An Enquiry into the Duties of the Male Gender – Pt. 1

The ‘Crisis’

“You’ll be a man, my son” — If, Rudyard Kipling

In 1797, Thomas Gisborne, a priest, poet and abolitionist, wrote a well-meaning, if clueless, book called An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. In it, he argued that women were designed by god to be subordinate to men.

A riposte, then.

We find ourselves at a moment that both looks and feels significant to global history. With a pandemic, the climate crisis, multiple flashpoint conflicts around the world and a collapsing public sphere in order to serve the needs of the wealthy, we are all faced with a series of interconnected issues that are impacting our day-to-day lives. Many of these are being addressed from all sides but there is one specific ‘crisis’ that seems to have been co-opted by one side of the political divide and that is on the question of ‘Masculinity’.

The nature of this ‘crisis’ is of great debate (hence why I refer to it in inverted commas) given that some people are arguing that the concept of masculinity is under threat and that men themselves are being attacked purely for existing, while others are insisting this is a redressing of a historical imbalance that has seen men as the ones who make all the decisions and violently…