I didn’t embrace feminism to annihilate men. I wanted my slice of the cake, but the plan was never to scoff the lot. Katy Goff, writing in yesterday’s Guardian tells women we’re better off ‘dying alone’ than ‘settling’.
I’d be surprised if Ms Goff is anywhere close to the Big D, so I’m not going to waste time arguing about that melodramatic assertion. (We do anyway. Just – nobody sane would deliberately set out to have no loving hand to hold on the way out).
Her point is that we women are just fine living alone and we don’t need to compromise by settling for sub-standard men. This brittle, unkind position is mistakenly seen as the direct flip-side to the ancient imperative we apparently nuzzled at our mother’s breast and every day after: find a man!
People go crazy if they don’t take part in their community, and being in relationship with another human being, committing yourselves to work out how to handle their daft mistakes and your stubborn insistences, their snoring, your habit of burning the toast when they like it blonde, which school the kids will go to, and how to move forward when one of us loses their job, is what makes us human, makes us grow, shows us qualities about ourselves we never knew we had. Or at least reminds us to develop them.
Where is this lovely person who stands above another and judges them wanting, casts him out along with all the rest of their sniggering, profligate, half-witted tribe? We’re all a bit crap at something. Our job is to help each other find the buried treasure, not get swamped by the slurry.
The way Them and Us is starting to grip every discourse is troubling indeed. Transsexual/Bi folk (self labelling to the last) are very much on the ‘we’re better than CIS-gendered tedious/dangerously-prejudiced people’ end of the spectrum now. Obviously, there’s Leave/Remain, (each protesting they’re better than the other, though to be fair, what could be better than arguing not to trash the economy and throw away valuable rights, while at the same time endangering peace in the continent we inhabit, whether we like it or not?) In India, Modi’s RSS party’s terrifying, weaponised version of Hinduism, turning anyone Other into the Enemy, followers licensed to kill. Trump and his merry men taking the high line against ‘Fake’ news, and now it’s the environment – you must be an Activist and therefore better than a ghastly jet-travelling, resource-munching appeaser – the list goes on and on and we must resist it. It mustn’t swallow up men and women. Or men and men/women and women for that matter.
Let’s be kinder to each other than this.
Izzy Brown 