SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 3 - Do you have a problem with women?

"Do you have a problem with women?" she asked.
"I think I have a problem with people, to be honest. I seem to upset everyone. I can show you a list of all the men I've had to block."

Women's rights people often assume (that word again) that if you question feminism in any way at all, that you're anti-women but in fact I'm the opposite. Most of my life I've been quite strongly anti-men, with quite a hefty dose of self-loathing thrown in. Misandry, despite protestations, is a real thing - many men I know are somewhat ashamed to be men, despite being caring, sensitive, insightful people. Some acknowledge their own privilege despite the fact their wife is in a much better paid, more prestigious job than they are. They somehow feel accountable for the things other men do - criminals and oligarchs - even though they're ordinary working class blokes and have no more power to change things than their wives, and are just as badly affected by the injustice. 

I had a lot of trouble with men and boys when I was young. I spent the first five years of my life alone with my mum, who was depressed. I'd never met any children before I started school and I had no idea how to deal with them. I still don't. I kept to myself. Later my dad became worried that I wouldn't survive so they tried to make me into a proper boy. I was an embarrassment. He tried to get me interested in games and engines, maths and physics, and fitting in with the other boys, but the more he pushed the more stressed I got. I was useless. I was interested in nature and drawing and collecting things. I spent a lot of time in rockpools and steams. I liked books and records. As a teenager I had a room full of fish tanks and houseplants - and then I started doing the garden. The feeling though was that none of this would get me a 'proper job' and was dismissed as childish things - to be put away. They suspected I was mentally handicapped or lazy, and probably 'queer'. I ended up with no self-esteem at all. I was very good at useless things and no good at what I should be doing. Only now do I know that what I was doing was studying, researching, educating myself, and I should have become an ecologist. When I applied to university at 18, two polytechnics would have accepted me to do marine biology with just passes and without interviews because they could see my potential but I was so stressed and had so little confidence that I failed utterly. I tried again in my thirties - got myself an MSc distinction in ecology - but got no further due again to my lack of confidence. I went back to gardening.

I don't really want to blame them - they thought they were doing the right thing. It has been hard though to forgive those men who tried to make me like them. They were not brutal or violent but they were contemptuous and dismissive. One thing was certain - I did not want to be like the boys or men I knew. The boys were rough and unpredictable. Men's work was dirty and exhausting. Dad was a foreman at Shoreham power station - an electrical fitter - having crawl in the still-hot turbines, breathing heavy metals, coal dust, asbestos and all kinds of exotic hydrocarbons. I didn't want his life. He had a good steady skilled job and yet there still never seemed to be anything to show for it. All he did was work, come home, eat, sleep and go to work again. At the weekend he rushed around trying to fit everything else in. It was exhausting. What was the point of that? What is the point of living that way? He just looked forward to his retirement but died at 60 of a mesothelioma from the asbestos. And they wanted me to be like him. Sometimes it felt like I was being corrupted.

Throughout though I admired the girls at school. They were the ones to beat with their neat handwriting and quiet composure. I desperately wanted a girlfriend too, from the age of about 10, but it was not just sexual - I just thought everything about girls were fantastic. Needless to say they didn't want me because I was a weird geeky boy. It took me a long time to get any social skills, but my closest friends were always women because I could have a proper conversation with them. I wasn't expected to compete or banter. I've always been very open about how I feel I don't really know how to hide it, and because I had so many problems getting on in life I was always trying to ask others who maybe knew something I didn't. Boys don't do that - they don't talk about their fears and problems, though they undoubtedly all have them. I've never really worked out how to be friends with men. All my jobs (bar work, care work, teaching and gardening) have been traditionally women's work or unisex. In the 80s, in my early twenties, I discovered the women's rights movement and I empathised entirely with how women were kept down and disparaged. Women were the future. Mum had always been very dismissive of men, who she saw as crude and uncouth, smelly and loud. This was a pretty common view among women in our friends and family. Men were just the ones who went out and got the money. It was women who held everything together - who did the real work. Dad told me this. He was very much 'of his time' but he had a lot of respect for women. For her part, mum felt very hard-done-by at home all day doing the housework. Even so I was very sure even then whose job I'd prefer, his or hers. Born 10 years later she'd have had a good job, probably running an office or clinic, and probably with no kids or husband, neither of which she enjoyed. They were very different people. Born 10 years later there's no way they'd have been together.