Chin up, chaps, to me you’ll never be wimps!
AS A mother of sons, wife to a husband and a sister to brothers, I resent the constant attack on males (‘Why men are truly the weaker sex’, Mail). We’re always told to regard them as like that cartoon idiot, Elmer Fudd. In Sarah Rainey’s article, the assertion that male foetuses grow ‘bigger and faster in the womb’ would surely indicate an advantage toward their survival, not a disadvantage. She writes that ‘males respond more strongly emotionally, and twice as much to heartwarming content’. So much for them lacking emotional intelligence, then! There’s hope yet for all of those future Vivaldis, Yeatses and Stravinskys. The research goes on to say that girls weren’t as upset at hearing a crying baby. An unmoved heart is not a virtue. The matter of 60 per cent of degreeholders now being female has nothing to do with two decades of pushing the quota for female intake at universities, then? And I’m always flummoxed when it’s said that men are more promiscuous than women. Who the heck are they having sex with? We are told that women live longer. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? So few of them are working up scaffolding, tarmacking roads in all weathers or trapped in city jobs that kill the soul but pay the mortgage. It’s no wonder men are smoking more, drinking more, avoiding the doctor and bottling up all their angst. What does any of this denigration of the male while plumping up of the female ego gain anyone? Roles swapped are still the same roles, but with the wrong people filling them. I sometimes wonder what’s left for females after they’ve proved their ‘masculinity’, like Michelle Obama did, dropping to do push-ups on TV, or female soldiers and rugby players trying to prove that they’re just as tough as men. All this doesn’t represent the majority of us females. Most of us want a great love-match for our daughters, and our daughters still hope for a hero of a guy who’ll watch over them — not for him to be a house-husband who champions her go-getting abilities while he does the dishes and takes her place looking after the kids. Enough of this trend! Take heart, fellas. Most of us think you’re great.
LYNNE GRACE, Eastbourne, E. Sussex.