Diane AbbottRII SCHROER

In a speech last month Diane Abbott argued that there is a “crisis of masculinity in Britain”.  Sometimes even Diane Abbott can stumble onto the truth, even if she promptly picks herself up and walks off in another direction.

One does not need to look far to see that Abbott is correct in her main claim.  The “crisis of masculinity”  has long since crossed into the level of the physiological; British men are registering a historic drop in sperm counts, a trend seen in several countries.

Abbott is right to connect this with pornography.  There has been a lot of work recently exploring the physical and psychological effects of Internet porn.  Male brains did not evolve to cope with having an infinite variety of sexual materials present for the price of a mouse-click.  Or, to state it in reverse, the human norm has been for men to expend a great deal of effort to have access to any sexual material whatsoever.  The surfeit available over the web leads quickly to saturation, the blunting of the pleasure response, and eventually erectile dysfunction.

More than this, there is a general surfeit of pretty faces and forms in pop culture, a pop culture that also portrays, particularly in its image of teen and twenty-something life, a lifestyle of easy hook-ups and easy sex as the norm.  The disconnect between the image and the reality – across a lifetime, British women report an average of six sexual partners, and men thirteen, so someone is lying – fuels frustration.

The first cause is cultural. The essayist Kate Hymowitz wrote an electrifying essay, ‘Child Man in the Promised Land’, on the general phenomenon of boys refusing to become men.  In the equally remarkable sequel, ‘Love in the Time of Darwinism’ she argues that many “child-men” feel that that they live in a culture that “disses all things male”; they jettison all the traditional requirements of manhood, such as taking responsibility for raising a family, and sink into an extended adolescence.

It is here that Abbott makes her swift metaphorical departure.  In the speech she stated that she was under no circumstance going to “try and suggest that one particular family might be in some way better than another.”  But read any study you like and you will find that the single largest determinant of a child’s success in later life is the presence of two parents (interestingly this applies equally to same-sex couples).  At the most basic level, raising a child is a resource-intense project, and having the productive ability of two people involved is better than having only one.  But if we focus only on the male question, the most effective way of turning boys into men is fatherhood; becoming a father is the main way in which, historically, adolescents have become men.  Furthermore, here are a number of studies that show that simply by being married, a man is more likely to earn more and be better integrated into his society.

Abbott cannot fix or even address this, because that would mean facing the reality that there is no way to do so without a general social consensus that regards marriage as honourable and separation as shameful, for the sake of the children if nothing else.   All the “family friendly” policies in the world cannot substitute for the oldest ways of regulating behaviour.

Now, the world is a cold place, and the fact that many males in the developed world feel that there is no place for them does not rank high on the scale of human suffering.  The problem is that, when men, young men, are idle and feel that they have no place, they tend to turn bad, and that is especially true if sexual frustration is involved.  One example of this is the rise of the ‘pick up artist’ or PUA community, which is an online community that aims to share information about how to successfully “pick up” women.  The PUA community is what Abbott calls “a celebration of heartlessness”, completely willing to use the advances of the modern world to its own self-interested ends.

The ongoing economic decline could bring out worse still.  In the thirties, Orwell wrote that the success of fascism could not be understood without understanding the emptiness of a hedonistic worldview.  With anti-liberal ideologues stirring across the world, that could happen again, especially if things are so bad that even Diane Abbott notices.