Europe, Gender, Demographics & Shakespeare

Sex. There’s much talking about sex these days. For starters the immigration agenda has taken a bizarre sexual twist ever since the New Year’s Eve events in Cologne when males of an Arab/Middle Easten complexion assaulted a large number of women taking advantage of the cover afforded by the holiday celebration confusion. As if the immigration issue were not a problem on its own, the further twist in the tale has meant that new warning signs have been flagged as to the huge gender imbalance when it comes to the influx of refugees to Europe.

Most refugees, about one in four, are male and the prediction doing the rounds is that this will cause a huge demographic shift in Europe with an even worse male to female ratio than already exists. We were used to hearing how the new wave of immigrants were beneficial for the economy in the long run, how they would plug the holes caused by the low birth rate in Europe and how they could be part of a long-term solution to solve the pension time-bomb. The worry now is that there are too many men among them. The danger in this sense is sociological since it turns out that social scientists have long been telling us that violence is linked not to poverty or religion but to the failure to provide a critical mass of young men with something constructive to do.

Which is ironic really since Europe with its crisis-driven unemployment rate had already a large mass of bored young men who could have been easily attracted to violence. Little wonder really that the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were homegrown Europeans and not refugees from the latest Syrian conflicts. The warnings do not stop there. Skewed sex ratios in immigration flux means not only new dangerous masses in Europe but also the neutering of the countries of origin. Those left behind will never be able to recover and reconstruct. The Single Male Refugee risks becoming a new problem.

Funny then that the new director (Emma Rice, the first female artistic director) of the Globe theatre – the spiritual home of Shakespearean drama – has chosen her debut season to skewer the figures of acting on stage. She believes that more females should take up the male roles in theatre and has set a 50/50 numerus clausus for performances. It is not only Lady Macbeth who will be calling to be “unsexed” in the future – this banal effort at ultra-feminism threatens the foundations of Shakespearean drama but is set to mirror the absurd results we are now used to seeing when it comes to promoting feminist extremes.

It is dangerous to define the issue of immigration on the basis of gender. A refugee’s nature should not be determined by gender but by nature of his or her plight. While the perils of massing large numbers of unemployed men in Europe are understandable the solution should lie beyond a banalisation of some kind of gender driven numerus clausus. All the world may be a stage, but emulating the Globe’s new artistic director’s trends would be quite a comedy of errors.