Diary of a Homeless Man Pt IV

Days five and six in the bedsit...

I am tired. I think my wfe is too. The only person that is wide awake and full of energy is the little man who is blessedly oblivious to everything. As for the cause of this fatigue I think it is due to a combination of factors of which having a baby is the smallest.

It was good to be visited by a friend today although we think she came more to see Little Man more than us; but we will claim anything that will remind us that we exist and are not forgotten. It was also nice to be sent some messages of support and have offers of help from people even though there is little that can be done to help us at present. Well unless you feel like cooking us dinner...

Since moving into this bedsit our diets have rapidly gone downhill. Cooking in such a small place in a room that serves as a bedroom, a kitchen, living room, dining room and everything in between is far from pleasant or even comfortable. Your clothes end up smelling of food and come the end of the week you end up with a scent reminiscent of your local take away. But don't get it twisted there is nothing wrong with my cooking or the way it smells, I just think that when it comes to fragrances I would rather leave that in Jean Paul Gaultier's hands.

I also think that be treated like children is beginning to weigh heavily on us adults. In fact even as a child I had more respect and responsibility. Whenever we leave we have to hand our room keys in at the reception desk. Maybe my memory serves me wrong but as a 12 year old child my parents gave me my own house key which I kept and was my responsibility. It is requirements like this that belittle and in some small way dehumanise people that are forced to stumble down this path. I don't think it would be so bad if it was not for the fact that you are painfully aware that there is a lack of privacy and that you are not afforded basic rights. In many ways we have be come less than a second class citizen.

Let me explain that last statement. If you were sitting in your house would you expect the post man to attempt to barge into your house without knocking and say, "Oi, Mate. I am here to deliver your mail, oh and I need you to sign for it.". Well something very similar happened not once but twice yesterday. The first time the man was unsuccessful as the door was locked. The second time we were not so lucky as the person had keys for the room. So there was my wife sitting there breast all out of doors feeding the baby when the door is just flung wide open and a stranger proceeds to enter into what to all intents and purposes is our home. Such things would not happen if I was living in a detatched house in suburbia or even a council flat on a ghetto estate in an inner city. And thus you have it: Britain's third societal tier.

This experience has shown me thus far that the needs of the different groups that are homeless are vastly different and as things stand unless you are young, single and "at risk" your needs are not met, considered important, or yet worse even identified. Sadly I think the latter is closest to the truth.

The challenge for me now is what can I do about it when I am in a position to divert energies into attempting to make a difference to status quo.

The Marginalization of Men

Let me begin this by saying the oppression of women throughout history is wrong. To deprive them of a voice and not give them a vote is wrong. To feel and treat them as worth less than men due to their sex is wrong. There is no excuse or justification for how they have been treated. Having established this, I hope that any women reading this will keep that in the back of their minds and hopefully see the point that I am trying to make. I would also like to make it clear that for the sake of brevity I am not elaborating on a lot of things.

It is my assertion that with the feminism and its associated brand of equality, that men have become displaced and increasingly been pushed to the margins of society to the point that it is necessary to take a long hard look at gender roles within society and either return or redefine them.

This all begins with women gaining, and rightly so, the vote. However it is not this alone, it goes hand in hand with them gaining education, the right to work, equal pay etc etc without addressing or looking how these will impact on roles within society. Any of these rights on their own would not have caused a dramatic shift in the status quo, and as said some were rightly needed but the culminated effect of all of these would in turn have a catastrophic effect on society as we know it.

As women gained more and more rights feminism cultivated the mentality that men were not needed or obsolete. After all if a woman wanted something, she could get it for herself. And as for reproduction, isn't that what sperm banks and IVF were created for? This poses the question about men: What is their role? It is no longer one of provider. Women earn their own pay checks. It was no longer as protector; as they now vote and are treated as equals. It was no longer as father to a woman's children because now fathers are not essential to the process.

This insular approach that has developed is not limited to women. As women became more insular and believing in the idea that they could do it all alone, men's belief that they were redundant grew, and out of this feeling of being obsolete the idea that they only needed to concentrate on themselves and their own desires grew even greater. (Under the previous status quo men were very much focused on their own desires, this was simply exagerated because of the break down in traditional roles). So faced with both genders concentrating on themselves, the gulf between the sexes grew greater, and this translated even into relationships.

Now the belief is that you can have a relationship where the focus is the individual, and yet you are truly a 'couple' as opposed to simply two individuals that made the decision to live under the same roof and sleep in the same bed. This means that both people feel they can have a career and their home life will not suffer. That both people can lead seperate lives and the bond between them will not grow any weaker. The reality of society today however does not bear these concepts to be true. We are plagued with children that have no supervision. After school they are left to their own devices, nobody is home to help them with their home work. Nobody is home to provide them guidance. Nobody is at home to take the most basic of interest in them. (Admittedly sometimes it is both parents work out of necessity to pay the bills, but many times both work to achieve material dreams that are not essential and are achieved at the detriment of their children.)

It is my belief that the roles that men and women stem from the critical difference between them: namely the fact that one can bear children, where as the other cannot. Logically it would make sense that as there would be periods throughout a woman's life where she could not have children, that she would take care of the home and the man, able to work all year round would do so. However with the changes in society and laws, along with the introduction of maternity pay this is no longer necessary and as such it may be necessary to look at and redefine the gender roles. I am not saying that men should necessarily return to being the bread winners and that women should be pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen. Perhaps it may make more sense to reverse the roles especially in light of maternity pay. What I do believe is that there is a need for the traditional roles of provider and care giver to be maintained as they will help address many of the societal problems that we face today, but whether they are established based on sex or another criteria... that is not a question for me to answer.