Not so New Lads
Not so New Lads
"The modern young man is changing. Well-trained in the skill of pleasing women, he's discovering the benefits of pleasing himself. He's a New Lad, and he's ready to kick the SNAG and the Bloke out of women's beds once and for all."
So began one of the most concerted pieces of backlash propaganda to hit the newsagents since Bettina Arndt began her weekly anti-feminist column in the Sydney Morning Herald.
"Men behaving (not too) badly", a six-page feature by Sue Williams in the March 1-2 Australian Magazine, describes, with considerable glee, the New Lad. This lad, say Williams and her bevy of "experts", is "the man with the attitude of a Sensitive New Age Guy but with the behaviour sometimes more reminiscent of a true blue ocker bloke. He might look, but he'd never touch without permission. He might think, but he'd never say. He might know better, but you'd never, ever imagine it."
"Inside every SNAG", says Williams, "there's a New Lad bursting to get out".
If this sends an unpleasant shiver down the spines of feminists, well that's simply just deserts. You guessed it — the arrival of this New Lad is our fault.
"Over the past 30 years ... women have needed liberating from their social identity", says Paul Whyte from the Sydney Men's Network. But "this has involved men being blamed, scapegoated and put upon ... There are two ways of coping with that. They can either sort of agree with that, as a SNAG, and seek approval from women, or they can say they agree with the theory but not the treatment and go the New Lad way ... there's been an open season on men ... and they're reacting against it."
Predictably, the right wing's favourite bogey is invoked to focus the fire on feminism. Frustration, says Williams, has made "many men decide to simply give vent to all that boyishness they'd stored up for years, intimidated by the dominant doctrine of political correctness".
Williams tries to "explain" the New Lad as a victim of the breakdown of the nuclear family. Her "expert" on manhood, University of WA education lecturer Peter West, argues that young Australian men are tending to "laddism" in order to forge an identity: "The fathers aren't around, men are getting excluded in the Family Court, where is a boy to turn for when he needs assurance that he's a man? It's difficult for guys these days ..."
Even the high suicide rate amongst young men is blamed on gender role confusion caused by feminism: "All these young men are desperately searching for what malehood means", West says.
Williams correctly identifies the SNAG as a direct response to the mass feminist consciousness created by the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s. To this extent, it was progressive, reflecting some men's desire to change their behaviour. The promotion of the New Lad — an assertion of men's right to be Loud, Arrogant Dickheads again — is therefore regressive.
Nevertheless, that the transition from SNAG to New Lad can be argued so readily reveals a certain continuity in these apparently counterposed responses to feminism. That is, it reveals the utter inadequacy of the SNAG response.
Some individual men changing their behaviour by adopting elements of capitalism's gender role stereotype for women (e.g. compassion, sensitivity, cooperation) did not seriously challenge, let alone eradicate, those sex roles or stereotypes.
An individual response to a social problem is always insufficient; the development of the women's liberation movement was an acknowledgment of just that. At the heart of the movement was a profound challenge to the ideology that such "natural" male and female characteristics exist at all.
The women's movement was about freeing all people, especially women, from the tyranny of the sex roles and stereotypes created by the capitalist family form, not about tinkering with the mix of "male" and "female" traits in each individual.
The arrival of New Lad propaganda shows us, once again, that individual solutions are inadequate solutions, all too easily rolled back in the absence of an organised movement striving for fundamental change in all spheres of society.
By Lisa Macdonald