Useless?

First published in Column Eight on the 1^st Sept, 1993

While attending the last stretches of the Dunedin Competitions, my ear caught a line from a song on suffragettes: ‘We enjoy men individually, but as a group they’re rather stup…id.’

This must be Give Men Flak Week, because I’ve also come across two book titles: Things You Can Do With a Useless Man, and Dads Say the Dumbest Things. Can you imagine the outcry if the subject was the opposite gender? Sexism doesn’t appear to exist when men are being put down – it only runs one way.

Men, solid citizens as they are, have put up with being flailed for decades – long before women’s lib came on the scene. And they continue to suffer it. you only have to look at the television to see the way men are treated in commercials, or in sit-coms. They’re always the fools. The worst examples are the ones where some game is being advertised. Who’s the schmuck who loses? Always the father.

Let’s get real here. What man is useless? Useless is defined (rather weakly) in my dictionary as ‘having no practical use or advantage.’ But the inference in the book title I mentioned is of something even less than that: a person with no purpose or function at all.

You’d think that womankind, having been victims of oppression for so long, would (on gaining a measure of equality), look kindly on those now less fortunate than themselves. Not so. Condescension is the order of the day.

A Useless Man: this sounds to me like a man seen through the eyes of some woman who expects things of him that he has no skill at, or no innate ability to do.

Perhaps a useless man is one who doesn’t fit the Kiwi bloke model: the man who doesn’t drink much, if at all; the man who doesn’t go crazy if he misses a rugby match, or the man who can’t remodel his home because it’ll look worse at the end than it was at the beginning.

On the other hand, perhaps a useless man is one who communicates with his kids (even if, as they grow older, it is with some increasing degree of difficulty). The man who knows when his wife’s birthday, and their wedding anniversary, occur. The man who can take something his wife bought back to the shop, and complain – because his wife is too chicken to. The man who knows how to cook three variations of his favourite mince and rice dish.

The man who continues to love his wife when her logic fails him, when she has PMT three weeks running, when she decides to try out a recipe for a very strong curry or when she’s got the cheque book in a muddle.

If there really is such a creature as a useless male, he must be getting as rare as the yellow-eyed penguin, though perhaps needing less money spent on preserving his species.

One of the positive things unemployment has done for many blokes is to give them time with their kids when they never had it before. Time when they’re not tired, or absorbed in trying to do up the house after tea and on the weekends.

Now they have time to walk with their kids to school, to sit in on classes, to help them with their homework, and tuck them up at night. To go out and play games with them. That can only be an improvement.

But even apart from unemployed men, a feature of modern day manhood is the way in which they parent their kids: how many men of the last generation would have pushed a pram, carried their babies in a backpack, or even changed their nappies?

I get irritated at the way fathers in American sitcoms still act stricken when their wives are having a baby. I saw each of my children born: five wondrous and unforgettable occasions. I even helped deliver the last, a rather frisky fellow. This is something many older men never experienced.

But according to some, men are so useless. They can only repair cars, play pianos, clean drains, paint pictures, empty gutters, wash dishes, program computers, lay concrete, write books, keep wives warm, and snuggle children on their laps.

I’m sure there are many more things they’re useless at, but that’ll do for starters.

The Dunedin Competitions would have been the singing competitions specifically, the section I had most involvement with. I did occasionally accompany instrumentalists in the instrumental section as well.

Somewhat sadly, the two books I mention were both written by men. Men have a great ability to put themselves down.