Bus boy

If only MRAs were all about reclaiming old school etiquette, and only that.

I don’t have a catchphrase but I have repeated ‘give me a gentleman over a male feminist any day’ over the past few years to friends when discussing the explosion of preening wokeness. Especially the online kind. It really crept up on us, didn’t it? I’m not an anthropologist, and I’m not blaming the repeal movement, but I am drawing a correlation based on my many years of staring at screens and tsking.

Some of you are nice, I will admit that. And I suppose it’s good to have The Men onside.

At a feminist panel event a few years ago one speaker hogged the microphone at the first question from the teenage girl audience. I enjoyed it a lot. I love when the host is trying to say ‘that really is enough’ in a firm but sweet manner. And I love grinning on stage. Being a witness to public ego is so much fun. It’s like being in the opening scenes of a movie. You’re not in the film, really, but you are on the IMDB first page of credits. After that woman answered one question over, I swear, ten minutes, the rest of us took questions in quickfire banana bunches. My handful comprised of ‘things seem really bad at the moment’ and ‘why do we have to tell men to think of their daughter, sister, cousin when talking about women’s rights?’.

To the first question I said things are probably going to get worse. It was literally late 2016, and they did! Although, maybe this is all just bread and water drawing the wound. To the second question, I said something about empathy, sympathy, marketing. Men are on a different porous plain. (Although, we’re still kinda in the dark on endocrine disruptors , so who knows.)

I get public transport a lot. (I can’t drive. I will take my theory test again at some stage, I promise. I bought the app. I really want to drive. I also don’t cycle. Stop telling me to cycle. Someone telling me to cycle will eventually be my Falling Down trigger.) This morning I got the bus from a southside Dublin suburb to town and realised what the scene resembled, and has been transforming into this past year especially. The men on the rush hour buses have become Cal Hockley on the Titanic, lying his way on to a life boat. They think their shuffling towards the stairs as it bleeds children rushing to the school gates is a subtle Cold War move. I see your navy coat ballet, boys. They convincingly apologise for blocking someone’s way as they maintain their raven perch. There could be a naked woman on the bus and they would only have eyes for an about to be vacated seat.

Elderly women, pregnant women, obviously struggling women - when they get a look in and a seat offer, you can feel the mental sigh of relief ping through other passengers. Oh look, someone who knows how to behave.

So, I guess I now want to answer that second question with a new question. Do they even like their daughter, sister, cousin?