Make Love not War
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in July 2025.
I think it must be hard to be a man these days, particularly a young man. I wonder why young men as a sector are attracted to right-leaning politics, which was the trend in our recent election as elsewhere in the world. Particularly those we used to call blue-collar workers who for generations were the backbone of left-leaning and labour parties. I get that they feel left-out of progress they have been socialized to believe is theirs by right – secure and well-paying jobs, home ownership, economic security, benefits and pensions. But women are equally disadvantaged generationally, arguably further disadvantaged by gender, and they seem to be trending centre and left electorally.
I wonder if it’s because the role of the male in most species is to sire offspring and, in a few species, to ensure their survival by protecting the female. On the farm where I was raised, the long-term value of female over male livestock and fowl was clearly evident, which is maybe why feminism came easily to me. I always suspected that patriarchy was man’s way of compensating for this inherent disadvantage. That bias colors my understanding of why the world is lurching toward Strong Man dictatorship and war: both are the play pen – or wrestling ring, if you will – of men seeking to justify their existence.
I recently read the first two of Pat Barker’s trilogy about the women of Troy. She continues her lacerating exploration of war from a woman’s perspective (the Regeneration Trilogy, which deals with the second world war, is sustaining its relevance) by taking that lens to more ancient, arguably more brutal, war. In theory the Trojan War was initiated by a disagreement about who rightfully owned a woman who was so beautiful men could not be blamed for laying down their lives for her – presumably ten years of war and the prolonged butchery of men of all ages was at base her fault. Women, then as now, were the spoils of war, chattels who were meted out as prizes to the heroes of the day, destined to be bed-slaves to the men who had murdered their sons, their brothers, their fathers, and to ambivalently bear their children. From Barker’s perspective, those consequences of war were difficult, but perhaps more easily managed than the consequences of war for men. Why? Because the women could find purpose in life, even as a slave, but a man’s career of hand-to-hand, close-up, relentless butchery destroyed their humanity. Their lives, as I understand Barker describing them, are tantamount to manning the killing floor in an abattoir, and trying to wash the stink from their bodies at the end of the day.
Is modern warfare different? I think about what it might be like to be an Israel Defence Force soldier protecting a humanitarian shipment of food from starving children and mothers. Or a Hamas military taking refuge behind the skirts of grandmothers and under the beds of hospital patients. I think it might be even worse than wielding a spear or club like Achilles, because he at least could demonstrate skill and perseverance, and earn the commendation of his fellow fighters. How does an American military person take pride in pushing a button in a subterranean silo in Arizona that pinpoints a drone’s designated enemy and blows him and everyone around him to smithereens?
And those are just the wars we follow closely. Are the civil wars that have devastated Africa for decades any more humane? Adam Gopnik, a Canadian, in a recent article in The New Yorker (A Time to Kill, Apr 28/25) reconsiders the American Civil War in which fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, faced off against each other across a killing field over, in the end, the abandoned cause of slavery. Gopnik suggests, subtly, that Canadians and their American relatives might face a similar dilemma in the imaginable future.
For what? So that men can feel their existence is justified? We are looking for leadership to usher us away from this brink, and I agree that the face of it is better male, but I also think that the crux of it is female. Women have always led from behind – not solely, but primarily, and perhaps most productively. We raise our sons and nurture our husbands to rise above their testosterone. We teach them to be accountable to the goodness of their natures, not by criticizing every idea they ever had, not by playing Gotcha! with a vengeance, but by bolstering the positive at every opportunity.
I think doubling down on that is the next wave of feminism. Time to put our egos in our jean pockets and do the necessary. It’s an odd variation on the 60s mantra of Make Love Not War, but it deserves consideration.
