WHETHER it’s seeing swaggering blokes win footy finals, or drink beer out of a shoe, you’d be forgiven this week for thinking testosterone is back in fashion. But contact sports are about the last bastion of traditional masculinity, and even they are fast losing their cachet.

Among the intelligentsia, such overt displays of male aggression are decidedly on the nose, and beady eyes are always on the lookout for some indiscretion to crank up the outrage meter.

The fact is that masculinity is under threat like never before. The very existence of a Y chromosome gives rise to accusations of violence, aggression and patriarchy.

Between gender fluidity imperatives, girl power indoctrination, pretend gender pay gaps, and the characterisation of little boys as incipient wife bashers, the fragile wonder of boyhood is being demonised.

There’s even now a university in the United States offering classes to “question and deconstruct toxic masculinities”. Duke University in North Carolina has created a “safe space” where men can discard male “privilege” and “toxic” masculinity.

They needn’t have bothered. Every primary school classroom is a “safe space” to rid young boys of any notion of male privilege.

You might be five years old and interested in dressing up like Batman and playing bullrush in the playground. But in the classroom you will be told that your exuberance is bad. You are a “bad boy”, if that’s not already an oxymoron. You are a boy. Therefore you are bad.

I have seen eight-year-old boys kept in at lunchtime as punishment for jiggling in their seats. Needless to say they were climbing the walls by the end of the day.

My sons endured primary schools where every physical activity they enjoyed in the playground was gradually banned and their sense of adventure curtailed.

I once was helping out in a Year 2 classroom and watched a little girl reach over and smack a little boy on the hand and instruct him to stop doing whatever he was doing to annoy her. What was astonishing was that he accepted her physical rebuke and she was not the slightest bit chastened when I intervened. Talk about privilege.

Boys have absorbed this lesson from women for a long time. Up to a point such pre-emptive rebuke to boyhood tamed testosterone-fuelled instincts. But then teachers, even mothers, and society at large started taking it all too far.

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Where once we used to lament that girls lagged behind boys and invent all sorts of strategies to right the imbalance, now there is untrammelled joy as boys fall further and further behind. Last year 82 girls topped the state in at least one subject compared with just 34 boys. And at university, 60 per cent of graduates are women.

Such a gender skew is now just taken for granted as the due of women who, we are constantly told, are the smarter sex. Never mind that the bell curve on any IQ test shows more girls clustered around the average and more boys at the top and the bottom; in other words males are more likely to be genii or imbeciles.

It would be a brave academic who raised such a point on any university campus today. A generation has grown up thinking there is something wrong with maleness.

Children are bombarded with anti-male messages and complaints of gender ­discrimination as social engineers reach for younger targets for their illogical ideas.

Reader Kris this week complained about taking her kids to the movies only to have them exposed to an ad from ANZ bank depicting little boys as intrinsically monstrous. It showed boys and girls doing chores. “And then the girls were paid less than the boys, just like in the real world.”

The boys were then shamed for being male. One poor little blonde boy, the archetypal inheritor of white male privilege, is humiliated as two little girls lecture him. He can’t find anything to say as they bombard him: “What we’re trying to tell you is that it’s not fair that boys get paid more than girls.”

The whole gender pay gap is a hoax. Industries statistically dominated by men tend to attract better pay than those traditionally dominated by women. And then there is the choice women make, willingly, to trade career heights for job flexibility in order to raise children, which a lot of mothers would agree is a priceless privilege.

ANZ claims “the world needs reshaping”. More like its board needs another diversity KPI. Quite why it wants to perpetuate a myth that insults the intelligence of potential future customers is a mystery.

But Social Services Minister Christian Porter did the same with the government’s shameful $30 million domestic violence ad, which showed a little boy at a barbecue slamming a door on a little girl, causing her to drop a plate of food, while her mother absurdly intones: “He just did it because he likes you.”

What schlock. Real people don’t behave like any of those characters, and why are all little boys cast as the villains. The ad campaign is also, as Warren Mundine has pointed out so eloquently this week, a travesty of the truth. It will do nothing to alleviate domestic violence, which is ­endemic in indigenous communities.

But, of course, the aim was not really to protect victims of domestic violence. It was to reinforce a negative stereotype of masculinity.

I LIKE YOUR OLD JOB BETTER THAN YOUR NEW JOB

THE closing date for applications for the job of commissioner of State Emergency Services was last Friday. That is the job ably carried out by Murray Kear, until he was dragged through ICAC on bogus charges, which destroyed his career and nearly ruined him financially with legal bills.

Kear, 52, was exonerated and awarded costs when the allegations against him were tested in a proper court seven months ago, with the magistrate scathing about ICAC’s conduct. Yet Premier Mike Baird did not reinstate Kear, as he was morally obliged to do, or even invite him to reapply for his old job. He didn’t apologise to Kear and his deputy, Steve Pearce, for the disgusting way they were treated, or reimburse them for lost earnings.

The Premier didn’t even bother responding to a letter from Kear’s wife Leanne begging for a meeting.

Despite the fact that even Chief Justice Tom Bathurst expressed concern that the presumption of innocence is being dangerously eroded in this state, the Premier’s inaction has given tacit approval to ICAC’s trashing of innocent lives.

Meanwhile, Tara McCarthy, the former SES employee who made the corruption allegations to ICAC (which were dismissed by five separate independent investigations) has a cushy job back in Baird’s public service, last year even earning a promotion.

For the Premier to discard a man with an exemplary record of 30 years in fire and emergency services is a huge loss to NSW. We will be less well prepared for the next crisis.

But at least there are still decent civic leaders, such as David Lowy, who has snapped up the talent Baird rejected.

Lowy this week appointed Kear, a keen pilot, to run his precious ­Temora Aviation Museum in the Riverina. The museum, featuring a unique collection of operational vintage warplanes, is a labour of love for the scion of the billionaire Lowy clan, who is also a national aerobatics champion.

“I miss and will continue to miss being a part of the Emergency Services,’’ Kear said, “but I have great colleagues from many Emergency Service agencies who will keep my need for contact alive.”

He says he will also continue the fight to right past wrongs and ­ensure that “no one else has to ­experience what I have”.