No winners in the battle of the sexes

Columnist

Friday 21 September 2012

WOMEN for peace, men for war.

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Robert McNeil

I generalise – think Maggie Thatcher or Jessie Boudicca – but you get my gist.

I've come to think of women as being better than men in many ways. It was going to the gym that first opened my eyes. At the gym, you never see women looking in mirrors. Only men do this. The narcissism is disturbing.

But they don't wish to look beautiful. They wish to look brutish. With scowling brow and shaven head, big biceps, pecs and mighty shoulders, their aim is to look daunting and to scare.This brutishness is admittedly encouraged by women, creatures of biology whose over-riding purpose is continued promulgation of the species. Thus the female need, in 2012, for men who'll fight off wild animals and defeat hostile savages from other tribes.But men are the root cause of all the trouble. Must defeat other men. Must win woman. Must rule. I make it a golden rule never to generalise. It's a rule I keep for the joy of breaking it. But I'm not the only one. Everyone's generalising. See? There's another one.A classic of the genre, but a valid one, arrived on the desks of opinion formers yesterday. Not on my desk obviously. I just got another catalogue from Viking Office Supplies. I never knew the Norsemen were so keen on stationery. But I read about the report by the Institute of Development Studies – with a name like that they must like keeping things general ("specialists in social analysis; also grass cutting, fencing, roof repairs") – which observed that, while women make peace in their homes and communities, men sign the big, crucial peace treaties.That's why such deals are so often flawed. Instead of taking a deeper view of peace, men see it as political and expedient. It's still the men who wear the suits, too, so they tend already to be in place for playing about with power and peace.I believe there's something in this assessment. It's time someone put the boot into men for their aggressive tendencies. I didn't mention the gym earlier for spurious reasons. These men frighten me. They make me think we've learned nothing from the horrors of the last century, that we've not changed, not grown. Small-minded big men are training every day, and I fear where it's going to take us.Ought, therefore, the future to be female? Whoa! Who spake thus? Women have their problems too. Liberated, they emulate men, and therein lies the Catch-22. An early champion of women's lib, I remember despairing in the 1980s at seeing dozy bints strutting about in power-suits. For some reason, they were always eating apples in public, which I found curiously irritating.Also at this time, the same sort of men who'd opposed women's lib now espoused it. They'd exactly the same look in their eyes. It was the look of a chancer.These men are zeitgeist riders, their views determined by the prospect of social or sexual advantage. They don't so much go with the flow as try to bottle it and use it for their own purposes. Never trust men proclaiming gender solidarity.There are false truisms and true falsehoods. I leave you to judge which is which from the following. Women can't drive. The bad driver ahead always turns out to be a woman, unless it's an old man in a cap. True or false?You're waiting to get out of a busy opening, but a dawdling driver on the main road leaves you stuck. It's always a female. They're not being mean, like men. They just don't think strategically. True? False? Answer according to your experience in reality-style life, not what you think should be true.Women like shopping. Not necessarily. According to a poll published yesterday by Marisota ("clothes retailing; also grass-cutting, roof repairs"), a third of women hate it. See? The thing about stereotypes is that typically they don't apply.Instead of shopping, women must aspire to power, for all our sakes. But power corrupts and turns them into men. Complicated, isn't it? In the meantime, I am happy to proclaim gender solidarity.

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No winners in the battle of the sexes

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