Opinion

GOING FOR BLOKE

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars

It's now 230 years since Mary Wollstonecraft published “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. Hasn’t the time flown? Here we are, just nine generations later and young women across the world step wearily into their predecessors’ battered and trampled shoes to trudge the same road in the fight for equality of rights, opportunities and even unbelievably in this 21st century ownership of their own bodies. Despite many hard-won advances, however, my gender still rules the world, pretty much uninhibited. Why is it this way? Well, aeons ago, after the dinosaurs but before Fred Flintstone, male humans found that disagreements with their womenfolk could usually be settled with violence. On that basis of brute strength alone, Fred settled in to enjoy gender domination for the next 300,000 years. A threat surfaced in the late 18th century when the Industrial Revolution brought machinery which undermined the need for muscle power in many areas of life. But although this process expanded at warp speed over the following centuries, the patriarchy had built the necessary power structures to protect its sovereignty. The subjugation of women was thus assured. Go Fred. The result we all live with today is swaggering ‘macho’ politics, where compromise is seen as ‘losing face’ and cooperation as weakness. Today’s ‘leaders’ with egos matched in scale only by their incompetence, stoke outrage and division for their own ends, aided by a largely compliant (male owned) media. Let’s face it, drawing battle lines is so much easier than actually governing. Centuries of popular entertainment have reinforced this nonsense, the tough-guy hero rescuing the helpless female. It was inculcated in generations of young men. When my brother and I were small and beset by cuts and bruises from bikes or football, our mother would shush our whining with “No tears, big boys don’t cry. Be a brave soldier”. This repressing of emotion in boys was the norm in those days and that military analogy was typical. Decades later when my own son and daughter were small, I suspect I also responded differently to each when their tears ran, following a fall. (Luckily for me, they still turned out pretty wonderful). Another, seemingly innocuous, example from some years ago nevertheless stuck in my head like Velcro because it perpetuates this tedious stereotype: a UK television series presented by the chef, Tom Kerridge. When a recipe called for an item to be seared, Mr Kerridge grabbed a small blowtorch, enthusiastically declaring this to be “proper blokey cooking”. Undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek but the joke still relied on the idea that the introduction of a dangerous, firebreathing implement would render the idea of cooking less effete, and hence more ‘acceptable’ to us guys. Phew, for a moment there I felt patronised. The complexities around gender roles, how we define and perceive them, make the Gordian Knot look like a party bow but the debate gets depressingly adversarial, all understanding lost in the din. It’s like an overcrowded bar where everyone has a megaphone. Resolution surely demands objectivity, a willingness to listen to a different viewpoint and for most people to shut the hell up. I have zero experience of being discriminated against. I have never been stalked or bullied into feeling ashamed of my body. Nor have I been excluded because of my sex or dictated to by what someone else believes. Since I cannot imagine enduring any of these scenarios, I keep quiet in the hope that I might, you know, learn something. But here we are in 2022 with gender pay gaps, glass ceilings and mediaeval legislation designed to control women, none of which apply to men. Quelle surprise. So, men have ruled the world’s roost with very few interruptions for half a million years. How’s this working out? I think we can all agree it’s women’s turn. A survey by the Pew Research centre in the US a few years ago found that in areas like honesty, communication and – crucially - conflict resolution, women were widely considered superior to men. Despite this, only about 12% of countries have a female head of state/government. Humankind continues to tackle existential challenges in the manner of a soccer team taking to the pitch for the World Cup Final while leaving half their players on the bench. Male dominance across the world is cynical, self-defeating and downright stupid. In its hubris, my gender’s refusal to yield control has created a monster which damages lives everywhere. It was foretold. Mary Wollstonecraft tragically died shortly after giving birth to a daughter in 1797. Her daughter went on to write ‘Frankenstein’.

So, men have ruled the world’s roost with very few interruptions for half a million years. How’s this working out?