What does the man want? A wife, a house, a family that he wants to maintain, protect and lead. Am I saying it right? Yes, half of the Dutch men between 18 and 35 in the EO sample think about masculinity. That’s how it should be, that’s how it should be, that’s how it was. Because 60 percent of men think that masculinity is under pressure these days, and half also think that society is becoming more feminine. There is an implicit judgment underlying that, I think. The man is no longer allowed to be a man, and men will not accept that anymore.
Two medium-masculine men and one woman investigate on behalf of the EO what masculinity is This is the issue. Reporter Joram Kaat, referred to by his own wife as fashion boy, attends a United Brotherhood training day. Young men drown in a pond, run across a forest path with beams and full jerry cans and wrestle each other to the ground. Joram is shocked by the masculine mentality. Life is too comfortable, says fraternity founder Joel Longayroux. Men are not challenged physically or mentally, they do not know their strength and their character. “Weakness brews beneath comfort.” Weakness that leads to procrastination, relationship problems and therefore depression.
Reporter Kefah Allush is now with Jens van Tricht, who says that men as a group differ more from each other than from women. He doesn’t care much about gender differences. We even divide food into male and female, he says. A woman drinks tea, a man coffee. She eats fish, he eats meat. A waiter will place a beer with the man, the wine with the woman. He believes: gender is a construction, and ‘the’ image of ‘the’ man is fluid. Kefah Allush has an immediate answer to the question of what his “scarf, earrings and curls” say about him as a man.
Margje Fikse also tries to get a grip on what attracts men to ‘masculinity’. She ends up with holistic coach Nick Alper, an adept of men whisperers such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. His emphasis is on physical strength and mental toughness. Decisiveness that he dictates as a manual for being a man: enter the restaurant first, choose immediately where you want to sit, you take your wife’s coat and pull up her chair, not the waiter.
What the woman wants was the subject of last week This is the issue. Where the man has to to sort what his role is, the woman knows what to do. Says Jordan Peterson, and he knows exactly: the woman takes care of her husband, the children and the household. The whole division of roles has been confused since women had to have a job if necessary. Men think so, and some women do too. They name themselves after their American sisters tradwivestraditional wives who choose to stay at home with the children.
Should ‘we’ want that, the EO wonders. We didn’t stand on the barricades for nothing, did we? I didn’t know they were there too. Fikse visits three friends in a house marked in large letters Jesus saves. Not a feminist stronghold, I think. A crowd of children in the kitchen, the mothers at the counter. One of them admits that she once worked in a notary’s office and enjoyed it too. When she got married she worked less, but when she had another child she stopped. Women are to love and serve their husbands. That’s what it said in her Bible. If her husband has to cook dinner himself after a hard day’s work, she is no help to him.
What should we do with this now? I also completed the survey about traditional division of roles on the EO site. My score: ‘a little bit of this and a little bit of that’. No, we will make some progress with that.
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