Once upon a time, the world belonged to men.
Literally.
Because men had exclusive power in both private and public life, they controlled their surrounding environment and the way in which space was designed and decorated. Consequently, the world was once a very masculine place.
Fair enough. I'd say a world where women are actively excluded from most public spaces could fairly be called "a very masculine place". It's lines like this that send me scurrying for the nearest liquor cabinet:
... we’ve made progress in the area of gender equality and women have brought their influence to bear in both the home and the workplace. However, as with many other areas of modern life, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other;...
Has it really? Funny - I would have sworn on a stack of Betty Friedan novels that the polar opposite of: "Once the world belonged to men" isn't "... but then we decided to share". I would have thought it was something more like, "Now the world belongs to women.
Except the world doesn't belong to women, does it? We don't control everything, or even most things. Come to think of it, I can't think of a time in history when women ever held "exclusive power". I can't think of a time when we could exclude men from the workplace, from commercial businesses, or from voting booths. The truth is that Mr. McKay has never actually experienced the 'opposite extreme' of this metaphorical pendulum. Things haven't moved to the other extreme at all, but rather to some middle ground between one pole that has persisted throughout most of human history and an opposing fantasy scenario none of us has ever witnessed.
That middle ground, apparently, can be a bleak place:
...instead of creating a world that’s friendly to both male and female space, we’ve created one that benefits female space at the expense of male space.
It seems remarkable to this wife and mother that men gave up absolute control over the world peacefully. This is a thing that hasn't happened often in our history - confronted with demands from women that men give up some of their power and share control over the world we both live in, men decided (for whatever reason) to do so voluntarily. I would hope that every man who loves his wife or mother or sister - every man who has young daughters - would rejoice at this miracle that was accomplished, not at the point of a sword but at the ballot box.
The truth is that no one is keeping men out of the workplace. No one is keeping them out of bars. As McKay admits, women were first accepted in bars during Prohibition. When it was over, no law forced bars to continue admitting women. For over 30 years my husband has had his hair cut at a barbershop. Never, even once - in any state we've lived in - has he elected to patronize a unisex salon. But more importantly, never once has he had the slightest trouble finding a barbershop. If there were sufficient demand - FROM MEN - for single sex hair establishments, there would be more barbershops.
Likewise, single sex gyms have largely given way to co-ed ones. The success of Curves (which, by the way, is nothing like a full service gym) is a testimony to the free market's ability to meet the demand for single sex workout emporiums... as is the rise of male-only gyms like Cuts and Blitz.
As a woman, I can't begin to imagine what it must be like to marinate in nostalgia for some magical time when the law of the land guaranteed me the "right" to exclude one half of humanity from places of employment. And while I don't much care for forcing legally mandated inclusiveness upon private organizations that accept no public funding, I can't help noticing that the bulk of McKay's examples involve neither force nor operation of law, but rather gradual shifts in public sensibilities: the inevitable changes in outward form that follow changes in the function of our social institutions.
No law today prevents men from negotiating private space in their own homes or spending their leisure time with male friends. Men (and now women, too) have full access to the courts and the voting booths. They have both the freedom and the ability to influence and even change the laws we live under. In today's world a man is even free to, as one of McKay's commenters so aptly phrased it, "act without consideration":
The decline in male space also correlates with a decline in male empowerment. I am 52 and my father did whatever he wanted without consideration of my mother. I get to do about half of what I want with my wife disallowing the other half. My sons will I am afraid get to do nothing they want, unless it includes and is approved by the wife.
Question for the day: are we talking about empowerment? Or entitlement?
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