Where we are all going

Yesterday I witnessed on television an item about the official unveiling of a statue in Parliament Square of – no doubt a great lady – the Suffragette Millie Fawcett who thereby became the first female ever to be so honoured.

Many thousands were present on this memorable occasion and, on the BBC news bulletin I saw, some of those interviewed in what we media folk call ‘vox pops’ were schoolgirls who had plainly been given the afternoon off in order to attend.

These uniformly spoke of their admiration for Fawcett’s role in helping to securing basic human rights for women including that to vote in public elections, the clear implication being given that this was a campaign in which they also hoped to be able to play their part one day, as if true equality for women with men was still some way off.

I’m not saying that I beg to differ but I have taken this event as my launch pad today to make a few observations today upon gender rights, equality and the way modern Western society seems to be going.

Here’s a snapshot of the context.

Yesterday former England women’s cricket captain Charlotte Edwards led a women’s MCC team against Middlesex in the first such women’s game ever to be played at Lords. For those whose life is built around such things, as a matter of record the MCC made 145 for three and lost on the last but one ball of the encounter.

One might take this – in an Apollo moon landing sort of a way – as ‘One [more] small step for woman, one giant leap for mankind’.

Elsewhere in modern society we have women enjoying significant amounts of employment maternity leave and then the absolute right to return to work (unless they declare they don’t want to) plus also the right to family-friendly ‘flexible hours’ and the customary impromptu freedom to take time off for ‘family’ reasons such as a child being ill, or needing to attend some assessment or another –  or indeed because the nanny is ill, pissed off, having boyfriend troubles and/or having a difficult menstrual cycle at the moment.

In other words, just about anything – and, of course, at any moment now some campaigner or another will identify new items to add to the growing list that will soon become illegal and/or socially unacceptable – that gets in the way of women having exactly the same opportunities in life as men have enjoyed since the dawn of time.

We now all have the right to enter same-sex civil partnerships and/or marriages.

To wake up one fine morning and decide that from now on we do not feel male, but rather female – and then automatically have the right to surgery, ongoing medical treatment and counselling, all at the expense of the taxpayer.

Or (if we are female) to embark upon the opposite journey, also at the public’s expense.

Or that from today we are feeling gender-fluid, bi-sexual or even pan-sexual – and therefore must set out upon that ‘journey’ [is it a journey?].

Or indeed that, although last summer we decided we felt female rather than male and therefore began ‘the journey’, this morning we woke up and (you know what?) we now felt that we were now feeling less of a women than we once did … and therefore want to revert back to being a man again – and suddenly the taxpayer suddenly finds himself (or herself) also footing the bill for that as well.

We’ve got female athletes (or rather those that administer their games or events) apparently demanding that as a matter of right – if men can play football in knockout tournaments at Wembley Stadium in front of a sold-out 90,000 crowd and get paid £125,000 per week, benefit from multi-million £ sterling deals for the broadcasting rights, get interviewed on BBC Match of the Day, and be asked to get become the public face of this or that national charity – then so should the women who play that game and/or compete in the same track & field event.

We’ve got a Scandinavian national male football team – forgive me, I’m too lazy to go and research on the internet to remind myself which nation this is – who have apparently demanded that their female counterparts should be paid exactly the same fee for playing for their country as they are.

And being successful in their action.

All wonderful stuff – and no doubt it is being celebrated as I type by campaigners all over our green and pleasant land.

And yet. And yet you’ll have to pardon me for being a party-pooping cynic and old-fashioned male dinosaur (if that’s what I am).

I begin from the viewpoint that men and women are fundamentally and gloriously different. It’s one of the reasons why it’s worth hanging around on this crazy planet.

The flaw behind the all-encompassing unstoppable ‘equality’ campaign – and here I’m referring to both genders here, not just women – is that it flows from the illogical attitude that anything which prevents men and women from being total ‘equal’ can be changed or circumvented by legislation and/or convention.

In other words, for example, if there’s anything that a man can do or experience (and which at the moment women cannot) then that ‘discrimination’ can be removed by either surrounding women with all the aids, support, wherewithal etc. that they need in order to do what the men are doing – or, alternatively, if that’s impossible to achieve – then men should no longer be allowed to do whatever it is we’re talking about.

And the same goes for men who currently cannot do what women alone can do.

(You can probably see where this is going …)

In other words, for example, if men can go around impregnating women, then women should be allowed or enabled to do so. And by the way, if it ultimately proves impossible to enable women to impregnate other women, then no man should be allowed to.

And, of course, it goes the other way as well.

If a man currently cannot get pregnant when women can, that’s obviously unfair and discriminatory if anything is. So either the world should spend whatever it takes to enable men to get pregnant or – if that proves impossible to achieve, then women shouldn’t be allowed to get pregnant either.

[Hang on, I think I’ve stumbled upon the solution to the vexed problem of the population explosion that threatens the future of the word …]