I have been getting lessons in the patriarchy from my 22-year-old daughter who, though she loves me to bits, won’t stand any more for mansplaining, inadvertent assumptions which rob her of her independence, or actions which suggest her older brother has ‘favoured nation’ status.
She makes no allowance for the fact that for millennia, the concept of male superiority has been in-bred in those of us with a Y and an X chromosome.
Men, I tried to mansplain, are like precious orchids that don’t exist in nature, but have been bred that way by obsessive gardeners. It’s the Monty Don theory of masculinity.
But she isn’t having any of that. “Change the way you think,” she told me.
“I’m trying.”
But trying is easy, getting it right is bloody difficult. That came home to me when I was standing in the vestibule of a train last week as it pulled into a station. A very bright-eyed baby in a blue jumpsuit was smiling away at me from the security of its mother’s arms.
“How old is he?” I asked.
“She is six months,” came the reply. “I like blue,” said her mum, wrongly letting me off the hook.
How times have changed. In the 19th century, baby boys wore dresses, and just 100 years ago, the fashionistas recommended pink for boys and blue for girls.
The American trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department laid it out clearly in 1918: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
Even in advocating pink for boys, the sexism rang through – “more decided and stronger”, as any self-respecting baby boy should be.
When my son was born, the Jubilee had run out of blue blankets (there had been a run on boys that night) and he was presented to us in a pink one.
The liberal in me didn’t mind, the sexist pig thought it a little off. What was the NHS coming to when it couldn’t provide gender-appropriate swaddling?
I’ve just finished reading Bibliomaniac, Robin Ince’s story of a post-Covid book tour round more than 100 independent bookshops in Britain. For those of us who decry the rise of social media and the decline of ‘real’ reading (another baseless and prejudiced assumption), it’s a heartening celebration of booksellers and the communities they serve.
In it he tells a story about author Rebecca Solnit, who had written about the pioneering English photographer Eadweard Muybridge – the guy who discovered how horses run by photographing them multiple times as they ran past his camera. It was the first use of photography for scientific experimentation.
At a gathering, Solnit was assailed by a man who lectured her on this new book he had been reading on Muybridge.
Her friends tried to tell him that Solnit was the author, but so keen was he to ‘educate’ her that he didn’t listen to them. When eventually he absorbed the truth, he moved on to another topic without apologising.
“It is a story that almost every woman I know has some version of,” Ince says. Surely not, I thought.
Then my daughter arrived home incensed after an incident in a car park that uses numberplate recognition. She had keyed her registration, but the machine said ‘not recognised’.
A well-meaning (my assumption, not hers) male friend went over to her car to check she had the right number. She was livid. “It’s my car – of course I have the number right.”
My daughter’s friend should have known better. But maybe not: research published earlier this year from King’s College London found that Generation Z males are more likely to be sexist than us Baby Boomers.
Research published earlier this year found that Generation Z males are more likely to be sexist than us Baby Boomers
Many believe feminism has done more harm than good, and a quarter of men aged 16 to 29 say it is more difficult to be a man than a woman.
Does this matter? Surely it’s just the endless battle of the sexes? Yes it does. I want my daughter and her female friends to live the fullest lives possible, and on their own terms.
Her message is getting through to me at least. I need to mansplain less and listen more. Here endeth the first lesson.