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Monday, 23 May 2016

Margaret Thatcher and the Crisis in Masculinity


I was listening to the Stig Abell programme on LBC yesterday afternoon when a discussion on a/the crisis in masculinity took place. I was prompted to offer up a couple of tweets.



I did a google search today and saw that this crisis had been going on for some time. Indeed Dianne Abbot told us back in 2013 that "successful women often wrongly get blamed for the problems facing men"  And what has the grand dame 'Margaret Thatcher' got to do with all this? Well the first female Prime Minister of the UK who ruled with a rod of iron from 1979-1990 and who died in 2013 is still blamed for many of societies ills and I offer up an unscientific theory.
She was a successful woman and she oversaw the dismantling of industries that employed a lot of men. She withdrew the opportunity for these men to become breadwinners. I feel that we often underestimate the power of the collective unconscious and I wonder whether a generation of men and now their sons have reacted in ways that might be reminiscent of the symptoms of PTSD.
Thatcher is actually the T in PTSD in the UK. We, the men of the UK are still not over her and you might say that we secretly envied her and admired her power. She managed to make us impotent and we allowed it. We took to the Pubs and the Bookies because essentially we are feckless and lazy and give us an excuse to do nothing and we will. The emphasis on the individual striving for himself and his family but what happens when what he does is not enough and his family turn on him. It is a huge responsibility to bear being 'The Head of the Household'. Who asked for that responsibility? I certainly didn't. My unscientific argument based on feminine intuition leads me to believe that we weren't ready for her. She was too much of a shock and even those mere men who have followed her including the equally hated Blair shrink in her shadow. She has done a great favour for women in politics for whoever now comes to the fore will always be compared to her and Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood often mention her and themselves as an antithesis to her. Any female politician can only come across as compassionate in comparison to her. In the U.S.A the Trump/Clinton election again reminds you of the 1980s with Ronald Reagan's tenureship. Larger than Life figures almost grotesques with the power to make life very difficult for ordinary people. People in politics often become caricatures of themselves. 
The crisis in my own masculinity has led to a withdrawal from wider society, a stubborn refusal to compete for jobs in the form of an interview with references. There were no jobs under Thatcher in the 1980s and there are no jobs now, no decent jobs for intelligent, thoughtful bloggers like myself. I believe that she came to teach men a lesson. She sent us to war in the Falklands and she took away our jobs in the miners strike.   
I grew up under Thatcher and I never wanted to be a breadwinner and I didn't want to provide so I haven't become one.

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