Young, hapless, hopeless — it’s all men’s fault

Cockney rebel: Roger Moore is up in arms about defending the Queen’s English
12 April 2012

Should you have made the bad call of being born a boy in the past 30 years or so, it's time for some home truths. Best delivered in front of a mirror, if you can find one that doesn't shatter at the sight of you.

Ready? Pulled yourself away from your Xbox, yeah? Now, after me: "I am cruel, cold, lazy, shallow, lame, insensitive. Complacency and general hopelessness are the root causes of my failure. I am supersensitive about anything that could spell constraint."

OK? Back to your computer game. But it might interest you to know that one of those phrases was used by the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute for its recent report on male graduates. It revealed that 17.2 per cent of male university leavers, as opposed to 11.2 per cent of females, are not finding work — a generation of fail-males is predicted.

The rest I nicked from a new dating manual, What The Hell Is He Thinking?, in which twentysomething Londoner Zoe Strimpel furthers the research of the seminal He's Just Not That Into You by interviewing men of roughly her age. A pair of contrasting briefs, for sure — but they throw up similar insights. That the modern male is a useless oaf we are told often enough. But who knew there were so many parallels between our professional and personal inadequacies?

Example: Strimpel finds that many men are holding out for "marriage material", so see nothing wrong with being beastly to the girls they fool around with in the meantime. Likewise, they have unrealistic hopes of landing a fabulously well-paid position and little appetite for the mundane work in between.

Or try this. It has been suggested that male graduates fail because they are no good at "appearances" and "soft presentation". Strimpel notes that while women strive hard to meet these expectations, men let themselves go "with impunity". Fatal, in an interview.

Thousands of research grants are now being spent to find out why being born with testicles post-1980 should have led to such turpitude. Waste of money, when it is almost certainly the result of internet pornography, computer games, hooded tops and Premiership football.

What is to be done is the trickier question. Mass castration? Enforced Sex and the City viewing? A cull?

Or perhaps something more radical. It is striking the number of young men you meet outside women's advice columns and think-tank reports who are quite reasonable people: far more respectful of women than their parents' generation were and realistic about their career prospects in harsh times. Sure, some are idiots — but idiocy is not dependent on chromosomes. Whatever the problems of young men, it doesn't help that the mainstream view is so negative.

Perhaps try a little understanding? As Strimpel finally learns,"some of them are even more sensitive than we are".

The name's Bond, chav Bond

Roger Moore has been having a bit of a rant about people what don't talk proper. Perhaps he's still reeling at being knocked down the 007 pecking order following Daniel Craig's emergence, but he's really narked.

"Can you imagine James Bond speaking cockney?" he thunders. "Or ordering a martini — shaken, not stirred — in Brummie or Scouse?" Didn't Sean Connery do so with a Scottish brogue? No matter — Moore goes on to conclude that people like him, who speak the Queen's English, are discriminated against. "Thanks to a kind of reverse snobbery, even newsreaders and reporters, who once spoke like Bond, are expected to have a regional twang and a colloquial turn of phrase."

I always listened to my gran when she told me to pronounce my Ts and turned out fairly well-spoken. I don't think it's ever hindered me — quite the opposite, in fact, even in these crazy days when people from Liverpool are allowed on the telly. Maybe it's not the way you say it, but what you say, Rog?

A click on the wilder side of democracy

"Pornography is very much a personal view. An old friend of mine used to say that the erotic ends where pubic hairs begin ..."

So begins one ricksavage, personally appealing to the Government of this country to repeal the laws banning explicit and graphic depictions of consensual sex. He submits this at the invitation of Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, at yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk, an exercise in participatory democracy for the digital age. It's worth a few clicks.

"I propose we decriminalize sex between two members of a different species," posits asdasd. "Why should two beings involved in a loving bi-species relationship be punished? I am a zoophile and I feel that I am unfairly criminalize[d] for my sexual persuasion."

Thank goodness the Government will completely ignore all of this.

Ping pong, the perfect game for a pavilion

I like the look of Jean Nouvel's Summer Pavilion, which has just been unveiled by the Serpentine Gallery, bright red like a London bus. Never mind the architecture, though — its best feature by far is the inclusion of a bunch of ping pong tables.

This sport of the gods — actually, the perfect combination of game and sport — has made significant in-roads in the capital recently. There are a few concrete tables in London Fields, and they're cropping up in a few trendy bars too.

Every year, the Serpentine Pavilion prompts the sad thought that star architects such as Nouvel so rarely build anything permanent in London. This time the table tennis, at least, should stick around.

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