There have been very many wrong ideas or perceptions about man and woman. “The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thought that all their lives women remain children, who live in the present, whereas men have the ability to think ahead. Another German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, thought that men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants” (“The Family,” in Philosophy of Right, 1821, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prfamily.htm). Don’t ask me what Hegel meant, but as noted by the British moral philosopher Mary Midgley, when it comes to women, the heavyweights of Western thought have produced extraordinarily silly reflections. Their usual divergence of opinion is nowhere to be found: “There cannot be many matters on which Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau and Schopenhauer agree cordially both with each other and with Aristotle … St. Thomas Aquinas, but their views on women are extremely close’” (Mary Midgley in Gregory McElwain, 2020, 108). Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to Caroline Kennard, an American women’s rights advocate, this opinion about women, “There seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance in their becoming the intellectual equals of man” (Charles Darwin to C. A. Kennard, January, 1882, Darwin Correspondence Project, darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LEFT-13607.xml). Aristotle thought that the female is, as it were, a mutilated male. We would say that all these weird ideas from the intellectuals living in different eras were the products of disparities in education between men and women. Now we live in a different era. 

In 2008, OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) produced papers on Higher Education to 2030. Stephan Vincent-Lancrin wrote in chapter 10, volume 1 (Demography), titled, “The Reversal of Gender Inequalities in Higher Education: An On-going Trend.” Instead of reading the whole chapter, let me give you its summary in the author’s own words as following: “This chapter analyses gender inequalities in participation in higher education and degree awards in OECD member countries. After documenting these inequalities, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, and presenting the main possible explanations for their reversal, we show that this new trend is more than likely to persist in coming decades. While it should probably continue to help reduce the wage inequalities which disadvantage women, its other possible social consequences have yet to be studied. However, in terms of educational inequalities, it would seem that in promoting equal opportunities for men and women the focus can no longer be solely on women” (https://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/41939699.pdf).

The University World News carried an article, “Women students dominating in many countries” written by Dylan Conqer and Mark C Long (March 2, 2013). They wrote, “After decades of concern that girls were not granted the same opportunities as their male classmates, the attention in the developed world has recently shifted to the relatively poor performance of boys in school. Studies of students in the United States find that girls often receive higher marks from their teachers and have now reached parity and sometimes exceed boys on standardised exams, including those required for entry into higher education. Research also indicates that girls are more likely to graduate from secondary school and to take more rigorous courses while in school than boys. These trends have led to a growing gender imbalance on college campuses that now favours females. In the United States, for example, males’ share of total college enrolment has fallen steadily from 71% in 1947 to 43% in 2010, with 1978 the last year that males held an advantage. Education experts in the US project an enrolment increase of 21% for women, compared to only 12% for men, through to 2019. This pattern is not unique to the US. According to 2007 estimates from UNESCO, the share of females in tertiary education now exceeds 50% in almost all OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member nations, reaching as high as 64% female in Iceland…. Due in part to their higher rates of enrolment, women are also more likely than men to obtain a college degree. There is also evidence that males fall behind even after they enrol in an institution of higher education. In the US, 43% of bachelor degrees went to men in 2010 despite males comprising 45% of freshmen in 2006, suggesting that males fall behind even after they have made the initial decision to obtain a college diploma.” Now no one is able to say that women are behind men in education. In fact, parents having boys must have more concerns and worries about their children’s education than parents having girls. 

Then, by now, do we have better ideas of man and woman? Now things are more against man than woman. Feminism talks about “toxic masculinity,” which became an academic term in social science. Psychologists associations promote the idea of toxic masculinity in “toxic masculinity ideology,” by which they elevated the issue unto the level of ideological wars. Interestingly, according to Terry A. Kupers, toxic masculinity includes “misogyny, homophobia, greed and violent domination” (“Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, June 2005, 61 (6): 713–724). Some of the issues he has found are, as for me, the issues of all sinful mankind, not any particular sex. And some of the issues are purely ideological. For example, what is homophobia, and who is homophobic? The Encyclopaedia Britannica says, it refers to “culturally produced fear of or prejudice against homosexuals that sometimes manifests itself in legal restrictions or, in extreme cases, bullying or even violence against homosexuals (sometimes called “gay bashing”). The term homophobia was coined in the late 1960s and was used prominently by George Weinberg, an American clinical psychologist, in his book Society and the Healthy Homosexual (1972).” This definition is deeply flawed, because we are neither culturally biased against homosexuals nor violent against them. We disagree with them based on biblical grounds. The LGBTIQA+ advocates argue that we are intolerant, while they have advocated to pass many laws to punish us, simply because we disagree with them on homosexuality. If a man opposes them, he is judged as having “toxic masculinity.”

According to the 2021 Census, released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, revealed nationwide the ratio of teachers was 25 per cent male to 75 per cent female. On average, this means for every male working in Education there are three females. “McGrath and Van Bergen (2017) tracked the decline of male teachers in primary and secondary schools across both government and non-government schools since 1965 and found a consistent downward trend, especially prominent in the government school sector. McGrath and Van Bergen even posited that if the current trajectory continues, ‘… Australian male primary teachers will reach an ‘extinction point’ in the year 2067’ (2017, p. 165)” (“The effect of gender on teaching dispositions: A Rasch measurement approach,” International Journal of Educational Research, vol. 99, 2020, 101510; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0883035519320518). It means that boys in schools do not have male role models, while they are more exposed to female influences. Thus, boys’ behaviours are not well explained and understood, and I think that a term like “toxic masculinity” is not appropriate to explain them. 

What is the point of stigmatizing an entire gender? 

I’ll continue to talk about man, woman, and others in the next few articles.

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