Unfair digs at men reverses the offence

THE urgent rush these days to right the wrongs of the multiple unearned disadvantages suffered by women appears to permit any number of attacks on men, no matter how undeserved they might be.

This week the Irish Independent published an editorial that said, ‘If one were looking for symbols of true super-power, courage and strength today, you will find it not among the decorated army generals, but in the set faces of the mothers cradling their infants in the makeshift shelters of Ukraine’s cities’.

This is a classic example of an attempt to pay a deserved tribute to women in a time of unimaginable crisis, but wrapped in a gratuitous, illdefined attack on men – seeing as how the number of women generals in either the Russian or Ukraine armies are as scarce as pubs in Kabul.

Unthinking side-swipes at men sets up a false dichotomy, erroneously pitching all men against women. It’s an emasculation of manhood, a demeaning, an othering of men.

For more than two weeks now Ukraine army commanders – men – have demonstrated what courage really means, what true strength looks like.

And so have all those rank-and-file men fighting under them against the Russian invader. We must add into that the tens of thousands of men who dropped their wives, children, partners and families into neighbouring countries and then returned to Ukraine, to fight, kill and be killed for their country. What about their courage, their strength? Age-old, systematic and endemic abuse of women cannot be ended by the suppression and humiliation of maleness. That’s just simply reversing the offence with men replacing women at the wrong side of injustice.

There’s no doubt about the natural courage displayed by the women of Ukraine over the past two weeks. But the same goes for the men of Ukraine, and for the resilience they have shown – and for their display of one of the key male characteristics, which is aggression. Male aggression has got a ‘bad rap’ of late. It’s like some people want to erase it altogether.

Putin’s murderous onslaught on Ukraine makes absolutely clear that righteous anger and targeted, controlled male aggression is what’s called for when push comes to shove, even in this wonderful 21st-century world of WOKE.