Shan

I have shared my life with an amazing man for 30 years. I love him deeply and he loves me deeply.
I’m not saying he’s perfect. No one is including me. But he does treat me with great respect as a person, as a woman, as a friend, as a lover, as the mother of our son.

Here’s the sexism.

I feel so lucky to share my life with him. Sure, he feels lucky to be with me too because I’m an amazing woman – but I’m extra lucky because he’s so rare in being a man who can cope with an unusually strong, highly intelligent woman.
I don’t think I should have to feel so incredibly lucky I actually feel guilty about how few decent men there are to go round and I’ve got one of them!

It’s a joke between us that sometimes I ask him to make a phone call, speak to a company, explain something to someone we both know. We have both learned that a male voice will be taken seriously. That a male voice will actually get heard. So sometimes it’s the practical thing to do. It makes us both angry that it’s like that.

As a speaker I once gave a particularly memorable talk about masculinity to a discussion society. At the start I explained my husband was sitting beside me as I gave the talk, to show that we had worked out together what I would say, because it was about men.
Also I was so heavily pregnant I could not stand up for long by myself, so I leaned on him, and put my hand on his shoulder as I stood beside him, which I explained.
At the end of my talk someone in the audience asked why my husband did not share giving the talk. My husband answered that he wasn’t the person the club had invited to do it, as I was known for my work in the area, not him. The other person said it was obvious I was a dominating woman because I was holding my husband down as he sat beside me.

A journalist asked my husband what it was like living with such a dominating woman as me? He laughed and said it was fun. The journalist said but what about being masculine? what about adventures? being a hero? He grinned, and said ‘I’ve done all that, you see.’

I remember the constant assaults on me in word and action whenever I went outside the house. All the men who made stupid or nasty remarks about my body, or groped me, or tried to talk to me, who frightened me. How that meant I had far less time to study a book or report than a male student or colleague did, because my time in public was constantly interrupted and spoiled.
How I became reluctant to leave the house. How it got better when I learned to drive because I was cut off, armoured in a metal box, against all the attacks and intrusions. How that gradually made me less angry, less hostile to men, which meant a more peaceful head space for me. But it also meant I gave up walking about so I put on a lot of weight! Yuk.

I am now old and one of the best things about being an old woman is how men leave me alone. I’m not prime meat any more. I know I still live with the threat of assault, rape, that all women do. But I don’t have the constant reminders of it when I’m out in the world. That’s nice. Nice but wrong.