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Question:

I keep reading that the future belongs to women. As a man, I feel this is disheartening, but is it true?

Answer:

The future is an unmapped land, and any prediction about it is highly speculative. However, we do see trends that suggest men are falling behind in establishing the legitimacy as leaders and shapers for the new millennium. During this century, women have improved their position, especially within the Western culture, in political, human rights, health care, property rights and career areas.

While the men's movement is growing, men seem, according to researchers, to be relatively disorganized and have yet to grasp the vision for mutual help and support and the furtherance of male self-awareness. Traditional physical strength and politico-economic control has shifted to approximately a midpoint position between the sexes, as women have become professionalized and achieved educational parity with men.

Women have achieved freedom from the exclusively domestic and parental roles of the past, partly due to the role changes that arose from two World Wars, the contraceptive pill which proliferated from the 1960's, and the development of a culture of equality that the many human rights movements have contributed to. The promotion of an appropriate set of male values awaits the emergence of a "critical mass" of men who will wake up to the need for men to draw strength from each other, to exchange passivity for activity, and who will generate a new and credible set of roles for themselves that will complement rather than antagonize the new confidence of women.

The feminist movement, while having demonstrated excesses at times, has undeniably moved the women's issues agenda to the fore, and we men need to stop complaining and start responding. However, it remains for men to respond to the challenge, to get together and chart a credible future for maleness.

New technologies, such as artificial insemination, are sometimes perceived as threats to males, seeming to make the man's role in relationships redundant. However, we see increasing awareness that children seek a balance of male and female influences, and best thrive where loving men and women input to their upbringing, though these experiences do not necessarily have to be confined to parental roles alone.

In a plurality of relationships, including but not defined by traditional nuclear family roles, we might hope to see men and women emerging from the confusion of change, to move beyond the simplistic gender war of the past few decades to a mutually respecting and enhancing collaboration in all areas of life -- sometimes termed "equalism" -- based on the recognition of human dignity that transcends sexually exclusive roles.

Our gender is an accident of birth, and there are many ways of being that exist within the boundaries of male and female. Women have already progressed some way along the road of defining the many expressions of female, and men are starting to have confidence in asserting that their sexuality and partner choices are acceptable if they are the true expression of the feelings and realities that bring them into being and support them. I would suggest that the future belongs to those who engage in the process of establishing who they truly are, regardless of gender.

12/29/97

Trevor Harvey, M.Ed combines lecturing in the School of Health at the University of East Anglia, with writing and counselling, and is based in Norwich, England. After a 12 year naval career, including the Falklands War, he became editorial board member/series advisor with The British Journal of Health Care Management and founder of the men's group AMICUS. He focused on health-related men's issues, particularly the way men negotiate personal transition through relationship crises, and is currently studying the management of information overload. Whenever possible, he combines his passion for photography with hill walking, and piloting his boat on the local lakes and rivers of eastern England.