The poor Long Suffering Husband started the day on the back foot. I was grumpy for many reasons, including the news, having lost my voice again, meetings and death. I really didn’t feel very well but that was no excuse for my over reaction.
It started with me showing him a thread on Twitter and telling him that my daughter and I were really impressed with people’s detective skills. To be fair, he probably hadn’t heard what I said because I have no voice. The thread started with a picture of two middle aged white men on a tube who looked a bit drunk. The picture had been taken by a young black girl who said that before Brexit men like this would never have had the courage to abuse her in the way they had and she was horrified about how justified they felt in telling her she should go ‘home’. They also called her uneducated for refusing to say she was from anywhere other than London. Within a few tweets people had managed to identify the men from a logo on a T-shirt and a bracelet. However, a few tweets later someone had managed to generalise, “Golf and Formula 1 just seems to attract the absolute *worst* type of people. Wonder what it is?”
The LSH finished reading and said, “I like golf and F1.” He had totally missed my point. I blew. Silently, of course, but he got the message. It’s one of those things that really upsets me. You see it a lot on Twitter when someone has been a misogynist or racist, the people who identify them because they are also male or white or play golf don’t condemn the behaviour but jump up and down shouting that they are not like that. Of course, by doing that they are acknowledging that the behaviour is bad but that just lessens the impact of the bad behaviour. It’s something women on Twitter get very annoyed about when discussing domestic abuse. Instead of coming straight out and condemning this horrible thing some (actually lots) of men put more energy into defending themselves.
It is a fact that the majority of violent acts are committed by men but it is also true that not all men commit them. But we like to divide the world into two. Girls are pink. Boys are blue. Men can’t cook. Women can’t play sport. None of these things are actually true. (I’m an accidental poet). Instead of perpetuating these myths it would be so much better if we tried to narrow the divide. Acknowledge the differences but accept that there is an overlapping spectrum of each gender. We are all people.
Since I started writing this blog a weird thing has happened. The BBC has run a smear test campaign, advising all ‘people’ with a vagina to get tested and a prostate campaign talking to ‘men’. It’s almost as if people are scared to use the word woman and here it would be the most appropriate use of the term: men with a womb should get tested. Women of Twitter seem to think that this has happened because of the threats of violence towards ‘cis’ women by ‘trans’ women. This is something I don’t understand but it seems as though some trans women are very angry with the women who were born with their genitals. You’d think that being born with the wrong genitals would be enough to be angry about. Again, I’m sure it’s only a small minority of trans women that are threatening violence. I do wonder if trans women need cervical smears because even though they have a vagina, they still don’t have a womb or a cervix.
I have also been reading Caroline Credo Perez’s book Invisible Women. This is a brilliantly researched book about the data gap in all things female. Things in our society are designed around the 50th percentile man, which isn’t appropriate for lots of women. It has made me think about how we need to acknowledge the difference as well as the similarities in our biological sex.
Before I finish this blog I would like to apologise to the LSH. Obviously, I know he would never racially abuse a young girl on the train because he plays golf and likes F1. He can cook and is a better housekeeper and shopper than I am and none of that threatens his masculinity and he is the only person I know who can win a coconut at the school fete.
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