International Women's Day, So let's hear from a man

 It’s International Women’s Day and that means it’s time for a man to share his opinion. You would think actually, this day, should be a day of respectful silence for men. A day for once where our opinion can stay purely a thought with no requirement for it to be shared verbally or in writing with a woman.

I can hear the voice of every woman in the country collectively chiming… I can live with that. So by rights that should be the end of this blog whilst I take my silence.

Nah, not going to happen.

In lieu of my silence I would like to use to this blog to wonder why men struggle with such silence around women.

First let’s deal with the male voice choir requesting an International Men’s Day. In fact, there is one. It’s in November but nobody cared. Not even men. And that’s kind of the point. Most men don’t feel the need to campaign for recognition because we can’t claim history bypassed us or denied us. Men were ahead of the queue before queues were invented. This front of queue phenomenon has been sold as either natural male supremacy and that women should appreciate being an important second or alternately as a heroic need for us to queue on behalf of women to provide and share resources.   

Men are crying foul as we are bumped from the queue and women are asking for a share of the front spot. Sadly men colleagues, we have to recognise we’ve had the front seat since the beginning of humanity so we can gracefully sit this one out a little longer. It’s terrible I know.

This victim sentiment is powerful and moving. Having had all the patronage through thousands of years it is quite tragic to realise that we might not be as important as we like to think. Tiny violins are being played by women as they try not to collapse in hysterics. Also men complaining about women playing victim card in their campaigns, now claiming to be victims ourselves, is acute level irony.

Men do better please.

Seriously nothing bad ever happened because a woman got a job. Whilst a woman having a valid point of view might feel like some act of castration, it really isn’t. Men, here’s an experiment.  Close our eyes and mouth for a few moments and listen to said point of view. It’s scary I know but when we open our eyes once more, the world will still be there. The house will not have fallen down and all our bits will still be intact. We might even like it. After all, men, our egos have to do a lot of work so giving them a day off might do wonders for our longevity.

So why do us men fail at this so abysmally? It’s simple. Everything politically and socially is sold as a zero sum game. If we give women one of our chips then we will have less chips. Also if we give her one chip then she’s want more of them until we will have none left. It’s so unfair until we realise that we had far too many chips and keeping them all for our self is what’s being making us fat and ill. So share. But the world has an infinite number of chips. Giving women more chips doesn’t mean we have less because if we’re clever we just make more chips. Most of our resources, jobs and even queues, have more than enough spaces for men and women. It is simply a convenient perception that by sharing something, we automatically have less.

Observe the way politicians always talk of financial constraints where it is suggested if we give a nurse a pay rise, we have to drown a migrant. Why can’t we give nurses a pay rise and stop migrants drowning at the same time. Answer is. We can. We can do both and do lots of other things. That is what life is about, picking how we prioritise. You can have 1000 things on a list and order them in priority but still do all of them. Repeatedly we are told it’s the opposite of that. Men are being given the wrong message and education about this sharing business. I wonder who it is that keeps telling men that they are being deprived of something.

Oh that’s right…. Men.

So for the women of the world, I apologise for men. We are macho, tough, heroes, your natural superiors at the same time as being victims and fearful that you might do something better than we do. It’s not your fault we are complicated, contradictory beings that barely understand ourselves.

Enjoy your day Women. You deserve it today and every day because men have got a heavy debt to pay before we get to even.

Meanwhile, perhaps we can have a new day in the calendar for men. A ‘Get Over Yourself’ day. Men can spend the day in a vacuum or in the middle of a forest and told to shout out 100 opinions an hour. At the end of the day we can ask ourselves if nobody heard us speak, did anyone give a shit.