Perhaps the greatest oddity of the woke moment that we are currently going through is the eagerness with which corporations and other parts of the money-making world have rushed to join in the stampede.
Time and again multinationals and public companies turn out to be as happy as junior members of the Royal Family to sign up to an ideology which will come to eat them next. If anyone is in any doubt about this trend, they should look to the men’s magazine GQ – or what we should more properly describe as the former men’s magazine, GQ.
Firstly, I should declare my prejudices at the outset. Though I have never bought a copy of GQ, I have often flicked through it at the barbers as a way to avoid conversation, and have always found it aggravating in the way that aspirational lifestyle magazines generally are.
By necessity these magazines are pornography for people who don’t have much sex, who feel that looking is the second-best thing to touching. How many of GQ’s readers could ever afford the vast price-tags on the sort of clothes the magazine made it look as though every man wore? How many went to the luxury resorts that were flagged in each issue? Or owned the cars, or generally lived the sort of James Bond-wannabe lifestyle that GQ presented as the achievable ambition of any man? If these flaws were aggravating then they were also embedded. You cannot have an aspirational lifestyle magazine which does not aspire.
Then there was the “Man of the Year” nonsense, the annual jamboree in which GQ got to display its own latest version of the modern aristocracy; a catwalk of public figures who were in turn flattered to be regarded as being in the cool club. GQ was always adept at this, hiring Alastair Campbell to give it alleged gravitas, or handing an award to Russell Brand in order to look like they were on top of each pseudo-serious trend.
In reality, of course, such episodes showed the vulnerability of these very modern day snobs, the pretence that they were style arbiters and trend-setters rather than deeply unimaginative trend-followers. The inability to take a stand on anything until the precise moment that GQ sensed that the stand was being taken by everybody else. The sucking-up to power wherever it came from. It is an editorial talent of a kind, to be so craven that you will jump on any trend as soon as you think it no longer worth resisting.
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SubscribeAs a woman whose life experience could literrally be the poster child for the MeToo movement, I have got to hold my up hands and say, ‘that’s a no from me!’ I have been afflicted by inappropriate behaviour, sexual harrassemnt, stalking, and sexual assault all my life, and on one occassion even a rape. (No, I have never been a sex worker, stripper or glamour model.)
I cannot abide by this new femi-male that the ‘woke’ fringes of society are pushing on the rest of us. That is definitely not what I want in a man. I don’t want you to be more like me, and even less do I want to be just like you. I don’t even want you to understand me. I just want you to follow the rule that says that you don’t have permission to touch me until I give it to you. I may well not, but that’s the rule that all men should follow.
It really is that simple. No need to avert your eyes and speak in hushed voices. No need for self-flagellation if you cop an eyeful of my peachy backside as I walk on by. No need to do pennance if the thought that you might like to tap that, inadvertently popped into your mind.
The Hannah Gadsby’s of this world need to slow their roll and stay in their lane. They do not speak for the majority of real women. Men! Respect the One Rule, and we will all get along just fine.