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Diarmaid Ferriter: Phallic man is alive and well

We must hear women’s testimonies now because we have underestimated how deep the abuses went

Frequently described as “the leading psychiatrist of his generation”, Dubliner Anthony Clare died suddenly 10 years ago. The publication of his book Psychiatry in Dissent in 1976 launched his very public career and he became a mainstay in British and Irish media as well as holding senior academic posts in London and Dublin. The BBC Radio 4 programme he presented, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, ran from 1982 to 2001 and made him famous while also ensuring he was credited with almost single-handedly demystifying psychiatry.

Clare was profoundly humane and talented and did lot of good for many of his patients but was controversial and regarded by some his peers as a “pop psychiatrist”. He also had his own crises, including his late-middle age one which resulted in the publication of his last book, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (2000), centred on the idea that men were suffering from a crisis of identity due to the challenges to patriarchy and were being pathologised in a manner similar to how women had been negatively stereotyped for so long. The traits that make “us the men we think we are and would like to be – logical, disciplined, controlled, rational, aggressive – are now seen as the stigmata of deviance. The very traits which once marked out women as weak and inferior – emotional, spontaneous, intuitive, expressive, compassionate, empathic – are increasingly being seen as the markers of maturity and health.”

Feared women

Clare was convinced that “phallic man, authoritative, dominant, assertive man – man in control not merely of himself but of woman – is starting to die”. He suggested that because men had always feared women and sought to dominate and control them they were struggling with a new order, but given their repudiation of the feminine they denied their own vulnerability and need for intimacy, leading to emotional distress.

Were he alive today, I wonder would Clare revise his thesis, as he seems to have been remarkably premature in some of his pronouncements as well as being too reductive. But perhaps some of his provocative assertions are relevant to the avalanche of revelations of recent months and the reaction to them. He observed: “Given the extent to which control is for many men the defining mark of their masculinity, any suggestion or threat of being out of control challenges the very essence of what being a male is all about… Rather than expose to a genuinely rigorous analysis the nature of male sexuality and its relationship to power, social status, aggression and control, most male commentators retreat into a self-pitying and ultimately depressing moan about the difficulty of being a full-bloodedly sexual man in a dynamic relationship with a women in the new post-feminist world of gender equality.”

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Thesis too neat

Clare also advocated something that has been frequently aired in recent weeks: the importance of an active fathering role “as a key civilising influence on men”. But his thesis was also too neat, built on the assumption that a new era of gender equality had dawned by the end of the 20th century, a “post patriarchal age”. What he seems to have underestimated was just how deep the gender power imbalances and the abuses of women went. We are now focused on “fallen men” but one of the most striking aspects of our history is the preoccupation with “fallen women”; those deemed to have transgressed and who were also frequently blamed for the abuse they were subjected to.

When the Ryan report on the abuse of children in institutions was published in 2009 it was apparent how systematic and casual the abuse was. But that was only part of a much wider, deeply ingrained abuse that was not just hidden in institutions and not just historical. In 2002, the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report highlighted that 30.4 per cent of women reported some form of sexual abuse in childhood, as did 23.6 per cent of men. Hannah McGee, the lead author of the report, said at the time that her main concern was “whether the figures would be believed”. That worry was justified, as the report’s urgent recommendation that a “comprehensive public awareness campaign on sexual violence” be undertaken did not happen.

In 2014, Europe’s biggest survey to date on sexual violence, by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, revealed 26 per cent of Irish women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence, while 48 per cent of Irish women had experienced sexual harassment since the age of 15.

Information on the extent of the abuse of women has long been in the public domain; what has changed in recent times is the extent, volume and public nature of the personal testimony about it. Given our long and disturbing history of such abuse, more such testimony is likely and necessary.