I am not a fan of International Women’s Day. As spiked has pointed out many times before, in much of the Western world young women today are more highly qualified and get better paid jobs than men. Women of all ages are more likely to be in work, have more access to childcare and earn more money than at any other point in history. In this context, setting aside a particular day ‘to celebrate the achievements of women while calling for greater equality’ seems unnecessary. Worse, it inevitably descends into a rehashing of all the reasons why, despite having made such huge leaps forward, feminists still consider women to be oppressed. We already spend far too much time anguishing over body-shaming, cat-calling and sexist passports. Another day spent reminding women they are still victims? No thank you.
International Women’s Day is a good example of how it is feminism that now holds women back. Instead of telling girls about all the opportunities available to them and how the odds really are now stacked in their favour, feminists prefer to scare them with stories of ‘rape culture’. Rather than encouraging young women to travel the world, feminist campaigners tell them to be outraged about passport pictures. In comparison, men are lucky. No one expects them to be permanent victims or to waste the best years of their lives declaring outrage over song lyrics, adverts and compliments.
Only now it turns out that some men think it’s unfair that women get to keep all this victimhood for themselves. They want a special day of their own to dwell on how hard it is to be a man. Today is International Men’s Day and, just as with the day set aside for women, the rhetoric of ‘fun’ and ‘celebration’ is to be enacted through awareness raising about issues such as men’s shorter life expectancy, higher suicide rate, and ‘the negative portrayals of fathers, men and boys’. It seems some men look at feminism with envy and want in on the pity-me identity politics. Just as with feminism, it is rarely the men working in factories or on building sites who want to make public declarations of their oppression. It is men who have made it to university, who have built careers off the back of social-media profiles, or who have the kind of jobs that allow them to spend the day stoking Twitter outrage, who are at the forefront of demands for the problems faced by men to be given equal billing.
This week the competitive victimhood that drives today’s gender politics has been played out in full grotesqueness at the University of York. Male students had successfully campaigned to have an event held on campus to mark International Men’s Day and address men’s issues. No sooner had the proposed meeting been advertised than the backlash began. Two hundred academics and students signed an open letter declaring, ‘We believe that men’s issues cannot be approached in the same way as unfairness and discrimination towards women, because women are structurally unequal to men’. The Oppression Olympics were underway.
It did not take the university long to back down and cancel the Men’s Day event. The Equality and Diversity Committee announced that, ‘the main focus of gender equality work should continue to be on the inequalities faced by women, and in particular the under-representation of women in the professoriate and senior management’. Before anyone had the chance to muster up sympathy for women with successful academic careers, a counter petition was underway which, as I write, has 3,234 signatures.