British Backlash

Sadly, the British Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), a thirty year old organization that fought for gender equality, released its final report today. Very disappointingly, the government has decided to absorb the EOC into the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, which deals generally with discrimination issues. This (most likely) means that gender issues will get less funding and airtime than they have previously– and the fight against racial inequality is likely to suffer as a result, too. And yes, the new organization is headed by a man.

The EOC did go out with a bang, though, saying in their final report:

“The way we live our lives has transformed dramatically in the last 30 years. New parents expect to share the upbringing of their children and both women and men want to work more flexibly and provide more support for older relatives.

“But life around us has not caught up and we are living with the consequences of an unfinished social revolution. We are still faced with many workplaces, institutions and services designed for an age when women stayed at home. In other areas of modern life, inequality underpins life and death issues. For example, every month seven women are killed by their partner or ex-partner.”

They also said that at the current rate of progress, gender equality will take generations to achieve.

In what would appear to be an example, The Guardian also ran an obnoxious commentary about how the change is necessary, because we also need to fight gendered discrimination against men.

Being male carries real penalties, and these are deeply written into understandings of masculinity. But that doesn’t mean they can’t change. If cosmetics marketing can persuade men to take grooming seriously in the space of a couple of decades – hair products, moisturisers and the like – then such things as masculinity are much more malleable than we might imagine. The battles ahead are more about cultural change than the EOC’s traditional method of bringing the test case of an individual to court, but it will need the same degree of bloodymindedness to fly in the face of accepted opinion.

The hope in the EOC is that, with a man heading up the new equality body, there will be more credence given to the idea that the agenda of equal opportunities is as much to do with men as women. That could help propel it into the mainstream. For too long gender equality has been seen as women’s special pleading, and this has meant that some of the crucial messages about the repercussions of the enormous changes in family roles for the whole social fabric of care have struggled to get the hearing they deserve.

Look, you’ll never find me arguing that the patriarchy doesn’t also hurt men. It does. It unfairly traps them into a highly-coded masculine gender role. But men simultaneously benefit from the patriarchy, while women do not. The patriarchy teaches men to act like assholes towards women. And while I’m sure that it sucks on some level to be an asshat, it sucks a hell of a lot more to be on the receiving end of the asshattery. Despite the fat that, yes, men do end up with some shitty bi-products of patriarchy, the idea that we should abolish an institution that fights for women’s equality because men are now discriminated against on a comparable level– while openly admitting that feminism’s work is far from done– is completely ludicrous. It’s bad enough that the move was made– do we now have to see it justified on such ridiculous and insulting grounds?

In any case, it seems as this point that what’s done is done. Farewell, EOC. I imagine that you will be missed.