SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 8 - The Pay Gap

I still absolutely believe in equal rights and opportunities for women however. I used to believe that the world would be better run by women but now I don't think it would be much different. Women in power behave as badly as men – not because they’re corrupted by the patriarchy but because power corrupts men and women equally. Women are absolutely as capable as men as behaving badly. So I’m not anti-women or anti-feminist. My view is something far more controversial - that men and women just aren’t all that different anymore. 

[I’m talking mostly about the UK. Things are much worse in other parts of the world, and I would absolutely back more women’s rights campaigning there.]

[I will be using the word ‘woman’ throughout in a generic way, responding to many conversations and interactions I’ve had over the years. Obviously it’s #notallwomen so should not be taken personally.]

Things have changed massively in my lifetime but many women don’t seem to have noticed. Compared to my mum when I was a kid in the 60s - what women can do now compared to what she could do then - the difference is immense. She couldn't have had a career, couldn't have owned property, couldn't have divorced, had an abortion, had casual sex, driven a car, been a single mum, run her own business, gone to uni, gone out for the night on her own, sat in a pub and had a pint, worn sexy clothes out, gone through life unmarried, been a lesbian, hitchhiked around the world on her own, been loud and sweary in public, called the police if she was being attacked by her husband, been a prime minister, a journalist, a vicar, a CEO, a soldier, a doctor, a lawyer…

Sadly modern feminists continually move the goalposts in order to prove that things are as bad as ever and keep the faithful riled up. But it’s no longer good enough for women to simply blame men when things go wrong. It’s time for women to take responsibility for their part in the problem. Women can no longer just say “A man made me do it.” 

All over the place I'm being told that everything is still so much worse for women than for men - despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. There seems to be a very strong need to say that men don't suffer in any way that really matters. If you say bad things happen to men you'll get a long list of bad things that happen to women - but the question is not whether bad things happen to women - of course they do - the question is do they happen MORE than to men? If you want equality you need to know both sides of the equation. Generally though the assumption is that men have nothing much to complain about. 

I could write a huge list of bad things that happen to women – I used to be a staunch feminist and I’ve been reading about this most of my life. I take it as read and don’t see the point in rehashing it all here. Now I’m just an egalitarian with a special interest in how men and women interact, and I know we all suffer. The world is not set up for any but a small minority of mostly old white men – and there is no patriarchal trickle-down effect. (Though there is an old-boy network it’s not going to involve anyone I know any time soon.) Violent men also have a kind of power, but most men are not violent. Rape does not benefit all men as I’ve been told - I see no benefit in being distrusted by half the population. Power no longer rests in physical strength but in money and technology. The most powerful men in the world are hardly paragons. Violence is mostly a desperate last resort for people who have no power. Genuinely evil psychopaths are far rarer than the movies suggest.

The fact though is that most people have no power to speak of at all. Most people are poor, working class, and minimally educated. The fact that so many people seem to think that you can tell who has the power in a relationship simply by knowing their sex (or age, or race) strikes me as hopelessly simplistic. Life is so much more complicated than that. As I've said many times before, there are too many old white men in top jobs (we all know this) and that skews the income distributions and creates the pay gap. At the moment in the UK it stands at about 9% I believe, however, that does not mean that men typically get 9% more than women. As usual it’s more complicated than that. In the UK, for people on lower incomes and for the under 40s the pay gap is very small, and among school leavers girls are doing better than boys. There are more women living in poverty but because they’re mostly single mums they usually get some sort of accommodation and benefits. The truly destitute and homeless are mostly men. Although there still aren’t as many women in those few top jobs, by far the most significant inequality now is not between men and women but between those old white guys and the rest of us, and that gap is widening. 

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 7 - Lidl Man

There is a question here about whether men are entitled to have a view on women’s rights, or whether or view can even be relevant.

I believe anyone can have an opinion on anything. This is not ‘telling women what to do’ – believe me - I don’t have the power to tell anyone what to do. Further, I have views on all sorts of things that don’t directly affect me – on Palestine for example – but surely for feminism to work it should affect men, and if you are affected, you have a right to express a view. But in any case, if women talk about what it’s like to be a man, then surely men know more than women? And surely that information is useful? If the women’s rights campaign is based on outdated, faulty or simplistic ideas about men then it can’t possibly work as well as it should, and I want it to work as well as possible.

But, more importantly, women can’t expect to simply impose their view on men, any more than men can simply impose their view on women. Nobody is entitled to impose their view of the world on anyone else, and nobody should be expected to unquestioningly accept anyone else’s opinion. If you want people to change you have to persuade them – negotiate, compromise. This seems to be something modern ‘woke’ progressives have forgotten. They seem to think if they get angry people will do as they’re told, and if they don’t they’re fascists. I have genuinely had these sorts of conversations. I ask them “When was the last time you changed your mind because someone shouted at you or called you names?” They tell me that it makes them feel better but that’s just self-indulgent. If you’re not trying to change people’s minds you’re not trying to make things better – you’re just having a tantrum.

It’s been depressing to see how much women really don’t want to hear the other side of the debate – even when the conversation is explicitly about what men think or feel or want. Women don’t know what men really feel, think and want, anything like as much as they think they do, and they really don’t like to ask. (Men of course don’t pretend to know what women really feel, think, and want.) It is remarkable how often women have told me I’m thinking something that I know very well I’m not, and then tell me I’m lying if I say so. Somehow women really believe they know what’s going on in my head better than I do. If a man did that to a woman it would be called ‘gaslighting’.

As a result women have some very strange ideas about what it means to be a man. They say they’re tired of hearing from men, but we very rarely talk about how life is for us – how we feel, our problems. There is a vast body of women's literature - fact and fiction - detailing every possible experience of life as a woman - childhood, parenthood, work, education, relationships, sex, beauty, medicine and crime - tales of ordinary women coping with their everyday lives, but the men's literature is about super heroes and gangsters, cowboys and soldiers. Learned works by are academics, politicians, priests and writers – not your average man in the street. If not it's outsiders - criminals, soldiers, immigrants, gays and celebrities. The rest of us - the ordinary man in Lidl - are invisible. We keep it to ourselves. We bottle it up or get pissed and make a joke of it, or if things get too much we go nuts and scare every-one. There seems to be this imaginary ‘Man’ in the feminist mind – a well-paid executive in a suit – a boss basically - or maybe menacing no-neck BREXIT man – nothing at all like most of us ordinary blokes. 

And yet we see normal blokes all the time - in the supermarket, at the pub, at work - sad, weedy, anxious, old, depressed, short, awkward, fat, shy or ugly people and we don't seem to realise that THAT is what ordinary men look like. We see our own insecurities and mistakes and embarrassments and yet we still think Men are cool and confident. These men we see in real life must surely be a mistake. They're not Men. They must be some sort of freakish losers. But no - that's us - that's what ordinary men are like. We just don't recognise them. It's a weird sort of cognitive dissonance. Men who are any-thing but powerful still insist that Men have all the power. Men who can barely make a living tell us 'it's a man's world'. I find this very strange. 

The problem is that most men are NOT more powerful than women any more, and many of us are in serious trouble (suicide and homelessness are much higher in men) so this dynamic has become a problem. Women are putting men down when they're already down. Women are punching down when they think they're punching up. In less 'educated' (ie poor) communities this can lead to an angry backlash and polarisation."

The problem might be that the modern progressive movement are middle-class college kids and many of the poor working class are older, male and white. They’re rude and noisy and won’t do as they’re told. Modern progressives talk down to them and then are horrified when they vote conservative. I don’t condone it, but I’m not surprised. 

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 6 - Men are more likely to die young than women by every means except childbirth

A while back, a friend online told me what he thought the difference is. “Ok, men suffer” he said, “but not because they are men.” 

Me being me of course, I didn't take his word for it - I checked. The first fact that changed my view is that men get murdered twice as often as women. This seems like quite a big deal. When there's such a huge disparity it's hard to argue that it's not somehow 'because they're men'. Further - men are as likely to be the victims of male violence as women, usually by strangers in public (women mostly by men they know, and in private) and yet somehow because it's male-on-male violence it doesn't really count. "He got into a fight" they say, as if it’s somehow consensual violence, but that's not how it is. I think there's an assumption that men are all more or less equally able to handle themselves but I suspect people who believe that have been watching too much TV – too many bar-fights and superheroes. I was a soft sensitive lad. I’d never been in a fight with anyone, so when I was attacked (as we all were at one time or another) my reaction was to just take it because if I fought back or tried to escape things would have undoubtedly got worse. I didn’t report it for exactly the same reason women don’t re-port it – because it was their word against mine and I didn’t want reprisals.

I see no reason to believe that violence against men is somehow less serious than violence against women. There is no reason to assume that men are less traumatised by violence than women, even if we don’t talk about it as much. I believe all attacks against anyone should be taken equally seriously. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me. Women however seem to want sex crimes and domestic violence to be taken more seriously than any other sort of crime, presumably because they are the crimes that mostly affect women. For some women it seems sexual assault still is a fate worse than death.

Near the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there was a story of a woman raped in front of her children by Russian soldiers. This was undoubtedly terrible but the fact that the child’s father was shot outside, presumably for protecting his family, was hardly mentioned. The fact that she will be there to help her children recover from their terrible experience and he won’t doesn’t seem to count.

Then I discovered that men are just generally more likely to die young than women by every means except childbirth. (All this is from ONS data). If any of these facts were true of women they'd be major planks of the women's rights campaign, but as it's men it doesn't seem to matter that much. Men traditionally get the dangerous jobs (heavy industry, building, heavy machinery, and of course, going to war), so accidents at work are a major contributor. Then young men feel they have to prove themselves by taking stupid risks (drinking too much, driving too fast, extreme sports), is another. Then men not being allowed to talk about their problems or ask for help leads to ‘self-medication’ (addiction), ‘self-harm’ (suicide), crime, homelessness and the rest. Basically, masculinity is a huge problem for men, and the cultural conditioning is every bit as powerful as for women. Women complain about the portrayal of female victims in crime drama, while men are tortured, beaten and killed in vast numbers in the movies without apparently upsetting anyone at all. We all grow up believing men’s deaths don’t mean anything very much.

One reason women don’t want to hear this is because they also think men should be tough and manly and not make a fuss. Men who are hurt and sensitive have ‘fragile egos’. It’s a strange confluence of feminism and toxic masculinity. Women also think that men talking about their issues somehow takes away from the women’s cause – as if it's a zero-sum-game. So it’s essential to only talk about women’s issues – any dissent is seen as anti-women, anti-feminist, and possibly misogynist. Any other point of view is mansplaining or hijacking the conversation. 

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 5 - Marxist Feminist

I've been wanting to write something about the very strange belief some of my progressive friends seem to have - that you can tell who has the power in a relationship simply by knowing their sexes (or race, or age). This seems to me such an obviously silly belief (and a pretty crass form of biological determinism) that I can't quite understand why intelligent, moral, thoughtful people would not question it. It's pretty common though. The idea seems to be that despite many of the woman I've known being better paid, having nicer homes, better jobs and just generally more status than I'll ever have, that nevertheless I'm supposed to treat them as if I'm the one with the power. 

It originates in Marxist political theory but that's about bosses and employees - where essentially, you can't be a boss unless you have power. A boss without power isn't a boss. Not so with male people (or white people, or old people) who are often in terrible trou-ble. Men are more likely than women to be addicts, homeless, criminals, and suicides. There are more men at the top for sure, but there are also more men at the bottom. (Women are more clustered in the middle.)

The rationalisation for this belief seems to be that since men have all this power, if we wanted to make things better we'd have done it by now - but most people have no power to speak of. Though on average men are better off and more violent, most men are neither rich nor violent. We can't treat people as examples of an average. We should treat them as individuals, and most people - men and woman - are poor, badly educated and under-privileged.

The consequence of this simplistic way of thinking is that men who have struggled all their lives get laughed at and ignored when they talk about their problems. For some-one like me that's just been very disappointing, but for many men it's literally adding insult to injury. 

I've been a feminist most of my life, but I no longer believe that women in general are especially badly treated compared to men, at least in the UK. Feminists think women are worse off because they either don't know about men's problems, or don't take them seriously. When I talk about men's problems no one ever asks me about them. Often they laugh. Generally, if they engage with me at all they give me a long list of women's grievances - grievances I've been hearing about all my life and know by heart. But the point is not that women don't have problems - of course they do - because we all do. No, the question is, are the woman's problems worse than the men's? To assess inequality you have to make a comparison. If you only know one side of the equation and just as-sume the other side is bigger it will always appear unequal. 

People don't want to hear about men's problems for various reasons - one is the belief that they're self-inflicted - that we could solve them if we wanted because we have so much power - but it's systemic - it's built into society. Men and women are heavily conditioned to take up certain roles in society and most people have neither the time nor the education to challenge them. I've been trying all my life, and I still have a load of masculine crap in my head - ways I'm supposed to be, things I'm supposed to do - guilt and shame for not measuring up. A man with a full-time minimum-wage job and kids doesn't stand a chance. He just needs to fit in to survive. 

The other common assumption is that men's roles are simply better, but I don't see many women digging up the road, emptying the bins, or joining the infantry. My lived expe-rience of being a man is that it can be pretty wretched - trying to measure up, not complain, keep your problems to yourself. 

There is of course a very visible minority of male high-achievers - politicians, business leaders, professionals, stars of various kinds - it's the last bastion of sex inequality, but the vast majority of us aren't among them. Most of us, men and women, are in trouble. The world is not set up for any of us.

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE - Introduction

"So you're a right-winger now?"
"No. I believe in redistribution of wealth, caring for the environment, and equal rights and opportunities for everyone. I couldn't easily be more left-wing."
"So how come you're against women's rights?"
"Again - I'm not - I've always believed women should have the same rights and opportunities as men. I just don't really believe that men and women are all that unequal any more, at least in the UK."

"Well it's not really up to you to tell women what to think is it?"

"I don't think it's up to anyone to tell anyone what to think. We all have to make up our own minds. I think the study of how men and women relate to each other has been taken over by feminism, which has given us a huge amount of insight into woman's experience but ignores the other half of the story."

"Oh I think we know more than enough about men thanks."

"Yes - I know you think that. Women often claim to know more about what it's like to be a man than men do. And if we disagree they accuse us of being in denial, or lying. But it is remarkable how often women are wrong."

"Well you would say that wouldn't you."

"Prove me wrong."

At this point my interlocutor will give me a long list of bad things women have to put up with, none of which I disagree with. What they're missing out is the bad things men have to put up with. Everybody has to put up with bad things. I agree the bad things may be different, but the overall levels of bad things men and women have to put up with are just not that different any more. At this point my interlocutor either laughs, tries to insult me, or leaves. The idea that men suffer in any serious way is ridiculous - unthinkable - not worth serious consideration.

And yet they do. For example, according to ONS data men are far more likely to die young than women by every means except child-birth. This seems pretty serious to me. In particular they're twice as likely to be murdered, but also far more likely to be killed or injured at work, or die from 'self medication' (addiction) or 'self-harm' (suicide), or taking risks trying to prove themselves as men. 
Why does this not matter? I think there are three interlocking reasons - people believe 1. that men have the power, so if they get into trouble it's their own fault, 2. that men are big and tough so they can handle it, and 3. that they probably deserve it because they're bad people. In contrast women are 1. powerless and oppressed, 2. the weaker sex, and 3. innocent victims. In my experience most people buy into at least some of these beliefs. Indeed I used to believe them myself, until recently.

The first is orthodox feminist theory - men simply are more powerful than women. It's the patriarchy. It's a man's world. "If you wanted to change things you'd have done it by now." And yet the vast majority of people - men and women - have no real power or wealth at all. Most people are poor/working class. The world is run by a small number of mostly old white men. There is an old boy network for sure but most of us are not part of it. There is no patriarchal trickle-down effect. The pay gap exists (and is getting wider) because the male average is skewed by that tiny minority of very wealthy, very powerful men. It's not men vs women - it's those few powerful men vs the rest of us.

The other source of power is violence. Recent feminism has been telling women that violence is a normal part of male behaviour. "We can't trust any of you." they say. "You could kill me with your bare hands." "We'd rather take our chances with a bear." 

But violence is not normal - it's a crime, and the vast majority of crimes are perpetrated by a small minority of reoffenders. Most criminals are men - true, but most men are not criminals. We are all likely to be the victims of violent men at some time or another, but the vast majority of human interactions are not violent. Men are at least as likely to be the victims of male violence as women. There is a perception that men being attacked by other men is ok - that it's consensual violence. Lads fighting among themselves are generally not reported as crimes unless someone ends up in hospital. "He got into a fight" they say, but most attacks are by a few hard men on those they perceive as different or vulnerable in some way, and few of us are able to defend ourselves. We just run away or lie still and hope they get bored. 

Violence against men is not taken seriously. Films and dramas and computer games are full of men being injured, tortured and killed. It's fun. Violence against women is far more disturbing. In war, casualties among women and children are reported, but not men. They don't really count it seems. Men are expendable cannon-fodder - both in war and industry.

Beyond these two principal measures of male power - wealth and violence - women complain of a myriad other smaller, more subtle injustices where men criticise, deride or disrespect women. Again though there's a failure to consider how life is for men. Do men respect other men? Do women respect men? (Do women respect each other? I have it on good authority that they don't). Derision and criticism are normal parts of human life. People dislike and disagree with each other for all sorts of reasons and express it in various ways. If feminism was campaigning for all of us to be kinder to each other it would make more sense, but they're not. Women can be as unpleasant to men as they like, but men criticising or ridiculing women is sexist or even misogynist. The argument is that men criticising women is 'punching down' because women have less power. I've talked about this above but in any case, on an individual basis it makes no sense. I know many women who are better off than I am, have better jobs, nicer homes, and more status generally. Am I still supposed to relate to them as if I'm the one with the power? 

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.

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 2 - They're all as Bad as One-another

Do male murder victims matter less than female because they're killed by men? It's a very commonly raised point.

Why does it matter who hurts you? Certainly most criminals are male. Does that make their male victims any less injured than their female victims? It's a point worth un-packing.

I suspect the thinking behind it (because I used to think this way) is that somehow we men are all on the same side, so it doesn't count if we hurt each other (that is unless the victims are gay or black of course). The implication is that the victims and the perpetrators are all the same. We're all as bad as each other - any of us might kill any other of us at any time. There's also the belief that we men are about equally able to stand up for ourselves so it's like a sport with well-matched opponents. In fact judging by what some women have said to me they think male on male violence is just two blokes squaring up to see who is the toughest.

It's not like that. If you've ever been attacked by some tough guys on the street at night you'll know that it's terrifying - you don't fight back because you know it'll only make it worse (or if you do you could be killed or badly injured - with a broken bottle or being kicked in the head for example). As with those gay and black men - those guys at-tacked you because you're different and/or vulnerable.

What women don't seem to realise is that most men are not tough or good at fighting, and tough guys pick on us for that reason. My guess is those women have been watching too many cop shows or action movies, where men fighting is a bit of a laugh. It's not like that irl. Also - those guys who do choose to get into a fight together don't get in the crime stats unless one of them ends up in hospital.

Violent men are the minority (<10%?) but they do a lot of damage - my experience as a young man was that the local tough lads attacked someone most weekends - probably more. None of us were like them - we avoided them as much as possible - avoided eye-contact, didn't walk the streets alone, didn't wear anything provocative, maybe carried a knife, and sorry to say we never reported it because the police would have laughed and told us we needed to learn to stick up for ourselves. My parents would probably have said the same. I don't know how much things have changed since then. Practically every young man I knew was attacked at some time or other. I've been attacked 5 times I think. 

Male and female victims should be taken equally seriously.