Feminists? No, men wearing this T-shirt insult women and I don't believe Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg's protestations for a second says MELISSA KITE

Scrawled in arty black lettering across a fashionable-looking blue-grey T-shirt, the slogan reads: ‘This is what a feminist looks like.’

Stretched across the figure of a trendy young woman, keen to join the fight for equality, the statement would seem accurate, if a little earnest. Yet covering the somewhat slight shoulders and wimpish yet unmistakeably male torsos of politicians Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, it reads like a bad joke. For how can a man ever claim to be a feminist?

The idea is utterly ludicrous. I don’t believe Ed and Nick’s protestations for a second, and I don’t suppose many other women are fooled either. Both leaders had put on T-shirts produced by The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equal rights for women, and agreed to be photographed for Elle magazine.

Getting shirty: Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband wear the 'This is what a feminist looks like' T-shirt
Getting shirty: Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband wear the 'This is what a feminist looks like' T-shirt

Getting shirty: Nick Clegg, left, and Ed Miliband, right, wear the 'This is what a feminist looks like' T-shirt

Staring vacantly into the middle distance, the Leader of the Opposition looks rather like a budget-catalogue model. Stiff and uneasy, with an uncertain half-grin on his face, he wouldn’t be out of place on one of those old adverts for Man At C&A. Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, giving his best ‘I’m a real outdoorsy kind of guy’ grin, appears no more relaxed in the same T-shirt.

They were right to look uncomfortable. For a man can’t be a feminist, any more than I can be a chauvinist.

The whole thrust of the campaign is to make men seem equally concerned about sexism as women. But why should they be? To tell men they have to be sorry for possessing a natural advantage is to make them deny their most primal human urge — to compete and outdo their rivals, whatever the cost.

Moreover, when these wide-eyed campaigners suggest men can know what it’s like to be a woman faced with sexism, they take away from the female sex an experience that is unique to them.

How can a man know what it feels like to have to decide whether to have children in case they have to put on hold or even lose their career? This is an experience unique to women. To understand the feminist perspective — with its many biological dilemmas — you have to be inside a female body.

How on earth can a man, least of all a political leader who has fought his way to the top by stepping over the careers of any number of women, truly claim to be a feminist? And, more pertinently, why would he want to?

Interestingly, David Cameron rejected the cheap publicity stunt and faced the ire of the feminist lobby for most of this week.

Rarely have I felt so sympathetic towards him as when Holly Baxter, author of The Vagenda: A Zero Tolerance Guide to the Media, said: ‘The Prime Minister doesn’t want to identify himself as a feminist. The fact that he can’t even put on a T-shirt is very disappointing.’

Really? I’m not disappointed in the slightest. In fact, I’m incredibly relieved. I’d have been ashamed to see our Prime Minister posing in a daft T-shirt when he should be managing the economy, standing up to the EU over our budget contribution and tackling the growing immigration crisis.

By wearing such a T-shirt, the PM would have looked an utter fraud. Make no mistake, a man wearing one is not being genuine. After all, he’s not just being asked if he supports equality of the sexes — a banal question anyone would say yes to.

Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman wore the t-shirt as she sat next to Ed Miliband on the frontbench

Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman wore the t-shirt as she sat next to Ed Miliband on the frontbench

Ms Harman tweeted this picture of herself wearing the t-shirt ahead of PMQs in the Commons

Ms Harman tweeted this picture of herself wearing the t-shirt ahead of PMQs in the Commons

Wearing a T-shirt carries unique resonance. There is an old saying: ‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.’ And, when it comes to feminism, surely only women can truthfully say they have been there, done that, and got the T-shirt?

It’s all very well for Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Opposition, to wear the T-shirt to PMQs, as she did this week. She has a right to say she has suffered, I suppose, having coped as a woman in the Labour Party for more than 30 years.

But, deep down, the Labour leader and the Deputy Prime Minister both know their claims are bogus. They might believe in equal rights. But neither of them can possibly consider themselves to be the embodiment of the struggle for social, political, legal and economic equality — because they haven’t suffered the anguish of not having those rights.

Any man who wears a T-shirt declaring himself to be a feminist is either dissembling or, more likely, trying to please women — a patronising act that would in itself be totally anti-feminist.

In Clegg and Miliband’s case, it is a transparent attempt to woo female voters, while in the case of ordinary blokes, it’s usually an attempt to woo women. A case of ‘Put the T-shirt on, lads, and keep her happy.’

I’ve lost count of the number of men who, in chatting me up, have said the immortal words: ‘I like strong women.’ They invariably demonstrate later they don’t, but they say they do to get me on side.

Esquire magazine recently ran an article telling men to ‘be a feminist’ — the inference being it would make them more attractive to women.

Yet it often has the opposite effect. Putting on feminist T-shirts just made Miliband and Clegg look feeble — too scared of the repercussions from the powerful women’s lobbying groups if they refused.

On the one hand their cowardly acquiescence is understandable, as there’s no beast more formidable than the women’s lobby in today’s politically correct society. Politicians mess with it at their peril.

‘Are you a feminist?’ is fast becoming a rite-of-passage question in interviews, and male celebrities are increasingly being interrogated along these lines. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch put on the T-shirt, despite having 70,000 Twitter followers who call themselves the decidedly unfeminist ‘Cumberbitches’. He said he disagrees with the term and wants them to call themselves ‘Cumberpeople’.

David Cameron rejected the chance to wear a 'this is what a feminist looks like' T-shirt, sparking anger among women's rights groups

David Cameron rejected the chance to wear a 'this is what a feminist looks like' T-shirt, sparking anger among women's rights groups

Yet why is the feminist lobby growing in power when things have never been better for women? We are rising to the top of the professions — particularly law and medicine — in unprecedented numbers, have greater rights to flexible working than ever before and are increasingly triumphing over men.

The battle ahead is less to do with life and death than fine-tuning the rights we have, such as the gender pay gap. Research suggests this persists and has recently increased for the first time in five years, with women earning on average 81p for every £1 men earn.

Asda is currently facing mass legal action from thousands of female shop-floor employees who claim they are paid less than male warehouse staff but have equally valuable jobs.

But while it might be fashionable to attack the pay gap wholeheartedly, I would argue that women don’t always deserve to be paid the same as men. Surely the men in the Asda warehouses have feelings about their worth too — and wouldn’t it emasculate a chap who spends his working life hauling heavy goods around if we tell him he can no longer earn more than a woman sitting down at a till?

Modern feminism often seems less about fairness and more about everyone getting the same. And in life, sometimes things aren’t the same.

Surely now, when women do have equal rights to own property, to vote, to access the job market, we should show magnanimity towards men as we break through that last bit of the glass ceiling? Especially as there is a brewing crisis in male identity — the rising numbers of underachieving boys in our schools suggests that in a generation we might be facing the opposite problem to chauvinism.

And yet today’s feminism seems to be about crushing men. What is making men wear silly T-shirts if not an attempt to humiliate them? This is feminism resorting, rather perversely, to the underhand tactics of male manipulation.

On balance, it’s hard to decide who is manipulating whom the most cynically. The feminists who force the men to display their slogans, or the men who do so to shut the women up. Ultimately, they are both as wrong as each other.

 

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