With Labour on course to win the next election, it’s worth asking again: why is it the only major political party in the UK never to have had a female leader? There still hasn’t been a satisfactory answer. Indeed, considering the enthusiasm for the Church of Transubstantiation within its ranks – Labour has more of what I coined ‘transmaids’ than all the other parties put together – it’s not altogether impossible that the first ‘woman’ to lead Labour could be the proud possessor of a penis, especially if the risible Izzard ever finds a safe seat willing to take him. Whatever the excuse, Labour look on like scared schoolboys at the end of term disco while every other party have been bossed at some point by females.
Some left-wing men appear to be of the opinion that feminism itself should be a boys’ club
Somehow the traditional right-wing antipathy to uppity women has been passed to the left, as Labour also previously inherited anti-Semitism from the Tories. There was an unbecoming row recently when Billy Bragg told feminists that they had to be wrong about single-sex spaces because of who they are allied with on the issue. ‘That’s what I see with Rowling and the others: they are on the wrong side of the table’, he told the Guardian.
Bragg is part of what we night call the Accidental Sexist tendency – people who are so confused or feel themselves to be so superior to the herd that they seem to think they can get away with speed-reading the arguments of the other side. As a result they think they are wonderfully enlightened beings while looking like seven sorts of chump to the impartial observer. Take when silly Billy mistook beta-blockers for puberty-blockers in the befuddled manner that Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap asked ‘But what’s wrong with being sexy?’ when accused of being sexist.
Accidental Sexism is not like the old-fashioned pantomime villain the Patriarchy. This isn’t about seriously fearing and loathing women and doing anything to keep them in positions of abject powerlessness, as Christianity did in the past and extreme Islam does now. No, this is another ship of fools altogether, who in their well-meaning meanderings have more in common with Alan Titchmarsh than Andrew Tate.
I think of them as the Pratriarchy. Merriam-Webster defines a prat as ‘a stupid or foolish person’ while online Collins English Dictionary informs us solemnly that ‘If you describe someone as a prat, you are saying in an unkind way that you think that they are very stupid or foolish.’ Apparently the word started out meaning buttocks in the 16th century but by the 1960s had come to mean a fool. Now it covers an awful lot of sinners of the male variety, from shouty transvestites on one extreme to the bumbling brain-box Stephen Fry burbling on about women not really liking sex. But what all their comments seem to suggest is a shared belief that women, bless ’em, don’t really know what’s best for them – poor dears, all those hormones running riot – and should probably have a nice sit down and listen to the men.
It’s a fun coincidence that there’s actually a ‘gentlemen’s club’ called Pratt’s – established in 1857 in Park Place, near the Ritz, and currently owned by the Earl of Burlington. Interestingly, it opened to women last year. Not so the Garrick, where many a member of the artistic Pratriachy who doubtless believe in equality may trough without those pesky females yattering away. Last week, Sting and Stephen Fry threatened to quit the club if it didn’t admit women. How on earth did smart men like these not realise in the first place that they were joining an organisation that excludes women? Maybe they thought that some of the big hulking creatures next to them in the lavvies were trans-women – and as trans-women are women, honour had been satisfied? Anyway, their apparent sexism must have been an accident – a ‘pratfall’, even, defined as ‘an embarrassing failure or mistake.’ As Kate Ferguson of the Sun on Sunday put it: ‘Imagine the shock of these celebrity blokes when they suddenly realised they had been members of a male only club all this time!’ Amelia Gentleman commented waspishly in the Guardian: ‘Their concerns appear to have been primarily triggered by the bad publicity that the club’s men-only membership has provoked in the past few weeks, rather than the discriminatory nature of the membership rules.’
We can imagine how many of the showbiz types involved would have screamed blue murder if a club they belonged to only accepted white people. And I bet that at least some of them believe that trans-women should be allowed into real women’s spaces, so they’re doubly hypocrites. But as we saw when Bragg lectured women on how to do feminism recently, some left-wing men appear to be of the opinion that feminism itself should be a boys’ club, something which – like sex used to be viewed – is best done to women by men. In the case of the ghastly Fry, it’s not the first time he’s appeared happy to sell women out while posing as a courageous upholder of equal rights for all. A while ago he was telling us about his right to offend – and then he turned around and told us gender-critical femmes to not hurt the feelings of our trans-sisters. This looks suspiciously like ‘be yourself’ for men, and ‘Be Kind’ for women.
The Pratriarchy would be fine if they just stuck to making clowns of themselves, but they can’t help getting involved in politics, always to the detriment of others. It was Pratriarchy-on-a-plane who stopped a Somalian man, Yaqub Ahmed, from being deported, only for him to be revealed as part of a gang who raped a teenage girl.
With the recent conclusive proof of how important the Muslim vote is to Labour, we can expect more Pratriarchy antics as Starmer cuts his cloth accordingly. Maybe Starmer will concede none of our hard-won rights. But I look at those beautiful old photographs of the young women of pre-Islamist Iran, on campuses and beaches, sunlight streaming down on them, and I shiver.
A possible and sinister development is that well-meaning, democratic Pratriarchy may meet sinister, theocratic Patriarchy. This unholy alliance would bode ill for women of all ethnicities – and indeed, for all of us who love freedom.
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