THAT'S MEN:Changing the way the genders are reared
‘BOYS COULD curse like the proverbial troopers, get filthy and hang by their knees from the top bars of swings without enduring similar exhortations; boys were forces of nature that couldn’t be stopped or changed. They didn’t have to worry about being temples or any of that guff.”
So writes Yvonne Nolan on her How We Live Nowblog in a piece on how girls and women were shaped by society when she was growing up – and along the way, she shows how boys and men were shaped too.
The “exhortations” she refers to above were the instructions passed on to girls on how to be “a little lady”.
For instance, “You were not to sit in an unladylike manner with your knickers showing because your body was ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit’. Cursing was ‘taking the holy name in vain’ as well as unladylike and could make you sound like ‘a British Tommy’ [a nice bit of nationalist post-war bias there].”
The Christian Brothers told us boys also that girls were “temples of the Holy Spirit”. So if you sinned with a girl, you were not only imperilling your own soul, but you were “destroying a temple of the Holy Spirit”.
I had thought that the girls as temples idea had been minted by the Christian Brothers in Naas. Now I realise it had a more common currency. I wonder if girls are ever told today that they are temples? I suppose not.
But times change and the combination of women’s determination and of new trends in society began to modify the way we see and shape both men and women.
Her father, Yvonne recalls, “supported all my efforts to be as good as a boy without laughing. I traipsed after him to marts and matches and funerals – all gatherings dominated by men and boys, and he never seemed to mind being the only man there with a little girl in tow”. This was the 1960s in rural Ireland.
But here’s a difference in the shaping of the genders: at school. “The best of the nuns who educated me were fiercely interested in our success in the world and I even recall very many discussions about equality in religion classes.”
I was in secondary school in the 1960s and I recall no discussions about equality between the sexes.
It seems the role of women changed faster than that of men and with the enthusiastic support of some nuns.
But she believes change has been more pronounced in the public arena than at home.
“Where the State can intervene with legislation, some kind of simulacrum of equality is enforceable – equal wages for equal work, what questions can be asked at a job interview, the right to take a case if you’re sexually harassed at work, the right not to be discriminated against if you’re a working mother.
“Behind closed doors, it’s a different story, and we know about the big headline issues here – domestic violence, marital rape – the laws exist but you have to be strong enough and free enough to access them.”
I think she’s over-pessimistic about the scale of what goes on behind closed doors. The sense of equality in personal relations is far greater now than in the 1950s and 1960s, and I think neither men nor women want to go back to the bad old days.
But I have to acknowledge that bad things still happen – though not always done by men – and that we men often get out of shouldering our share of the burden of domestic work.
If you're interested in these issues, read her article, Does Your Brain Look Good Naked?, on howwelivenow.com.
Finally, Anna Carey tweets that when she predicted in a comment on the Anti-Room blog (http://theantiroom.wordpress.com/) that disgruntled men would be complaining to The Irish Timesbecause the newspaper featured the rise of a new feminist movement, "I was referring to the men's rights brigade, not most men".
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail