The Emperor

A BBC anchor editorializes about the state of men in society.

I'm not sure what's more interesting - his actual observations, or the reactions they've gotten.

Words count. Words have meanings. Journalists know those meanings - most of them, anyway.

Words can shade the impact of a story, subtly or, as we see below, maybe not so subtly.

I'm going to bold the words in the article below that add editorial spin to the piece, by the Telegraph's Richard Alleyne:

It's a woman's world, moans Michael Buerk
By Richard Alleyne
(Filed: 16/08/2005)

Michael Buerk, the veteran BBC newsreader, has launched a tirade against what he believes is the all-pervading influence of women in society, claiming that men have been reduced to little more than "sperm donors".

Buerk, the former presenter of The Nine O'Clock News whose report on Ethiopia inspired Live Aid, said that life was now lived "according to women's rules" and that traditional male traits had been marginalised.

All too much of life is, of course. A good part of our society does actively disparage masculinity and its basic traits; it is under deliberate attack in our schools, which have effectively turned boyhood into a treatable illness, trying to raise a generation of children that believe that aggressivness is not just different than cooperation - it's inferior.

In an interview with The Radio Times, he cited the decline of the manual workforce as an example of the trend as well as the number of women in top jobs at the BBC and other media outlets.

As the education system has become more hostile to men, the number of men in higher education has plummetted as a share of the population.

Buerk, who now presents BBC World and recently attacked some of his fellow news presenters for being overpaid "lame brains" [And he was right, there and here - Ed.], complained that the "shift in the balance of power between the sexes" has gone too far and we needed to "admit the problem".

"Life is now being lived according to women's rules," he said. "The traits that have traditionally been associated with men - reticence, stoicism, single-mindedness - have been marginalised.

"The result is that men are becoming more like women. Look at the men who are being held up as sporting icons - David Beckham and, God forbid, Tim Henman."

It goes deeper than that.

There was a time in America when masculine ideals - emotional restraint, stoicism, focus, deserved aggression - where treated as virtues in our society. John Wayne was an American icon for a reason.

And it's no accident that it was during the seventies and eighties - when equity feminism (the feminism that brought political equality) got squeezed out of the limelight and off of the campuses by identity feminism (the feminism that says women need to exert power over society as a gender) - that not only did Hollywood change the "male" icon from John Wayne to Hawkeye Pierce, but began to systematically tear down and ridicule the previous notion of "what is a male". The goal was not just to create a "kinder and gentler" - i.e., more female - male, but to eradicate the notion that the "John Wayne" archetype was ever really an ideal.

And as Buerk says - it largely worked.

The struggle goes on, of course - huge swathes of our society never bought into the left and Hollywood's notion. Of course, those holdouts have spent the last thirty years being actively denigrated by Hollywood, with the odd exception (firemen after September 11) which have been notable by their rarity, otherwise being held up as objects of ridicule (the homicidal soldier, the borderline-crazy cop).

More to come.

Posted by Mitch at August 17, 2005 06:23 AM | TrackBack