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So sitting next to unaccompanied
minors has become part of what men are and we must not be thwarted. How sad.
What a shocker of a year it has been for men. Just when you thought it
couldn't get any worse, this month it did, and considerably so. Like many disasters, it occurred
on an aircraft. Auckland shipping broker Mark Worsley provoked widespread
outrage among menfolk when he revealed he had been asked to move from his
allocated seat because Qantas staff did not want him sitting next to an
unaccompanied minor. It turned out that had he flown
Air New Zealand, he would have faced the same predicament. It was policy. The next day, the airlines were
attacked for being patsies to political correctness gone mad. Celia Lashlie,
former prison boss and author of He'll be OK -- Growing Gorgeous Boys into
Good Men, castigated the airlines for denying children the benefit of a cosy
chat with a good man. Green MP Keith Locke and a number
of other men complained to the Human Rights Commission, and former All Black
Norm Hewitt, bless him, likened the distrust of men to the segregation of
black Americans in the 1950s. The dramatic reaction seemed quite
surprising to me on several fronts. For instance, many men would have been
quite happy to move rather than be subjected to the pop of bubblegum, the
beep of a Gameboy or the annoying sound-effects of mass slaughter emitted by
a mobile Playstation. Most men would rather have passed around the sweets and
poured coffee than talk about their experiences of attaining manhood with a
strange child. However, the worst aspect of the
saga, and the one that made me wonder if men could stoop any lower, was the
characterisation of men as victims. Perhaps nothing showed this better than
the complaints to the Human Rights Commission. What, you have to ask yourself, is
the right being complained about? Is it the right to sit next to an
unaccompanied minor? "Sir, it is every man's human right to have the
company of an unaccompanied minor when flying." Is it the untrammelled
right to remain in an allocated seat? "Sir, after spending 30 seconds
struggling to seat 13A, being asked to move was a breach of my right to enjoy
my seat undisturbed." Whatever. The mere fact men have
lowered themselves to trying to enforce a dubious manly right by appealing to
the Human Rights Commission suggests they have lost any last vestige of
independence and dignity, let alone superiority or dominance. This is the commission whose head
summed up the state of human rights in New Zealand last year with this:
"The fundamental right to be who we are, to be respected for who we are
-- whether a disabled person, Pakeha, Maori, Pacific, Asian, gay, lesbian, a
transgender or intersex person, male, female, young or old -- is still not a
reality for New Zealanders." So sitting next to unaccompanied minors has
become part of what men are and we must not be thwarted. How sad. I agree that the airline rule is
silly and over the top, but the language with which it has been attacked is
the language of victimhood. The body to which we have appealed is a forum for
victims. What are we saying by jumping on
this victimhood bandwagon? We are saying we have suffered and that because we
have suffered, we have been ennobled. The '80s and '90s were about men
learning to develop and express their emotional selves and about breaking
down the myths of manhood. But now it seems all we have achieved in the first
decade of the new millennium is the right to call ourselves victims, often in
the most trivial circumstances. And so the message we fine, new model men are
giving boys is that it's all right to complain like drama queens about almost
anything, and everything is stacked against us. That was the message from the
first men's issues summit held in Auckland in May. New Zealand men are dying
because of a crisis of the spirit and despair at what life has to offer, it
was told. A former director of Lifeline,
Bruce Mackie -- pointing to more men than women dying in the workplace and on
the roads -- said the reason was men had learnt not to value themselves and
were continually denigrated by their depiction in the media as an
"irresponsible herd of buffoons". Then this year we hear we are the
victims of our male physiology -- yet another low point. In the book
Irritable Male Syndrome, Jed Diamond says men have hormonal and other
biochemical changes which account for variable levels of depression, anger,
fatigue, moodiness, anxiety and low libido. Based on a study of 6000 men,
Diamond found 55 per cent said they feared failure, 40% said their sex lives
were unsatisfactory and 46% said they always felt sorry for themselves. But what do men really have to
complain about? Most still kicking have never been drafted to fight a war,
most have never experienced a depression and we have full employment. We may
not have jobs for life, but just try to give us the sack. Women have become
as sexually voracious and promiscuous as we are supposed to be, and women
outnumber us to the extent that if we lose our partner, we still have a good
chance of starting afresh. We have never had so much money or credit, and if
we can make it into the All Blacks, it's OK to sob into our jerseys. But the airline row shows we have
squandered the little progress we have made. We can add to our worry beads
the final insult to the spirit: airlines not letting us sit next to snotty
youngsters travelling alone.
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