The nearest I ever got to rowing was (unbelievable as it seems to me now, with a BMI of 27.4) as cox of the Leys School, Cambridge’s sixth VIII. They only had six of them. And I was only doing it to get out of playing hockey (what North Americans call ‘field hockey’).
I had always thought of this as a girls’ game, and no school I had ever attended had played it. Suddenly I was confronted with it. A couple of experiences on freezing fenland fields in January persuaded me that it was not for me in any way – a great deal of ridiculous boredom plus the lurking danger of a rather hard ball in the face.
How to escape? I would later pay people to play cricket for me (two shillings seemed to me to be a small price for avoiding an entire afternoon of tedium, and nobody ever noticed that I wasn’t there). But this was Cambridge, where there was another Spring term sport, rowing, and somehow there was a shortage of small, slight persons to be coxes.
No, I wasn’t especially good at it, not least because my voice was half way through breaking and would veer from a boom to a squeak , and perhaps back again, in mid-bellow. But I can still recall the set of commands necessary to turn a thin-skinned and fragile boat round in the middle of the Cam, with a large gin-palace pleasure cruiser bearing down on us. (‘Hitchens!!’ a voice from the bank still echoes in my head, ‘Do you have ANY idea how much that boat COSTS?’ ) . The procedure for lifting the thing out of the river, which I usually managed flawlessly, has by contrast vanished from my mind.
Eventually, we won a race, thanks to the boat in front sinking (one of the crew had put his foot through the bottom and an attempt to stem the leak by stuffing sweaters into it had failed, badly). Still they manfully struggled on, and even as they filled with water we struggled to catch up with them. We just managed to bump them the moment before they went under, which apparently counted.
So I know the difference between bow and stroke, what a slide is and various other arcane things which make me slightly more interested in the boat race than I would otherwise be which, in truth, is not very much.
But on Sunday, during an appearance on the Andrew Marr show on BBC1, in which , together with Lesley Riddoch, I reviewed the newspapers,…
(The programme can be viewed here,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05rjst7/the-andrew-marr-show-12042015
the paper review begins at about six minutes into the programme)
…the subject came up once again. This time it was because of the decision to row the women’s Oxford-Cambridge race on the same day, and on the same course, as the men’s, thus giving it parity with the male version.
I remarked ( as I said, subversively) that the winning women’s crew had taken rather longer to finish the course than the winning men’s crew. The difference was about two minutes, which may not seem much, but is quite a bit in a race (imagine if the Cambridge crew in either race had come in two minutes behind Oxford).
That was all I said, but it didn’t take long for the protests to begin on Twitter, boring, unresponsive, and baseless as they were. Leftist ultra-feminists instinctively understood that what I had said was indeed subversive of their orthodoxy, but didn’t choose to ask themselves why. For to do so is to admit something about modern ultra-feminism that they do not wish to admit, that it is no longer a reasonable quest for reasonable equality, but a dogma-driven attack on the married family and on the historic division of labour between men and women, based fundamentally on the fact that women bear children ( and nourish small babies) and men don’t.
It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this argument, whether you think that this attack is a good or a bad thing. I think most readers here know that I think it a bad thing, and know why I think it a bad thing. What does matter is that it is advanced under a false flag, and that many of those who give in to it do so without understanding what it is that they are giving in to. This must surely be wrong. If we wish to make deep and radical reforms in our society, then we should call them by their proper names.
Instead, they accused me, quite falsely of arguing that the women’s crews didn’t deserve any praise ( I don’t think this ) or of misogyny (I am not a misogynist). I suspect they don’t even know what the word means, and use it as a grandiose substitute for ‘sexist’.
Now of course, it is difficult for anyone, in practice, not to be a ‘sexist’, as men and women have many important differences, and if we did not treat them differently in many ways, all the time, we would run into all kinds of trouble. Everybody knows this, but, so that the word can be used as if it were the exact equivalent of ‘racist’, everyone pretends not to know it and feigns shock or outrage when it is pointed out. By confusing ‘sexism’ with ‘racism’ one also avoids any real examination of the claim that is being made. Racism (or racialism as I still prefer to call it) is repulsive precisely because it is unreasoning and stupid. To treat someone differently from someone else *when he or she is not different* is the essence of unreasoning stupidity.
That is also why it is ridiculous to have denied women education, equal pay for equal work, legal autonomy, property rights or the vote. The differences between the sexes simply do not affect such things.
But the next stage of feminism seems to me to have moved out of the area of reason and fact, and into the zone of dogma.
There is a new belief, that the evident and undeniable differences between women and men must henceforth be treated as if they did not exist. This seems to me to be more or less the reverse of late 19th and early 20th century feminism, which rightly pointed out that women were being denied the freedom to do things they were perfectly capable of doing, because *in such matters* there was no difference between the sexes.
This stage of feminism was, I think, content to accept mid-20th-century restrictions on women serving in the armed forces, or the police, or the fire service, or in heavy industry. It did not regard such restrictions as irrational or as unfair discrimination, but as reasonable distinctions between the sexes based on undeniable generalities. These generalities were that women, on average, have far less upper body strength than men; and that women alone are capable of bearing children. Indeed, to this day, many low-prestige occupations demanding physical strength – the crewing of dustcarts and the building trade being the obvious examples, though one might think also of deep-sea fishing and what remains of coalmining – remain almost totally male-dominated and face no campaigns to alter this, no quotas or anything like them.
The armed forces, the police and the fire service are under pressure to change because they are high-status occupations, much admired by children looking for examples.
It is true that some women do have as much upper body strength as most men. It is true that some women cannot bear children, and that some do not wish to do so. But in general, these facts are a rational basis for generally different treatment –provided that rational exceptions are made when justified by the facts.
Why depart from this reasonable view, and move to the dogmatic position that all discrimination, even when it has a rational basis, is in itself wrong?
Did we, in fact, do so? I believe we did, in the interesting case of Gillian Maxwell, pursued and won by by then then Equal Opportunities Commission in 1996-1997.
The story was as follows : 5ft 3in Mrs Maxwell applied to be a firefighter. She was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough, under the provisions of Fire Services Act of 1947 which stipulated a minimum height of 5 feet 6 inches. With the support of the EOC, she took them to an employment tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women *because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population*.
(I first wrote about this case and its implications many years ago, in this 2002 article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-124076/Why-I-believe-women-brigade-danger.html
I notice, looking back at it, that I use the word ‘extremists’, a mistake I regret, would not now make and which I would correct if I returned to the subject. )
This argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act.
Note the reason for the ruling. It wasn’t that anyone had established that it was a good idea to lower the height restriction, but that the height restriction was axiomatically wrong *because it ‘discriminated against 60% of women’*. That is to say, it made it impossible for 60% of women to join the Fire Service. How many of those women under 5’6”in height actually wanted to join the fire service it is very hard to say. I doubt if there are any records that could be usefully studied, especially now, 18 years after the rule was lifted. But I would guess that it was not very many. I imagine it also prevented quite a large number of men from joining. But that was not ‘discrimination’, in the sense in which it is used here.
How do we know? Because no man could have successfully brought this case. He could not have maintained that the rule discriminated against him *because he was male*. Nor could he have said it discriminated against him because he was short, as the EOC and its successors have never made physical height a protected status (an attribute through which one could be ‘discriminated’ against in the modern sense). Discrimination is merely a long word for ‘choice’. We discriminate when we choose one pizza instead of another . A discriminating person used to be a person of good judgement. But in its modern meaning it is automatically wrong and a tort in law. But only in certain defined matters, chosen for political reasons.
Oddly enough, it is quite possible that the main effect of this ruling has in fact been to stop ‘discrimination’ against weedy men by the Fire Brigade. It doesn’t really matter to those who pursued the case. Theirs is an ideological aim, not a practical one.
The number of women in the brigade (and there were significant numbers of women firefighters before this decision, who had passed the old physical tests with ease) is still quite small . In 2009, the latest year for which I have figures, it was said to be 3.3 per cent, well short of the 15 per cent target set by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1999. This is despite incessant government campaigns for female recruitment, and a general reduction in physical demands for the job . In the period after 1997 the entry requirements changed considerably. They did not get tougher. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests were dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute - was scrapped.
I do not believe any studies have been carried out on the effect of this on the fire service itself. How would one tell for certain without an incredibly detailed and intrusive investigation? My own suspicion would be that, as in the police, greater height and upper-body strength may well be an advantage in certain specific circumstances.
As it happens, thanks to the decline in smoking, the greatly increased use of fire-retardant materials in buildings and furniture, huge improvements in electrical wiring, the virtual disappearance of open fires and the mass introduction of smoke alarms, much of the Fire Service’s work is now preventive (the opposite of what has happened to the police, who have become almost wholly reactive). What’s more, even after 16 years of pressure, the Fire Service still contains a large number of old-fashioned firemen. No doubt, in emergencies, all work together as hard as they can to ensure the safety of the public. Maybe they have to work harder to achieve this than they did under the old rules. But outsiders would never know.
Another formerly male-dominated service, the morale and discipline of the seagoing Royal Navy, were ( according to a huge amount of anecdotal evidence, occasionally supported by lurid courts martial) damaged by the decision to allow women to go to sea in warships. But the political view was that this had to be done, and done it was. An in-depth study of the outcome would not be welcome. In my experience, the modern Navy is far more reluctant than it used to be to allow journalists to spend time aboard HM ships at sea.
It may well be that the image of the Fire Service and the reality are now so far apart, that its old role as a rough tough brigade of big strong men who could carry an unconscious fatty out of a running building and down a ladder, is as outdated as the idea of a train driver being a soot-stained bloke leaning out of a rain-swept cab while his fireman colleague shovelled coal into a roaring furnace. You don’t get much fuss these days about women drivers of trains, do you? Though I’m not sure how many there are.
But as long as that image persists, I suspect the ultra-feminists will have the Fire Service high on their list as a target for politically-driven change. Likewise the police and the armed services will never be free of this pressure. At all costs the old Ladybird-book idea of the division of labour between men and women must be erased and replaced by one in which every high-status job can be and is done by women exactly as men do, and the raising of children must not be assumed to have any effect on this at all. Indeed, it must be assumed *not* to have any effect on it. Any mention of real differences between the sexes is subversive of this dogma, and will become increasingly frowned upon until it is impossible.
