My doctor just told me I am a feminist. I was furious. Bloody quacks, spouting the first diagnosis that comes into their heads, regardless of how it might make a chap feel. So I’m coming to you for a second opinion. Just to check.
It fell out like this. My daughter was ill so I was down at the medical centre to get a prescription. I don’t see the doc much so we were having a catch up. Usual medical stuff (“No, I still don’t smoke, drink, do drugs or eat fried food, and yes, I’m still running marathons every week and living entirely on raw brassicas and steamed fish”) and then she asked if I was ready for Christmas and I said: “Yes, presents all sorted. I’ve got Kitty a train set and Sam this excellent little toy kitchen.”
And she laughed and said: “North London, eh?”
“What?” I said.
“Gender reversal presents,” she said. “Trains for the girl, pots and pans for the boy.”
“Gosh,” I said. “I hadn’t even thought about it. Kitty digs the train set at nursery, so I’ve got her one. Sam likes to help his mum in the kitchen so I’ve got him a stove. Am I going to mess them up for life? Should I swap the gifts round?”
“No, of course not,” says the doc. “I’m just glad you’re such a feminist.”
But I’m not. I am totally not. I just bought the kids things I thought they’d enjoy playing with so they’d shut up over the holidays and leave me to my drinking. There was no “equality” going on. Those families you occasionally read about where they put the boy in a dress and call him “Mopsy” so as not to reinforce gender behaviour until the kid has “decided” what sex to be, fill me with revulsion. If my son ever puts a dress on for any reason other than to play Desdemona in the house play at his all-boys school, there will be no end of trouble. There are allotted roles in this world for men and women, they are quite flexible these days, and I am happy with them as they are.
Of course I’m not a feminist. I’m a man. It is not my battle to fight. I’m not a feminist the same way I’m not an Islamist. And I would die before wearing a “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt, because I am not what a feminist looks like at all. Except insofar as on a bad morning I do bear a passing resemblance to Andrea Dworkin.
David Cameron’s refusal to wear one was the most statesmanlike gesture of his premiership so far, and the sight of those two simpering hermaphrodites, Miliband and Clegg, wearing theirs made me want to puke and vote Tory. Neither of which I have done since my teens.
I am aware I am out of tune with the zeitgeist: 2014 was the year we hit “peak fem”, with every area of human existence so thoroughly saturated with feminism that men had no option but to squeal: “Me too! Me! Me! Me! Me! I’m one! I’m one!”
Pathetic, slack-moobed, bollockless sycophants greasing up to the girls because to all intents and purposes it is a female consciousness that runs our social media and thus forms our collective opinion. These pathetic men declare themselves feminists — I’m talking comedians, writers, singers, politicians — because otherwise their careers are doomed. They do it in the same spirit as men in Nazi Germany joined the party, and it’s every bit as edifying to see.
I suppose it was inevitable that men who are nothing of the kind would start calling themselves feminists. With every woman now fully signed up — which is a relatively new saturation — the only place for this powerful ideology to expand was into the male population. And in ideology, as in business, it’s grow or die. It’s like Apple having to go into China.
But not me. Respect compels me to leave feminism to the women. I may be raising a short-haired daughter in trousers who wants to be a train driver and an oversensitive son who loves dancing and baking, but that does not make me a feminist.
For example, I married my wife only partly because she was hot, funny and available but mostly because — which is much more rare — she was prepared to lay her job aside, learn to cook and make every imaginable sacrifice to raise our children.
Working mothers are great. I had one. Have one. Double-income family, dreamy. You can buy all sorts of stuff. But then you have to get someone else to raise your babies. Also fine. Job creation. Jobs for women, indeed. Pay them loads. Awesome. But it wasn’t what I wanted for my kids. Sorry. I wanted my children’s mum to be at home for them. To bake cakes for the school fête. And I’ll deal with getting the money into the house, even if it means we have a bit less. Money isn’t everything, you know. I recognise and admire all the different ways of being a man and woman. But I do not live by them. So don’t you dare call me a feminist.
And I agree with Nigel Farage on breast-feeding. Not on Europe, not on immigration, not on smoking in pubs. But on breast-feeding, yes. The hysteria around that was mental. Women, sure, make a fuss. But, men? Shut up. The guy was only preaching discretion. In a civilised society everything should be done with discretion. Including breast-feeding.
And I’m so bored with equal pay. Broadly, pay is equal. In some areas, it isn’t. That’s life. There is never a good reason to pay one person more than another. And you don’t get paid more by marching in the street or moaning about it on the soppy Channel 4 News. You get paid more by withholding your labour until your demands are met.
I am paid more than most journalists not because I am a man (most of those who are paid better than me are probably women) or because I am a better writer, but because I am a better negotiator. If that has to do with gender, it has to do with gender. But if you’re one of those people (like so many feminists) who reaches for a cultural stereotype every time you need to explain your own misfortunes then you might as well say it’s because I’m a Jew.
I am also fed up with the tedious modern trope of “man flu” — the suggestion that men are hypochondriacs and women stoics. It is perpetuated by male feminists in their ceaseless self-abasing project to be liked by women, but is, in my experience, b~~~~. Women grumble about every little ailment and are far more likely to complain about being “tired” than men, as if it were an actual medical condition. Whereas men, by and large, accept that there is no such thing as tiredness: you are either asleep or awake, and if you are awake then you shut up and get on with doing what has to be done. So come on, doc. Give it to me straight. Am I really, honestly, a feminist?
I’ve found Giles Coren to a bit irritating but he makes some good points here, albeit a bit trad for my liking. Still, a MSM aknowledgement about the culture war that’s surely going on…
In Which We Serve 5 years, 1 month ago.
