Feminism: The Ugly Truth. Mike J.D. Buchanan
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night Nicholas Soames MP, the former Tory defence minister, who is a member of White’s, Pratt’s and the Turf, said: ‘This is another sign that living under New Labour is like living in Soviet Russia. What sensible woman wants to be a member of a men’s club?’ ’
A good point, Mr Soames, and well made. Now there’s a man you can imagine tucking enthusiastically into rhubarb crumble and custard at his club. The following article was printed in the paper the next day, titled ‘The Irritations of Modern Life: Men-only Clubs’:
‘I have often wondered what men do in all-male clubs. Million-pound deals? Homosexual rituals? Men, especially if they belong to the Garrick Club, are reticent, giving the impression that it involves little more than long lunches, at which they get slightly squiffy and eat nursery food. Yet, as soon as someone proposes changing the law to force such clubs to admit women, it is as if the very foundations of civilisation had begun to shudder.
‘A grotesque curtailment of freedom of association – an almost totalitarian assertion that the state should be able to decide with whom you can spend your own free time on property private to you...’ is how The Daily Telegraph greeted the news that the Government is thinking of banning men-only establishments. Yikes! Next thing you know, Tony Blair will be personally knocking on Telegraph readers’ doors, pushing a female across the threshold and instructing them to talk to her.
Of course, there are few subjects so likely to fire up a right-wing leader-writer. The age-old right of the British upper classes to exclude outsiders is slowly being whittled away. The Reform Club has admitted women for years; even Lord’s is not the bastion it was. What’s left for the man who sometimes feels the need to be with people who, not to put too fine a point on it, aren’t going to go all funny and exhibit symptoms of pre-menstrual tension?
Men’s clubs are an anachronism. Their very existence institutionalises discrimination, draping it with a veil of respectability. When I witnessed the reaction to this mild move towards equality, I felt as if I’d been transported back to a time when misogyny was so firmly taken for granted that most people didn’t even have a name for it. Now we do, and it’s not acceptable. The bad news for club bores, tucking into bread-and-butter pudding in Covent Garden – or, indeed, a working men’s club in Halifax – is that the time has come to grow up.’
Ah yes. ‘An anachronism.’ ‘The time has come to grow up.’ I don’t suppose the journalist – a lady – is quite so agitated by the Women’s Institute, even many years later. And with such arguments women seek to hide the real reasons they want to stop men associating freely with one another, whatever they are. Maybe they’ve learned of our plan to withdraw voting rights from them. Damn. We’ve managed to keep that under wraps for years. On to Woman’s Hour, a staple of BBC Radio. From their website:
‘October 7 1946 was the start of something big – it was the first broadcast of a programme designed to celebrate, entertain and inform women.’
I’ve never heard a man suggest there should be a programme for men, Man’s Hour possibly, ‘a programme designed to celebrate, entertain and inform men’.
I often heard Woman’s Hour when driving around the country on business, and did so on 27 April 2009. It’s often an interesting programme but some topics come up with mind-numbing regularity. One is the so-called ‘gender pay gap’, annoyingly – to some people, at least – still a reality 40 years after the 1970 Equal Pay Act. The report concerned Harriet Harman who was putting forward the Equality Bill, which included provisions to require organisations to publish individuals’ salaries. The inference, as always, was that women are discriminated against by men.
But the gender pay gap isn’t attributable to discrimination against women once a number of factors are taken into account, such as choice of profession, career breaks for having children, many women preferring part-time work, and women taking earlier retirement than men. Not that you’ll ever hear this mentioned on Woman’s Hour. Or at least I haven’t heard it in the past 30 years of listening occasionally to the programme.
A later discussion in the same episode concerned women giving up highly paid stressful jobs to enable them to work for themselves, often on low incomes, or to do jobs they found more fulfilling. One of the women had been a ‘high-flying lawyer’. The general tone of the discussion was a celebration of women who decided to forsake lucrative but demanding jobs in favour of more job satisfaction. One woman made the following observation:
‘So many women I know are crying themselves to sleep on a Sunday night, because they really can’t bear the thought of going to work the next day.’
No connection was made by the good ladies on the programme between the gender pay gap and women voluntarily opting out of highly paid, stressful, unfulfilling jobs. Nor was it considered worth raising that even if a gender pay gap did still exist, it might be attributable to men being more willing than women to continue with such jobs. And so the myths of discrimination against women and the ‘glass ceiling’ roll on year after year.
The enthusiasm with which politicians – both female and male – keep perpetuating the myth of the gender pay gap is surely a testimony to its enduring vote-delivering powers among female voters. In October 2010 Prime Minister David Cameron, during a major interview on BBC television, made a ridiculous statement: that the difference between men’s pay and women’s pay was ‘scandalous’.
Many women work to achieve financial security, but this is generally not their preferred option. Women’s search for financial security has traditionally focused on securing a higher status partner, and this has remained unchanged into the modern era. In his 1998 book The Secrets of Love and Lust, Simon Andreae had some interesting things to say about women’s search for ‘Mr Right’:
‘Handsome men will pass their physical advantages down to the children of whoever they mate with, giving those children a head-start in the race for reproductive success. The indices of conventional male good looks – a rugged jaw, broad shoulders, a full head of hair and a healthy physique – are also indications of genetic health and strength. Yet looks in the opposite sex seem to be less important to women than they are to men, and less important than other factors.
In Douglas Kenrick’s study of the percentages required of potential partners before women would consent to dating, having sex, steady dating or marrying them, ‘good looks’ was the only criterion where women, across the board, were ready to accept a lower percentage value than men. They were even prepared to consider men of below-average physical attractiveness… as long as they had other things to offer…
In Glenn Wilson’s study of British sexual fantasies, men were found to fantasise more frequently about group sex than any of the other scenarios he presented to them. But women had a very different fantasy life. For them, by far the most characteristic fantasy was straight, monogamous sex with a famous personality. The argument runs that famous men today, like village headmen in the past, and successful hunters during the early period in which we evolved, would have acquired the status and resources to furnish a woman and her children with more food and protection than the next man.
Over the incremental advances of time, evolution would therefore have favoured women who developed mental programmes which allowed them to judge the signs of status within their particular environment and culture, and calibrate their desire accordingly.
Fame is not the only indicator of a man who is high in status and rich in resources. In 1986 the American psychologist Elizabeth Hill published the results of an experiment in which she asked her students to describe what sort of clothes they considered high-status men to wear, and what sort of clothes they considered low-status men to wear. Among the former were smart suits, polo shirts, designer jeans and expensive watches; among the latter were nondescript jeans, tank tops and T-shirts.
She then photographed a number of different men in variations of both styles of dress and showed the photographs to a different group of female students, asking them to rate each one for attractiveness. Overall, the same models were found more attractive when wearing the high-status costumes than when wearing the low-status ones.
It’s important to note, though,