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Ironically I would probably have been in quite a good position to do the March 8th marathon the next year as I'd likely still have been in bed recovering from surgery. When is International One-Ballers Day? That's the real question.
I no longer check my Twitter account (which I haven't deactivated as I don't want someone else to nick it) so there was no way for me to check whether people are still asking the question unironically. A big part of the task was trying to work out if a post was genuine or sarcastic, which is why you couldn't use a bot for this job. If you did you'd just get loads of replies saying, "I know, I was making a joke."
It's the one job that AI can't take.
Having said that I think I would struggle to do it now as now the kids are older it's not really on for me to spend International Women's Day making my wife do all the childcare (luckily she was always supportive of my efforts in the past and it was a bit easier to multitask when the kids were tiny). Also things were getting a bit toxic and tasty even in 2020 so I dread to think how the cloaca of Twitter would react to this now. I was getting threats and unpleasant comments from extreme meninists but also some feminists and I was very pleased to finally unite these two groups in agreement of something. One step at a time. If I were to do it now I suspect there would be another group of people asking me to define what a woman was. As positive as much of this experience was and as delighted as I was that it somehow raised around about half a million pounds for Refuge over the years, there did come a point where I had to step away.
My intent was always to get men to do stuff on November 19th, rather than complaining on March 8th, so I switched my attention to trying to make a fuss on that day. To general lack of interest. The men who complain about international women's day suddenly go quiet on International Men's Day (one year I doubled my workload by setting up a scheduled tweet for everyone who'd asked for November 19th saying "It's today! What are you going to do?" or something like that.
Today we should be celebrating and supporting women (though as always the quest for equality for all benefits men and women, unless you think of yourself as one of the men benefitting from the patriarchy and don't think you can compete in a world where everyone got the same start).
So in that spirit, check out my favourite stand-up Catie Wilkins (and woman) and her brilliant
Women's Problems routine (that's gone viral on tiktok today!) here!
Instead of driving myself slowly insane with a ridiculous task of my own making, we had a linner (the meal between lunch and dinner) with some friends and enjoyed our Sunday.
Catie did the cooking, so maybe there is still some way to go before equality is reached, but I did the washing up. One step at a time, sisters.
