(Photograph: Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Guardian, in its relentless and ever increasingly anachronistic crusade against something called the Patriarchy, has once again demanded that the Garrick, one of the few remaining London gentlemen’s clubs, admits female members. As the appropriately named Amelia Gentlemen, a journalist with The Guardian, tells us in her recent article against the Garrick, the Guardian has been waging this battle for nearly sixty years.
There appear to be three arguments used by the anti-Garrick agitators. First, it is just unfair, unequal and exclusive to ban women from membership. This is not a good argument, for on that basis all single sex associations ought to be made to admit the other sex, including those that favour women such as lesbian bars, women-only gyms and private women’s clubs such as the Allbright. (Yes, women’s clubs exist, so why are they not under the same pressure to admit men?) Segregated environments, such as mosques, would have to desegregate. I cannot imagine the Guardianistas advocating these measures since for them they would be misogynistic and Islamophobic, so why do they think they have the right to deny men their ‘spaces’?
The second and third arguments are prima facie stronger. The second runs like this: professional women are at a disadvantage as they do not have the networking opportunities that the Garrick provides its male members; therefore, their careers and businesses suffer. In an age of equality, this is unacceptable. The third regards the Garrick as a place where the most politically powerful men meet and through the alliances they form, have a disproportionate influence on British politics. It is the Garrick’s membership statistics that reveal these arguments to be nonsense.
According to the journalist Noah Carl, 8% of Supreme Court judges, 14% of Court of Appeal judges, 6% of High Court judges, 7% of KCs and only 1.5% of MPs are members of the Garrick. Put another way, 86–94% of senior lawyers are not members and 98.5% of MPs are not members. To insist that women are being denied networking opportunities with powerful men when the great majority are not Garrick members, and that the Garrick is the clandestine power behind Number Ten is absurd.
Carl was also informed by an anonymous source who is a Garrick member that the club’s raison d’etre is not networking as business meetings are banned. Rather, it is a place where men can enjoy an exclusively male environment.
Perhaps that is the real, underlying reason The Guardian’s feminist agitators and their virtue-signalling male allies cannot tolerate the Garrick: it challenges the vicious feminist myth that whereas women need men as much as fish need bicycles, men become uncivilised without the regulatory presence of women. Yet, most women who are friends with or live with male partners and husbands know only too well the benefits of all male company. A female friend of mine welcomes the all-male fishing trips her husband goes on once a month and enjoys her all-female shopping sprees and nights-in with a good film. Why? Because as she wisely explained to me, time spent in the company of one’s own sex makes a person more appreciative of the other sex. A man who has enjoyed a weekend fishing trip with his mates will be glad to return to his wife or girlfriend because however much he likes his male companions, they are not winsome like her. Equally, a woman may enjoy her female friends’ company, but appreciates more the fact that when with her male partner or husband, she does not have to worry so much about causing offence with her words.
It is an eye-watering irony that at a time when feminists are vocal in their defence of women-only spaces, particularly against the incursions of transgender women, and expect men to support their position, that they are intent on denying men their remaining spaces. But hypocrisy has never given third and fourth-wave feminists pause for thought before, so why expect it to now?
Just leave the Garrick alone. It is blinding, vindictive ideology that is no better than a conspiracy theory, not facts and wisdom, which is behind this attack. And anyway, do the Garrick members really care what Amelia Gentleman et al have to say? Here’s to another futile sixty years of futile campaigning by The Guardian.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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Not one article on this silly issue (that I’ve seen) mentions the even more crucial information on how much membership costs and what is the application process – I’d like to bet that for most men the prospects of becoming a member are virtually nil – not because they are men and so qualify, but because they wouldn’t be ‘the right sort’, even if they could afford it. Yes, just leave it alone as a quaint rather anachronistic British relic. Groucho Marx comes to mind.
I would have mentioned how most men are excluded too, but I try to stick to the editor’s very sensible guideline of around 700 words, so not everything can be discussed.
The extreme feminist is, by definition, never satisfied. We hear little of men-only spaces. Even many of those trendy new ‘men’s sheds’ are being invaded by a certain type of aggressive female, often encouraged by their gamma-male apologists!