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A few people were sharing
this Fist of Fun clip this week, this guy rudely crediting it to the genius of Stewart Lee and not mentioning me at all. Actually fairly accurately in this case. I am still pretty good at telling who wrote what and this is very much a Lee section. I think we pretty much wrote our own character bits in this one, though obviously there would have been a run through of the material together (to which I may or may not have contributed the surname Campkin). With this and the Pie Pie we did seem to make some predictions of the direction that the country was heading in.
Good characters though, those teachers, though it was one of the more mainstream and obvious ideas we had (I think Kids in the Hall might have beaten us to it). Could have been a sitcom perhaps. I loved little Twatty Harris and suspect that that’s how I would have been if I’d gone into teaching (as perhaps I should!)
Part of the reason I decided to stop doing the International Women’s Day thing was that the reaction of both hardline meninists and feminists (weirdly so often united in belief) was getting a bit nastier and harder on my not particularly fragile psyche. I didn’t really think about that as I was writing the book, but of course, it’s just going to invite more of the same. Which I think I’ll be OK with, but it gets a bit wearing and I suspect my Twitter feed will get increasingly lively. The book is actually pretty pro-International Men’s Day in the end but I don’t suppose that will change much. Even if you express a very gentle and middle ground opinion these days you are still open to vitriol and a bizarre extrapolation of views (a few months ago I suggested that maybe it’s polite to call people whatever they want to be called and this has led to me being told online that I am an advocate for men and myself being allowed into female changing rooms to ogle women. The reading between the lines (when there’s only one line) is doing a lot of work there. But this is 2020 and it’s fucking awesome.
Someone online today posted a thing about my new book and suggested that as it was about men being feminists (again the book is only obliquely about that and is more about if you’re searching for equality then you share a common goal with anyone else who is doing the same), that I was another example of a man pretending to be a feminist in the hope that women would therefore have sex with me. It’s a tired trope that I don’t think ever really held any water. Feminists are clever enough to see through any man who would have those motives. But I mainly found it funny because I am 53, married and have two kids so would much rather engineer a situation where I am able to go to sleep for 12 hours straight. But you know, my days of hoping I can persuade people to have sex with me are long gone. Luckily my wife still seems to want to even though I don’t think she thinks I a very good feminist.
I don’t know. Just found it funny that some meninists would assume that was the only reason I wrote a book (that they won’t read and that they’ve guessing at the content of). It says a lot about them that they can not imagine any other motivation for doing something. But what struck me for the first time is that the argument sort of implies that any man trying to facilitate male equality and arguing that it’s wrong that there isn’t an International Men’s Day (there is one by the way, it’s November 19th) can only be doing it to impress men so they will fuck them. Which is actually so true that it makes me think that they must also be right about men only becoming feminists in the hope that women will do them.
It made me laugh anyway. As you all know, I am a flawed person (as are you) who has done loads of dumb ass stuff in my time, much of it in the hope that someone would sleep with me. Men are idiots and I am a man and so I am an idiot too. The book is an attempt to address all of our flaws, not to suggest that I don’t have any myself. I reckon I am going to have to field a load of shit in November. But I have fielded a lot of shit and taken the stones out of the field too, so I’ll probably be able to cope.
