What bothers me about all this nonsense, is that it is entirely part of the patriarchal attempts to erase or glorify certain aspects of history. Let me explain.
In the past, it was exceedingly common, indeed expected for men to have safe spaces. They were sometimes even called this. A man had a study at home, or an office. Even in the poorer houses, during the growth of the middle class, circa 1700′s, men had a library, or a study, or a dressing room. They had social clubs that did not allow women. They were allowed multiple locations that were entirely theirs to do with as they pleased, including abandoning their wives to whatever it was they were doing, ignoring the world, shooting billiards, drinking, smoking and so forth. Even before the creation of the middle class after the plague, there were male-only groups, meeting halls, schools, and pubs. Men had plenty of safe spaces reserved for themselves that were unrelated to work and entirely focused on leisure. At universities, which were male only for the longest time, there were also common rooms, study rooms, rooms for leisure activities, pubs, mess halls and so forth.
Men have always had their male-only spaces. They have kept women from them, they have used them to escape from “the strictures of family life” specifically. They used them to avoid the things that men found overtly objectionable. They have used them to write letters, or converse with other women who were not their wives, or experience companionship with other men. They have even made rules about what could and could not be discussed.
Great historical partnerships, arrangements, bargains, treaties and on and on were founded in these male-only safe spaces. Lloyd’s of London, one of the largest financial institutions of the world? Founded in Lloyd’s coffee shop - a typically male-oriented space full of cronies sitting around chatting about their insurances on ships and trade. Publishing? Founded in pubs and churchyards. Property? governed through public houses and in male clubs. Law? An entire group existed at Temple Bar and the Inns of court to allow male lawyers to have freedom from the regulations of the city, to the point that they often fought with the crown. These men had an entire culture entirely to themselves, with additional safe spaces within that were the foundations of many of the longer standing legal and trade organizations. The British East India trading company? You guessed it. Put together by blokes sitting at a pub on the North Bank.
Safe spaces for men have always existed, while women were either kept from them or eventually had safe female spaces delegated for them by men, usually a solarium or parlor, or drawing room specifically. They were allowed to take the air or promenade in the park, but that was all.
And that says nothing about racial organizations that provided safe spaces from the poor, the immigrant, the slave, from which, all of these groups were banned or forced to act as servants or slaves within these safe spaces, seeing the white males go about their safe leisure, with no regard that it is being facilitated by the oppressed.
To now see grown men in children’s clothes, acting as if the entire foundation of everything they hold dear and propagate as the heights of achievement wasn’t built in male safe spaces, by men escaping their families, or their jobs, or their obligations, or the people they didn’t see as “fit”, for a moment, is both appalling to me and uniquely ignorant. The history of male leisure and its critical impact on how the world works is being overwritten. This new history is a palimpsest that obliterates the intrinsic hierarchies at play in western culture.
These men are stupid bastards, and someone ought to give them a good walloping.
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