Man Gas

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.