Medals are notoriously hard to come by at World Championships. Typically, they do not entertain their friends at home in the way that women do so easily. Walk into most houses and it is easy to see why – the decorating is almost always conceived by women and the vital rooms, kitchen, bathroom and living room, are normally female domains. Yet we live in an age when the needs of good parenting and sustained marital relationships demand that men should feel comfortable with being at home and not take flight as so many do.The implications of making traditionally “female” institutions more inviting to males, will understandably worry many women. Likewise, they may be concerned about what the new focus on boys at school will mean for their daughters.
But such issues, freed up by this week’s announcement, will have to be tackled if we are to move to a world in which the war between the sexes is, finally, to come to an end. They may need schools to be designed more in their image.If this is true in schools, then where else might the argument for less feminisation, more masculinisation, apply? If you were to look for one institution, other than school, to which we would like males to feel a greater attachment, it is the home.Home is a place where many men clearly do not feel much at home. They often seem to be more at ease in the pub, the garden shed or the allotment. And certainly both men and women will speak of its virtues in the workplace – better communication and more flexible hours.
Sir: How on earth can someone with the name Hamish McRae refer with a straight face to “we Anglo-Saxons” (“The dawning of the age of the Anglo-Saxon”, 7 January)?
The term “Anglo-Saxon” as an economic category is deeply irritating, inaccurate and highly un-PC. Given that the US is the main country thus denoted, I’m surprised that our American cousins, sensitive and literal- minded as they are in these matters, haven’t fired volleys of criticism at this racist and WASP-privileging epithet.
If it is true that the US and the UK – we may also cite New Zealand and the Celtic tiger, Ireland – share a common and distinctive economic model, why not call it “Anglophone”? Not only is this more neutral; it also draws attention, as does Hamish McRae, to the role that happening to speak English has played in these countries’ current good fortune.AIDAN FOSTER-CARTERShipley,West Yorkshire. Whatever the reason, the liberalisation of debate should benefit both men and women by facilitating their mutual understanding and allowing their different needs to be addressed.There are two further reasons why this week’s initiative represents a liberation for the gender debate. The first concerns recognition among experts that boys are doing no worse than in the past – their longstanding failure is merely being highlighted by female advancement. (Decades ago the 11-plus figures had to be fiddled because girls were doing so well and would have outnumbered boys in grammar schools.) This is a fascinating admission. Once you realise that the education system served boys badly even in the days of “male domination” you can question whether all sorts of institutions, designed when men controlled everything, actually did men much good.Second, the implication of the Government’s announcement was that “feminisation” of the educational culture may have ill-served boys. And the package of measures, such as introducing more male teachers, amounts to the admission that primary education, at the very least, needs some “masculinisation”.We have come to assume that “feminisation” is always a good thing.
