The Sex-Change Society: Feminised
Britain and the Neutered Male
By Melanie Phillips.
London: The Social Market Foundation, 1999
Melanie Phillips’ “The Sex-Change Society,” widely noted as a
comprehensive survey of gender politics in the United Kingdom, largely
succeeds at blending factual presentation and political analysis of
recent events. If you only read one work about developments across the
pond affecting men’s and women’s relationships, marriage, and
children, this is probably your book.
While the author focuses on the UK, much of her message is equally
applicable to North America, as when she laments: “The undermining of
marriage as a meaningful institution has played a crucial role in
collapsing the equilibrium between the sexes and driving men away from
their families.” The writer effortlessly shreds feminist theory
suggesting that men seek highly compensated work so as to exercise
economic power over their wives in their families, demonstrating
instead that women retain significant power in traditional marriages
and also that men have their own biological and social imperatives
motivating them to become effective providers in order to create a
useful role for themselves. Phillips is a big fan of marriage and
places its systematic destruction as perhaps the most critical change
on the gender front in recent decades. She rightly takes to tasks the
“pervasive non-judgmentalism” which has led us to paradoxes where
marriage’s importance is ostensibly acknowledged while society all too
often refuses to back up this lip service with appropriate social
support for this increasingly fragile institution. Phillips also
pinpoints no-fault divorce for “legitimis[ing] illegitimacy,” which
“in turn encouraged more women to get divorced, thus creating a
socially devastating feedback loop.”
The author pinpoints an important yet rarely discussed issue: “the
threshold of what is tolerable in a relationship has become extremely
low. What would once have been considered an irritating problem… is
now the trigger for marriage collapse.” A “culture of divorce” has
displaced a culture of marriage. Phillips proposes that marriage where
children are present should not be dissolvable in the absence of
wrongdoing by the non-petitioning partner and asks in effect, why not
turn back the clock on this issue? Why should marriage be cancelable
at will when other less socially critical contracts are binding on
both parties?
Where are we heading with our “sex-change society”? “Men are [] to be
re-engineered into the emotionally literate unemployed… so that women
can take their jobs and the state can perform the women’s role—with
fathers turned into au pairs. The aim is nothing less than the removal
of the distinctive social and cultural role for fathers that has
defined civil society [for centuries].” Phillips calls for an end to
the virtually unique taxation system in the UK which levies separately
on husbands and their wives without offering the possibility of joint
filing or acknowledging the reality of married couples with a
wage-earning husband and a stay-at-home wife.
Melanie Phillips is a careful wordsmith, and her clever and telling
phrases tend to stick in one’s memory. A few examples: “The idea that
women were repressed until the sexual revolution in the 1960s is
absurd… they were certainly restrained, a crucially different matter.”
“The term ‘single-parent family’ by definition excludes the second
parent from the institution, while at the same time sanitising the
loss.” “Fear of giving offence has left people so reluctant to
criticise irresponsibility that irresponsible behaviour has itself
been redefined as blameless, even heroic.” The author brooks no
nonsense and positively brims with common sense. “Men and women have
more in common and more differences than either feminists or
socio-biologists care to acknowledge.” “The general emphasis on
personal autonomy and individual rights undermined parental authority
and with it parental responsibility…. Children were invested with
adult responsibilities as fast as the adult world divested itself of
them.” Phillips forthrightly confronts the somewhat mind-boggling yet
pervasive claims that social policies and laws have no effect on
decisions regarding marriage and children.
The writer also has a facility at succinctly summarizing complex and
far-reaching social developments in a few sentences, as when she notes
that there are “three key characteristics of the new social order. The
first is the spread of sexual relationships outside marriage, free
from social disapproval. The second is the erosion of stable
marriages…. The third is the widespread toleration of illegitimacy and
the exclusion of the father from the family unit, now defined as the
mother and child alone.” Phillips emphasizes the critical role of this
trio of changes: “In detaching sex from permanent union between
individuals, they have robbed men and women of the freedom to build
relationships with each other in which they can place reliance and
trust…. Fathers have increasingly been turned into an optional bolt-on
extra.”
Perhaps inevitably in a book of this level of depth and thoroughness,
Phillips does tend to repeat facts and ideas and also occasionally
veers toward long-windedness. Also, “Sex-Change Society” at times
suffers from the writer’s unabashed conservatism, which suffuses some
of her analysis with biases that certainly differ from those of the
society she studies but may not be fully palatable to all readers of
Everyman. Finally, there are times where she may for example note the
“huge differences” between a mother deserted by her husband, a woman
of 28 who has a baby through a sperm donor, and a pregnant girl of 16,
without offering any concrete suggestions as to what specific
steps she would support in responding to these three situations. Be
that as it may, the author offers her readers a wealth of fascinating
information and analysis. In another of her signal encapsulations,
Phillips comments that the “never-ending tension between men and women
over their division of roles” is inevitable because stems from “two
unalterable givens”—individual freedom and the needs of the vulnerable
human infant. The tension may be insoluble but the clarity and
commitment of gifted authors such as Melanie Phillips will serve all
of us in good stead as we work toward ensuring the continued vitality
of marriage and healthy families in the twenty-first century.
Phillips is good on the subject of fathers, noting that dads’ play
with their children is “not only more physical, but has a quality of
apprenticeship, showing the child how the world works, while mothers
play at the child’s own level.” Later she distills the critical nature
of dads as “the other parent that made me,” whom the child needs to
“avoid the suffocating and potentially manipulative closeness of a
relationship with [only] one parent.” Daughter-father relationships
facilitate learning about and managing intimate relationships with the
opposite sex, and fathers provide their sons with a role model in
successfully managing male aggression and power both inside and
outside the family. Although it has been done before, the author
wisely devotes a number of pages to summarizing the wealth of evidence
proving fathers’ critical role in promoting happy life outcomes for
their children.
The writer rightly calls attention to a number of glaring
contradictions in feminist thinking, such as the remarkable claim that
fathers in intact families cannot effectively parent while holding
full-time jobs that require them to be away from home, but yet somehow
mothers with full-time jobs become better parents and also after
divorce the father’s physical presence is unnecessary as long as he
pays the all-important child support “Male breadwinning is thus
forbidden inside marriage but compulsory when the marriage is over.”
She also points to the clash of the concepts that on the one hand,
women should be treated the same as men and androgyny is a laudable
goal, and on the other hand, women are quite different from and
superior to men. Regarding domestic violence, she highlights the irony
that women have come to rely on men’s refusal to respond to physical
provocation and have themselves become more violent and men less
violent while the law continues to act as if only men can commit
domestic violence. (Astoundingly, a British government produced a
report admitting heavy female involvement in domestic violence was met
with public silence, and the government made no changes in its
policies to bring them into even minimal compliance with its own
findings.) Unfortunately, the author does not always avoid her own
brand of inconsistency, as when this straight-laced conservative
forthrightly calls for government spending to privilege matrimony and
at another point proposes cash payments to mothers.
