A DAY FOR WOMEN

So what did I do on Wednesday, International Women’s Day?   I watched a game of football, of course – Barcelona against Paris St Germain, a game I had no interest in as far as the result was concerned and which did not feature anyone from Britain on either side or even as referees.  I also contributed to a charity that works against FGM and fixed up my house, doing things like mending an extractor fan which gave me a great sense of masculine pride. 

Do women still need a special day?  Yes, if they still face problems arising from inequality and violence.  No, if they have achieved equality and freedom from violence.  Obviously they have not reached full equality and still face violence so we cannot begrudge them a day in which they celebrate their achIEvements and identity.    They even have an hour every day on Radio Four for their own programme which men do not – although they often dominate the other twenty three.

Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the wife of the sexy young Prime Minister of Canada, caused a minor stir when she said that women should celebrate the men who support women in their drive for selfhood and equity.  We are supposed to be bigging up ourselves not our blokes, was the gist of these complaints, which were probably pretty mild in truth.  Not a lot happens in Canada, which is an eminently sensible and civilised country, so they need to make a fuss when they have the chance. 

This does raise the question of how much women see feminism as a women-only movement and how much as a a co-operation with men.  Men who whinge about feministas and feminazis like to portray women who hate men.  There is a lot of fear in these portrayals, the fear of exclusion of being rendered irrelevant and superfluous. 

Men probably need women more than women need men.   They need them if they want children, as they cannot do that bit on their own.  They need them if they want sex.  (They can do that on their own but it is not so much fun.)   They need them if they want love, which they can get from other men (becoming more common) - or from dogs (also surprisingly common).  Yet most men, when they think of their ideal lives, imagine a woman next to them with whom they can have children and share a home, a future, a bed.  As Percy Sledge sang in It’s a Man’s World, ‘… it would nothing without a woman or a girl’.   

The old contract was that men supported women financially, while women supported men emotionally – or sexually, if you prefer.  The system worked reasonably well for thousands of years but when western women became dissatisfied with their part of the bargain, which made them economically dependent as well as intellectually subservient, they began to throw off the shackles.  (I would certainly have done so.)  You cannot change biology, however, and women still have a monopoly on childbirth and generally have a closer relationship with their children when they are young.  If they are earning and achieving as much as their male partners – or, even more frightening, taking female partners – then those men are often left feeling redundant and without purpose.

This may have led to a growth in male homosexuality.  It is difficult to get accurate figures but it seems that gay men outnumber gay women by roughly two to one in the UK at the moment.  (Hence the complaints by women that it is so hard to find a straight bloke these days.)   It has also led to a widespread scepticism or hostility towards feminism from men who like women but feel excluded from the women’s movement.  As I said in the first of these essays, it feels like the party I am not invited to. 

Which brings us back to football.  Nothing could be a more male activity than dressing up in uniform and slugging it out on a patch of grass for a couple of hours, then shaking hands with the other lot and jumping into the bath together.  Football has done a lot to promote racial equality but nothing to encoureage acceptance of gays – and no successful soccer player has yet come out as gay.  Interestingly some rugby players have, even though they like to think of themselves as tougher than those who play the roundball game.

There is a lot of near gay stuff in male sport, football especially – hugging and kissing, jumping naked into the bath with other men, etc – and so maybe this subliminates the need for more obvious gay activity.  Women can watch footy but they do so in male terms, identifying with the team more than the sport, being absurdly partial, wearing the colours, abusing the referee and being plunged into despair or transported to ecstasy depending on the number of time eleven blokes wearing the same shirts kick the ball into the net.  George Orwell described sport as a modern substitute for war, a once male activity which is now being invaded by female soldiers in the front line.

Women do play football, of course, but not in the same teams as men and not with such great rewards or followings.  Those temperamental and talented young men with their enormous salaries, beards and tattoos might be the last real men on the planet.  Maybe that is why I wanted to watch them on International Women’s Day.

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