How nice it is to have reason to celebrate on International Men’s Day, coming, as it does, at the end of a decade of unprecedented, and long overdue, gains for men. This year’s cherry on the top of that decade is the creation of the slogan for disenfranchised men everywhere, ‘Your body, my choice.’
It has taken a long time for the worm to turn. While my wife was on night-shift last week, I took the opportunity to watch a little-known art-house film from 1981, called Porky’s. It was shocking to see its portrayal of period, within my lifetime, when some high-spirited young men, who merely wanted to see their female-identifying classmates naked in the shower, had to do so illicitly! Those poor boys faced social disgrace, disciplinary action from their school, or even criminal charges, should they be caught doing nothing more than secretively viewing naked girls.
Amazingly, Porky’s wasn’t the only film brave enough to tackle this grave injustice. Seven years earlier Robin Askwith, in a gritty portrayal of working-class Britain, Confessions of a Window-Cleaner, had cheerfully quipped, “Blimey, they’re big for their age,” while watching a bevvy of schoolgirls shower. The US film industry was also inspired by Porky’s brave crusade for better rights for men and produced titles such as Revenge of the Nerds; one of the first films to examine the plight of incels. By 1990 even national treasures Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle had joined the cause, as they used deception to watch naked girls shower in Nuns on the Run.
This was, however, a last gasp in the darkness, as we entered two decades of humourless radical feminists shrilly screeching that it was somehow wrong for men to use subterfuge to cop an eyeful of some unsuspecting birds. The Sun’s page 3 vanished, actual laws were brought in against upskirting, on film and TV we were rarely given a gratuitous shot of a pair of knockers. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for the Internet, and its vast amount of free and degrading pornography, it might have been all over for men.
It’s truly incredible, then, to find that in the past decade we have managed to turn the tide so completely that we can have school policy actively inviting young men to get into the showers with their female classmates, public facilities, such as swimming pools and gyms, being scared to exclude men from their changing rooms, lest the force of the law fall upon them, and even women themselves reluctant to object, or even give a little scream, in case social opprobrium should label them a bigot.
We men, ALL men, should be eternally grateful to the few who realised that, by claiming they were women, they could not open every door to every man who doesn’t have the decency to stop at the threshold, but that they could also tear feminism in half, as some women argue that a group which has absolutely no barriers to any man joining it somehow poses no threat to women.
Is there a man whose heart does not swell when they see one female tell another that her feminism is not valid, because it does not recognise the rights of men? Is not that same heart fit to burst when a woman is told that she’s not qualified to speak about boundaries for women’s spaces, because she’s not a man claiming access to them?
This has, truly, been a glorious decade, as we marginalised men have been able to tell women that women are against them, the law is against them, history itself is against them. To the men who have fought so hard for this, congratulations. This International Men’s Day is your day! “Your body, my decision,” is your legacy, and your crown. Pick it up and wear it with pride.
Excel Pope 