation from their spouses.
Two years ago, Black returned from work one evening to find his de facto partner had left home with their baby daughter.
"She was just six months old," he says forlornly. As he clutches a "showbag" stamped with the logo of the Child Support Agency (it contained pen, pad and instructive government literature), he reveals the source of his feeling of powerlessness: "I've only seen my daughter five times since then."
Back in session, Barry Williams, the president and founder of the Lone Fathers Association, prosecutes some of the familiar themes of the men's rights movement in a mild tone sometimes at odds with the strength of his rhetoric. "Both men and women are, in fact, equally likely to be perpetrators of violence in relationships, although women are somewhat more likely to be seriously injured," he declares.
He warns his membership to be on guard against "further development of an ideologically based domestic-violence industry funded by the taxpayer". "There is a very serious issue of discrimination here," he says.
It's these sorts of arguments that bother researcher Michael Flood about the growing influence of groups such as the Lone Fathers, a peak body formed 32 years ago around the time the Family Law Act was established. The group is now federally funded.
This week's conference attracted two federal cabinet ministers - Family Services Minister Kay Patterson and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock - to Wednesday's opening. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward spoke the next day.
Flood does not dismiss serious issues men contend with: old certainties have been swept away as women's roles have changed. He has researched the intensity of the loneliness felt by many men.
The loneliest men of all, a survey published this year concludes, are sole fathers rearing children. More generally, when males hit midlife they feel most isolated, especially if they live alone.
Yet Flood believes a more nuanced approach is needed than simply railing against domestic-violence programs.
"We need to address men's pain in these areas, but without blaming women or putting children at risk," he says. "Yes, men can now cry on TV, but the institutionalised power relations between and among men and women have hardly gone away."
Eva Cox, who was at the barricades as a founding member of the Women's Electoral Lobby, believes men's rights groups are making the mistake of using some of the oppositional "victim strategies" that women once deployed but which, in retrospect, did not necessarily serve them well.
"They are blaming a lot of what's going wrong on women for taking things away," she says. "But we are not running the world, sorry. Where are the female law partners? Where are the female senior surgeons? . . . If you are looking for men in primary schools, tip them all out of the principals' offices."
While citing the continuing disparity between men and women's pay - for every dollar men earn in full-time work, full-time women earn 85 cents - Cox is not unsympathetic to the plight of low-skilled men, many of whom have lost the opportunity to do their fathers' and grandfathers' jobs.
Economist Bob Gregory has tracked the impact of the decline in manufacturing on men's income. In 1982, about 500,000 men of working age were on welfare. Now, there are about a million men on benefits and the job boom over a period of apparently unprecedented prosperity has barely reached them.
Monash University demographer Bob Birrell, who conducted a study of the clients of the Child Support Agency - which has 90 per cent of Australia's separated parents on its register - concludes that most separated fathers come from the ranks of the poor and low-paid. "Marriage is closely associated with the resources men can bring into a relationship," he says.
In a separate study on partnering, Birrell found the greatest decline in partnering rates in Australia was among low-income men.
"Blokes in their 30s and 40s who are on low incomes and are not partnered are in a diabolical situation," he says.
Paul Black, who made the lonely journey back from Canberra yesterday, counts himself luckier than some of his contemporaries. He has a stable trade as a plumber, but the loss of his daughter and relationship has left him deeply confused.
"Towards the end, we were fighting about the housework," he says. "But I thought there were two roles there: she didn't work, so she was the homemaker and mother. I was supposed to be the provider and father."
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WE guess Barry Williams has to justify all of that government funding somehow. Barry we challenge you to provide 500 names of the 30,000 men that you have "helped". Is this like the 5 men a day that you stop from committing suicide??
We know that there are less than 2,000 men who are responsible for the Fathers Rights movement in Australia because we have their names. The creation of false identities are a deliberate attempt to fool the public into thinking there are more of them but they are definitley a very small minority group albeit very loud and aggressive (which is exactly why they lost their families in the first place we think). They are just playground bullies in mens clothing.
1 comment:
Gee, i would like to see the actual abuse to women and since the law says we have award wages where does the 85 % come in exactly. Women like yourself will consistently deny that men are treated like shite and removd from there own childs live for no reason. You will always come back with the myth of pay and violence and also the bull that men only want there children to stop child support payments. The invented rapes and nonsense such as if a man is on top it is rape. If you don't want sex then stop luring men to have sex with you then scream rape. I can prove that child support payment do not matter when i have more custody. You also know that dicriminative as it is if my child was 50 % my care and 50% my ex partners care, that i can not claim parenting pention because she already gets it. Where are your arguments for in best interests of the child when that arises. I guess your best interests that money just floats out of the skies and food will magically appear before your childs eyes. You are not for equality and never have been. You indite all men with the same accusations when you do not know any of us out here suffering at a feminist regime. You claim to be pro equality but no your not or equal would be equal and no less. There is pure evidence for this inequality but you refuse to see it and all the unequal practices you claim were dealt with long ago and are law. I get sick of hearing the crap about unfair pay when i myself never have earned what a woman earned and never been given preference in a better position, no matter what my skills are. Doesn't matter about me though does it and it is plain as day all the feminist bulll on newsagent shelves. In government laws and practices but you still deny because you are a hypocrite. Honestly you don't belong in anyones life so stop with the crap accusations about mens groups and start using our tax money to promote true equality. Your mind wouldn't do that though because you are so self centred that you only see what you want to see. Not what is true.You only see women as a superior race but deny it is happening because of inequality. All because you don't want it to roll back to equality for every person to be law. You only want your female counterparts to be of any importance but in the end i guess like so many of your stupid ideas, you would never see that if all this bull comes to light and men are deemed nothing then your useless little world will fall flat and all human life will be gone. Try living in a country where women don't have right and then see the truth about Australian men. You have no idea lady except for your own self centred ways. Stop trying to rule all our lives. We don't want you in it
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