Double Vision with Charlie Adley

I’d finished packing my shopping at the supermarket checkout when the cashier asked if I was collecting coupons for the glasses.

“No, I’m not, so could you pass those coupons to the woman next in the queue? Thanks!” Then I remembered I’d some money-off vouchers in my wallet, but I was too late. The transaction was done.

“Here, you might as well have these vouchers as well. I forgot to use them in time!” I said, passing them to the woman.

Taking the vouchers, she looked over to me with scornful eyes and said

“Typical man.”

Right now I’m a little sensitive about man-bashing, for reasons I’ll explain, so I was hasty with my response.

“I’m sorry but I find that sexist and offensive.”

Later I contemplated the madness of it. I’d just given her coupons and seven quid off off a €50 shop.

Was that ‘typical man’?

I’d taken my list and followed a testosterone trail around the supermarket, building up household stocks alongside ingredients for meals that I planned to cook through the week. Was that ‘typical man’?

I think it’s all typical man, because I’m an egocentric male who thinks he’s pretty typical. We’re all our own normal, which is why the word counts for nowt.

If in a parallel universe the woman had sighed and uttered the very same words in a gentle and complimentary fashion, everything would have been just as apt.

Poor diddums manboy here was not devastated by being slagged off by a woman, but I was disconcerted by the heat of my response.

The issues of gender equality appear so clear to me it would feel trite to write them down, were the worldwide situation not still so appalling.

Right now women perform 66% of the world’s work and earn 10% of global income. They produce 50% of the planet’s food yet own 1% of the land.

Throw in systemic violence and FGM and there’s no debate. We’ve a long way to go but at least we’ve started.

Like a man on a mission, this Dangler first sought to understand and then support the feminist dream in the early 1980s. Alongside listening to female friends, I read Betty Friedan’s ‘Feminist Mystique’, progressed to Erica Jong’s zipless fuck and then hero-worshipped feminism in action, in the shape of German Green revolutionary and politician Petra Kelly. Her book ‘Fighting for Hope’ became something of a bible to my idealistic eyes. That fire still burns bright within me.

During that decade there emerged a phenomenon called ‘Militant Feminism’, personified by the heroic women of Greenham Common Peace Camp. Although rarely credited with victory, they managed to upset the British establishment and the Cruise and Pershing missiles were taken away.

To read all of Charlie’s column, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.