The last couple of weeks I’ve been a little dismayed by the
public profile of my male brethren. Not actual people – but the peculiar
individuals we get to see on the radio, telly and tinternob. Jeremy *unt kicked
it all off with his spectacularly useful “personal opinion” that abortion
should be limited to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. There is something singularly
bewildering about a man wading into a debate they are uniquely unqualified to
comment on. A couple of weeks later came the journalist Mehdi Hasan defending
himself on the Today programme for this article
claiming he can be anti-abortion and left wing. As he described the backlash
against him he seemed to be missing the big question of who actually gives a
toss? I was more sympathetic towards the woman presenting the pro-choice side
of the argument who sounded genuinely tired about having yet again to discuss a
distinctly female subject with two men. Surely this is a penis free zone no?
Of course there are countless women who have tiny hearts and
when push came to shove would think Hitler was actually doing a “really good
job in getting the country back on it’s feet again” were they in 1930s Germany – lackofsouldom is not gender specific - but removing men from this debate would at least be a
start.
A few days later a familiar narrative raised its nonsensical
head again, brought about by Hanna Rosin’s publishers flogging her book “The
Death of Men and The Rise of Women.” The author and publisher are of course
blameless – they’re just trying to sell a book – but there was no excuse for
the pithy male on the radio, commenting earnestly
- you’ve heard this before – how men, without wars to fight, and with
women now competing with them in the jobs market have now become obsolete and
are in crisis.
But they’re not though. Are they? Not really. When I walk
out my front door, the men I see don’t appear to be hobbling around, bent over
in existential masculine angst. Usually they’re going to work, or buying some
beans, or driving their car or something. Likewise, the women I see don’t tend to
walk around with their fannies out standing over the throat of withered men
screaming “I WIN YOU DIE!” Usually they’re going to work, or buying some beans,
or driving their car or something.
Consider if there was a war to fight – well there’s one
really dangerous one right now – and quite a few men have gone out there to
fight in it and die – how would men fare? Well, I for one would probably start crying, which as far as I'm aware isn't very useful on the battlefield.
So would most men I know. I know some harder people and they could do the
fighting but I couldn’t and I don’t want to. But I think when people say “wars
to fight” they mean Nazi Germany, in that you don’t get to choose, so that
effectively what men really want is the spectre of fascism threatening humanity’s
annihilation. The Good Old Days.
A further speciman was on the radio, just days later, plugging his
(almost certainly bad) book and describing in the process how every man needs a
shed. Why? Where’s the woman’s shed? Does he hate his family that much that he
needs to go and sit in a dark room on his own? To be happy?
If men really are in crisis, it’s probably because they can’t
stop the projectile sewage spewing from their mouths. Nobody wants to hear
it. In fact – given the history of global suppression of women, evident in the
fact that in “history” there aren’t really very many “women” – there’s very
little of use men can say about gender politics and gender specific issues like
abortion. What they can say safely is this: That they are pro-feminist and
anti-sexist. That’s about it. Exasperatingly, some men will attempt to claim
that they are feminists – you know
the kind – teach yoga, wear hemp, inflict sustained psychological abuse on
their partners - thereby missing the fundamental pre-requisite of being
feminist: being a woman.
Ironic really – that the sexist stereotype of women “gassing
away” should now be far more appropriately attributed to a certain type of man
who really, for want of a better way of putting it, should simply shut up.
