My song today is ‘The Woman in Me’. The only time I ever heard this song was in duet form between Shania Twain and Crystal Gale. I have taken the liberty of changing around a few of the lead words to retain their original meaning as I am singing it solo and as a male.
Until the late 1980s when ‘women’s rights causes’ began to dominate the social scene of enlightened advancement, twentieth-century man still retained a masculine identity and role in society that held no ambivalence. Until then, the tradition of men and women roles within the marriage, the workplace, and society at large had remained largely unaltered ever since the post-Cromwellian period.
Then, along came the enlightened 1980s where the attitudes of men toward women moved to a more visibly ‘progressive’ level. Some men still had one genetic foot in their caveman days, and some ‘new age’ men were proud to boast that they now ‘walked the political walk’. A few northern stalwarts of manhood fought to the bitter end, but year after year, the successive women’s campaigns forced the government onto the back foot and its collective conscience felt obliged to legally redress this obviously unjust situation. Over the next twenty years (1980-2000) the government of the day enacted every law imaginable that recognised the equal rights of men and women in all significant respects. Sexual equality in all things was its one aim!
However, like a great many of the enlightened males of 1980, the government of the day was also ‘walking the political walk’ while continuing to do business like the government of the day had done since Post Cromwellian days. Like all the country’s enlightened males the government paid ‘lip service’ to its own legislation which it only legally reinforced whenever it had no alternative. Regarding the positions and roles, they could now legally play in wider society, women were still being denied taking their rightful place in the church hierarchy, the home, the workplace, etc. The politicians of the day might have used the ‘legislation of the day’ to legally correct past judicial wrongs and injustices, but still, the wrong remained. All the government of the day had done was to kick the can of female worms farther down the road. The Houses of Parliament had made some symbolic attempt at the most modest of composition reform, but whenever anyone looked inside that parliamentary chicken coops, the cockerels would be the poultry stutters with membership. The astute observer might see a token number of hens who had found their natural place at the back of the coop.
Man has always made a big mistake whenever we underestimate the power of women to persuade us around to their way of thinking (whatever it is they are thinking). Even the traditional stalwart northern man, who has never been known to acknowledge equal rights between the sexes, was being defeated by the new rules of the nation’s bedrooms. Their wives may have wanted to wear men’s trousers (please note that there is no such thing as a pair of women’s trousers in the north of England), but the way that wives made most progress ‘up north’ was to exercise the degree of ‘down south’ rationing they were prepared to expose to their husbands in the matrimonial bed. Women knew better than any other that the way to get inside a man’s head (his northern region) was to allow him entry to their ‘southern region’, at an experience level that was lovely, but not quite enough.
Once allowed access to their minds, the northern women took full advantage of the ground they held. The next step was to infiltrate the bastion of the poor man’s castle. The women struck from two flanks at the same time, so that the poor men didn’t know what was happening all the while it happened. It had always been common in the home of the northern working man, for the man of the house to be able to escape the presence of his wife and family responsibilities anytime he wanted. Whether they were aristocrats who went to their private club or artisans of the working class who attended the ‘Working Man’s Club’. Either establishment represented places where women could not go.
After the post-war years, allotments were frequently established by northern men to grow fruit, vegetables, and flowers. They loved growing things but what they treasured most of all was peace and the absence of female chatter and the constant ‘pain-in-the-arse complaining that never ends. The pride of their allotments was the shed. This mancave held all the things that the husbands chose to conceal from their wives; a packet of cigarettes, a bottle of beer in a small fridge that your wife never knew that you had bought (just like the new clothes that magically appear from time to time in the wives wardrobe), that dirty old magazine, a cup, teaspoon, and kettle. This was a man’s treasure and while he might allow his wife to pop her head over the allotment hedge to pass him a message, either walking on his holy plot of ground or even daring to look inside his shed (which remained locked whether it was occupied or not) was taboo!
Before the norther man realised what their wives had been doing while they talked to their cabbages or spurred on the carrot growth by the discharge of the northern human urine, it had been done. All the northern wives had collectively invaded every Working Men’s Club Committee across the country and managed to open it up to women on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. Instead of going out for a pint with the lads on a weekend evening at the Working Men’s Club, women had now acquired full membership. For a long time, the allotment and shed remained the domain of the husband (who was allowed to go up there whenever the northern sun shone four days non-stop), the wife was now allowed inside the plot to sit and watch her husband sit and watch.
In getting all their menfolk to give up their traditional Friday and Saturday nights to spend their new Friday and Saturday nights with them, the new custom of ‘being on a promise’ encouraged the men to take their women to the WMC every Friday and Saturday night. They had been gradually coaxed to change their cave-man-ways, by little more than a Friday-night promise of ‘good things to come’ that weekend.
(PLEASE NOTE: THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN TOUNGE IN CHEEK, AND IS FROM THE NORTHERN MALE’S VIEWPOINT)
I would urge every man to find the women in themselves and to express that vital part of their nature that will otherwise not be expressed. True freedom of male identity can only exist when men learn to express the woman in you, and vice versa.
Love and peace
Bill xxx