The recent UK Supreme Court ruling that men are men and women are women, and it’s a fixed biological fact, has been hailed as a victory for women. The real ones, that is, not the men who cut their cocks off. In particular, it was rightly hailed as a victory for women who wanted to keep women’s spaces for women only.
Many men, who, after all, have mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, welcomed the decision. Most of us agree that women should have the right to women’s-only spaces.
It would be nice, though, if women returned the favour.
For decades, male-only spaces have been under sustained assault from nagging women. The girls have been hammering at the doors, demanding to be let in to every boys’ club from boys’ schools to social clubs. Not even men’s sheds are a safe space for blokes any more.
There is a project and a series of local groups called the Men in Sheds, and as they tell us on ageuk.org.uk, Men in Sheds is a service run by some local Age UK to support old men who want to get together, share and learn new skills, all in the welcoming space of a shed.
In Australia, where the movement originated as early as the 1980s, it’s Men’s Sheds, with an official umbrella organisation founded in 2007. As in the UK, it’s intended as a space for men to hang out and do ‘man stuff’: build things and learn how to make and fix things. Blokey stuff. Their purpose is as a kind of wellbeing space for men who wouldn’t be seen dead at a drum circle. Given that we’re told there is an epidemic of male loneliness, especially in later years, they serve a pretty important function for older men especially.
It’s just men, doing wholesome men things, manly things. Just older guys who clearly are either married, or divorced, or widowed maybe, and they just they don’t want to be lonely. And so they get together on whatever night of the week it is, or the weekend or whatever, and they... they’re just making stuff. And this is really meaningful to them […]
This is a really nice outlet in order to just spend your time and spend your energy being among some mates, and make some friends in the process.
This is all for the same reason there are women-only spaces, and why so many men supported the UK Supreme Court decision that ‘trans women’, who are really men, cannot go into women-only spaces.
So women, who are adult human females, get to have spaces away from adult human males. Where they get to curate it, they get to create the atmosphere of it, they get to decide the tone and tenor of it and they get to enjoy it in a way that is non-judgmental from a woman’s point of view.
So, why shouldn’t men get the same courtesy extended to them? Shouldn’t the men’s sheds be just for men?
No such luck, lads.
As the BBC reports – approvingly, of course, by a female reporter, of course – as soon as they discovered that the boys had something, the girls demanded it.
We put the pressure on to join Men in Sheds.
They nagged, in other words.
Brenda Needham said: “I kept asking my husband all the while ‘why can’t we join?’”
There was a reason you couldn’t join a men’s shed, Brenda: the same reason men can’t join a women’s gym, even if they think they’re a woman. Because they’re not a woman. And you’re not a man. The men’s shed is a space for men.
Instead of going “Yeah, you know what, when you’re doing that on Thursday, or whatever, I’m going to get a hobby of my own and do a hobby for myself,” you’re like, “Hmm, how can I barge in on my husband’s thing? I’m sure that he doesn’t get enough of me all day, every day” – cos these people look like retirees, let’s be honest – “I’m sure he doesn’t get enough of my company when he’s going to hang out with the men in sheds. I need to be there as well.”
And this is just so goddamn selfish. Because if you really wanted to do woodworking, well, why don’t you set up a women in sheds thing? Why don’t you just do it on your own?
In Australia, a sister organisation, ‘Australian Women’s Shed Association’, has dozens of locations in operation. Good for them.
No, you have to be invading their space.
So, it’s not a men’s shed, at all, any more. In fact, this particular group has been renamed ‘Men and Women in Sheds’. So, the men have lost what was almost certainly the last thing that was their own.
The 74-year-old added: “Eventually they let us in, just one morning, eventually it became all the time, and now it’s 50 per cent women, and we absolutely love it.”
No doubt the girls love it and the boys don’t dare say otherwise, because we know exactly how they’d be pilloried if they did. Indeed we can gauge just how much the men really ‘love it’ by the fact that, after the girls barged their way in, the group set up a “quiet room with a model railway display in it, just for men”.
Well, for now, at least. Until the girls demand to be let into that, too.
