Re: Die Rolle der Frauen
Geschrieben von Andreas am 05. April 2003 21:21:30:
Als Antwort auf: Re: Die Rolle der Frauen geschrieben von another am 05. April 2003 20:48:11:
Hallo another
Ich kann Dir nur zustimmen. Die verheerenden Folgen der gegenwärtigen hgesellschaftlichen Entwicklung wird man in ein paar Jahrzehnten in ihrer ganzen Tragweite zu sehen bekommen. Es geht nicht nur um die schleichende "Heterogenisierung" der Gesellschaft in Folge der Zunahme des Anteils junger Menschen aus fremden Kulturen. Vielmehr wird der Zusammenhalt und damit die Belastbarkeit der Gesellschaft als Ganzes stark geschwächt werden.
Hierzu möchte ich wieder einmal Widdowson und Beesley zititieren:
Aus: Part3, Chapter 25, Internal Discohesion (http://website.lineone.net/~marc.widdowson/Part3/Chapter25.html)
In referring to the rupture of social bonds- what we call discohesion - Francis Fukuyama has spoken of the Great Disruption. This is manifest in a series of social indicators, from divorce rates to juvenile delinquency, all of which have been rising for decades, in almost every developed country. At the heart of the Great Disruption is the decline of the nuclear family, i.e. the growth of single parenthood through marriage breakdown and illegitimacy. This is related to a whole host of other social defects, such as poverty (single parent families have fewer resources than those with two parents), child abuse (step-parents are more likely to be abusers than natural parents), and crime (teenage boys, who commit most crime, are more likely to be out of control if their fathers are absent). Furthermore, children who experience these problems when growing up are more likely to repeat the pattern themselves, creating the snowball effect which is readily apparent in the statistics.
Every kind of social pathology - suicide, alcoholism, murder, mental disorder - has been on the rise over the last 20 years. These are manifestations of the alienation, purposelessness, and generally low respect for other human beings, that come from breaking the bonds of social cohesion. The trends are world-wide. Even countries in East Asia, like Japan and Korea, find that their much prized social cohesion is giving way, with divorce and youthful rebelliousness on the increase. Singapore, which has boasted of its prosperity achieved without Western decadence and individualism is finding its younger generation to be increasingly independent. The country faces a rising crime rate, including a proliferation of video piracy as a way round TV censorship (indicating how technology like the video recorder undermines the political authority's ability to impose its will - see Chapter 23).
It should scarcely be surprising, therefore, that the rise of illegitimacy has also been associated with a rise in single parenthood, which for the most part means single motherhood. In Africa, a continent that is leading us into the dark age, male populations are perennially adrift and 40% of households are headed by women. The developed countries are moving strongly towards the same pattern. A 1997 report professed to expose the 'myth' of the feckless and absent father. It pointed out that there has been a big rise in the amount of time fathers spend on childcare, while in 64% of households fathers are the sole or main breadwinner, and only one father in eight is not living with any of his natural children. While these figures may not be as lurid as some commentators lead us to expect, they are by no means optimistic and represent a huge social change. Of course the traditional nuclear family has not disappeared, but it falls a long way short of the near-universality that it enjoyed not many decades ago. The fact that there is a continual demand for more housing, at a time when our population is more or less static, shows that households are getting smaller. Indeed, half of all households in developed countries are composed of only one or two people. This represents social atomisation, i.e. discohesion, on a large scale.These trends are not autonomous and therefore unlikely to be easily reversed. They are connected to other significant developments in our social institutions - developments that in other contexts we think of as benign and even desirable. The most significant of these is the establishment of the welfare state. The existence of this safety net has made it possible for a young woman with a baby to be independent. There is little compunction on the father to provide support when he knows that she and her baby will be fed, housed and clothed by the state. Nor is there the same motivation for the relatives to put pressure on him in this respect. And indeed the young woman probably does not want him there either if he is unemployed and devoid of obvious prospects. Why should she share her space with some restless yobbo, who would probably reduce her standard of living rather than contribute to it? This is very different from the way it was in 19th century Liverpool, as epitomised by Herman Melville's observation of a single mother starving to death in the gutter. Getting pregnant outside a stable relationship does not carry the same drastic consequences as it did then. It is not surprising, therefore, that the advent of social security has seen an epidemic of unmarried teenage motherhood in developed countries. In 1998, for example, Britain registered the highest rate in the world.
Thus, it is not primarily that young women have become more likely to participate in sex and get pregnant. Indeed, improvements in contraceptive technology have made unplanned pregnancy less likely. The point is that they can do so without drawing themselves, their children, and the father into the network of social ties that marriage involves. In the 1950s, it has been estimated, over 60% of brides were pregnant at the altar. The crucial thing was that parenthood led to marriage for that was the only way to avoid social stigma and, for the mother, severe economic hardship and/or dependence on her own probably unimpressed parents. Now that whole logic has disappeared, with predictable consequences. Improved contraception, if anything, exacerbates the problem because it makes it possible for young men to do what comes naturally without being encumbered by the traditional social obligations of marriage.
Discohesion means that people are not tied to each other by a strong network of mutual obligations. They are freer, but society as a whole is more vulnerable to external shocks, and more likely to break apart. One might think that that is not a problem, so long as there is no external shock, or so long as economic and political ties give people a reason to stay together. However, the picture is not as cosy as that. Broken homes and single parent families impose tangible social costs. Sociologists such as David Popenoe (?) have established at length that the absence of a father is bad not only for the unwed mother but also for the children. These children do worse academically and have greater social problems than those who are brought up in stable two-parent relationships. Violent crime - and remember that crime is a corollary of discohesion - follows the same spatial and temporal pattern as illegitimacy and divorce. In America, over the decade from 1985, murders committed by 14-17 year-olds rose by more than half. By the late 90s, multiple shootings in the playground became a miniature epidemic and schools were running classes on how to control anger.
Rightly or wrongly, the stereotyped roles of the traditional family gave men and women clear parts in the social project and this was more important for men than for women. That is to say, a woman's role as mother is fairly well-defined by the simple facts of biology. She is needed to bear the child and to suckle it. However, the need for men is less obvious. A man can quite easily have no knowledge of his child whereas that is impossible for a woman. Thus, the family, in which women and children depend on a man for status and for at least some part of their subsistence, gives men by sociological means what biology does not bestow - i.e. a purpose, or a sense of being needed. The erosion of the family and the discrediting of these stereotyped roles has left men seeming and feeling somewhat superfluous. Now that women can do everything that men have traditionally done, men are being psychologically marginalised. Nor is this some empty complaint. It has real consequences. Over the 1980s, for example, there was a 45% increase in teenage suicide among boys combined with a 23% decrease among girls. Suicide is, of course, the classic response to purposelessness and feelings of being unwanted. The other side of this is seen in the shootings at Jonesboro, in which one of the thirteen year old perpetrators aimed to kill all the girls who had rejected his precocious attentions. As one commentator noted, these days the inadequate male syndrome begins early. Thus, our societies are preparing to raise generations of young men who have no satisfactory orientation to adult authority, who lack self-control, who are not tied down by the obligation to get married and support a family, and who suffer from ineffable feelings of purposelessness, resentment and rage. A few of them may commit suicide, but the majority are just out there - embittered and adrift. It is an explosive situation - the kind of combustible material on which a dark age feeds.