THE problem with the role of father is that our conventional notions of it are based only on the visible, public manifestations - the sombre man in his long, black coat. In truth, there have always been two layers to fatherhood, public and private, but the private was so much so that it remained unrecognised at a societal level.
Fathers were always loving, nurturing and involved with the upbringing of their children but the demands of the workplace made it inadvisable for a man to make much play of such involvement. Too much talk about children was interpreted in the workplace as illustrating a lack of "commitment" to more "serious" matters.
Now, with considerably less to lose, men are silently attempting to redefine their roles. As yet, however, they are unable to articulate their private visions of fatherhood within the limits of a language constructed to promote the idea that woman was the only sex to suffer discrimination. Anything a man might say to give voice to his frustration would come out in a politically incorrect form. So men keep silent and are then accused of not expressing their feelings.
The New Man was a product of a search for new formulae within the existing language. Reacting against the failed patriarchal model and finding himself with no answers to the endless stream of accusations, man tried to fling out the chipped, enamel bath of traditional fatherhood, forgetting that it contained his baby. Because he was good and determined to behave well, he witlessly helped create the context whereby his own children might never have access to his goodness.
Confounded by the paradox of his position, he took the side of his own greatest disadvantage, wringing his hands in guilt and restating the wrongs of his fellow man until they had become as a forest of sin in which he himself, having forgotten how to bunt and climb and navigate the heights, was lost and helpless. He talked about the guilt of men and their treatment of women. He could not see that he himself had also been oppressed by the old world. Mea culpa, he sobbed, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
New Man's failure to square the circle gave credence to those who said that the "traditional" ways were best. The pendulum would have to swing back. The only alternatives to orthodoxy were anarchy, disintegration and chaos. For quite a few men, the argument had about it a titter of plausibility. Some rediscovered their Tarzan impulses. And that is where we now stand. Staring extinction in, the face, Old Man and New Man accuse and harangue one another, each seeking to offload responsibility for their shared predicament. Old Man thinks his successor lacks backbone, has failed to stand up for himself. New Man blames his father and the generations of males before him for having queered the pitch.
Though they argue until Kingdom Come, Old Man and New Man could not square the circle. Old Man knows only one way to be Father. For him the way to do it is the way it has always been done. New Man, however, offers not so much an alternative as a reaction. He knows how it should cot be done. But all he offers by way of alternative is a fudge which fails to acknowledge his lack of choices or power.
The question is: is there a third way?
BORN at a time of maximised orthodoxy, men of my generation found themselves growing into a stratosphere of change. We came preprogrammed with a sort of cliched view of family life in which mother stayed at home and father worked all day and in the evening sat in his armchair smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper. But all our efforts to realise this vision came to nothing. We were destined to be fathers in an era in which it was unclear what fathers did. In as far as we were prepared, it was with the ancient programme handed on to us by our own fathers, which we combined with a few woolly notions born of a deep hostility to that sensibility.
The admissible evidence against the orthodox nuclear family - child abuse, violence of many kinds - was mounting and increasingly damning. The virus of violence, driven allegedly by the patriarchal craving for control, had burst the cork and escaped from the bottle, ricocheting through society in manifold forms, leaving the nuclear family in tatters. The traditionalists declared that all this was the inevitable consequence of the amoral liberal society - the clamour for abortion, divorce and other freedoms was destabilising the foundations of the family. This, too, had a ring of plausibility for, at face value at least, the evidence suggested the abandonment of the nuclear family in favour of the post modern holy grail of limitless choice and minimal commitment.
But maybe our present confusion is an inchoate beginning to a new kind of response, which will yet mould the present chaos into new structures.
There may, in other words, exist the possibility that what we are undergoing is a positive disintegration that, contrary to the apocalyptic prognostications of traditionalists, what we are experiencing is not the beginning of the end but the beginning of a whole new way of living together in relative harmony. If men and women cannot live together, or at least not for the moment, and perhaps only ever again for some of the time, then we surely need to face these facts and try to deal with their consequences. Perhaps, then, we are in a period of purgation, flushing out the dirt and damage, of the old and awaiting delivery of the new. Perhaps it is a little early for men to be getting too definitively steamed up about their banishment.
In beginning our search for new visions we need to redefine the social contract between men and women, beyond the shadow of victimology or control. But men do not know how to do this and it is unlikely that they can do it without the help and sympathy of women. Unfortunately, the present culture tells women that, by showing weakness towards men, they are enabling the rowing back of the gains of feminism. This is, why, increasingly, women are pursuing the winner takes all options pressed on them by an enabling official culture and an adversarial legal system.
We need to ensure that men and women who love the same child or children are on the same side - and because women hold all the cards, only they have the power to bring this about. There are encouraging signs.
At first sight the notion of a book about fatherhood written by a woman is as ludicrous as a book about motherhood written by a man. But on closer examination, Adrienne Burgess's Fatherhood Reclaimed (Vermillion, £9.99) is a fine book, written with great sympathy for the male point of view. Since many of the concepts requiring to be articulated are deeply un PC, it may well be that men will have to depend more and more on enlightened women to make the case which timidity or chivalry prevents them making for themselves. Most women stand to gain by any changes which would help restore fatherhood to its proper place in the culture. For example, women involved with separated men often find the economic, social and personal emasculation of their partner in his prior family experience makes him a reluctant, unhappy mate, unable to commit to a new relationship.
There is no safe language available to men to express the nature of their longing to be with their children. Accused of being undemonstrative, they now must become less demonstrative for fear of inviting accusations of abuse. Increasingly in relationship breakdowns it is the practice to suggest, either by accusation or innuendo, that the man cannot be trusted to be alone with his children. One man in 50 abuses his children we only hear about the one. One woman in 50 abuses her children; we only hear about the 49.
A language to express a redefined notion of fatherhood can only evolve - it cannot be invented. One of the more modest objectives men need to aim for is the ability to carry out the everyday tasks of childrearing without exciting comment. There is little in the needs of a baby or child that a man cannot provide just as well as a woman but the immense condescension of the culture continues to suggest that men are incapable, feckless, clumsy, undemonstrative and, really, not to be taken seriously when it comes to caring for children.
In Tact, in countries such as, Britain and the US, the male increasingly taking on the household responsibilities. Men are spending more time on housework and women less. Curiously, the extreme propaganda of the misandrists campaign has managed to simultaneously complain about and patronise men, suggesting that they are unwilling to do the mundane work associated with childrearing and also that they are ill equipped to do it. They are damned if they don't and laughed at if they do.
What men are beginning to discover - too late, in some cases - is that looking after children, if you are able to dedicate yourself to it, is far more fulfilling than almost all other forms of work.
Men must find a way to have authority without power. In the traditional model of fatherhood, power and authority went hand in glove. It was the father who ultimately imposed order, often at the urging of the mother - the "wait til your father gets home" syndrome, which allowed the mother, control over her children without having to tarnish her image as unequivocally loving and caring. Now, in the emerging reality of post industrial society, the father's power is largely illusory.
LOOKING after babies is an immense responsibility. Men are conditioned to believe that it is beyond their capabilities. At the beginning I was certainly fearful of the responsibility of caring for my daughter alone for even a few hours. I did not believe I could carry it off. Now I know I can. It is hard work but there is no mystery about it. There is almost nothing my daughter needs now that I cannot give her.
We need to imagine new states of dadhood but have very little to go on. Do we become more like our mothers as we become less like our fathers? Is there a middle way? Is there any point in having two parents doing the same things in the same way? Will children react against a father who doesn't leave the cave to hunt for food?
I have only the foggiest notion of how to be a father. Probably, more than I imagine of what I will, bring to fatherhood will be things I picked up from my own father. It's not so much that there is only one way but that the way it has been done up to now, however imperfect, must stand until either refuted or improved upon.
