Enough. No, the UK is not a patriarchy.
A country whose gendered laws are written exclusively for women and not men, is not patriarchal.
A country that ignores the way that men and boys are hurt by institutional sexism, is not patriarchal.
A country whose political strategies and interventions around violent crime, sexual violence and domestic abuse, exclusively support women and erase men, is not a patriarchy.
A country that strips rights from fathers and gives them to mothers is not a patriarchy.
A society that sits idly by and watches it boys descend further and further in educational attainment, and does nothing to help, is not a patriarchy.
A country whose political leaders openly advocate for women, yet are too afraid to do the same for men, is not a patriarchy
And a country that only cares about women’s health, and appoints more and more policy makers to represent it, without similar positions for men – is not a patriarchy either.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with ignorant people, what they choose to do in the privacy of their own home, is of no business to me.
But I do have a problem when people’s igorance and insistence of paranoid fairy-tale politics is used to influence, lobby and dictate highly gendered political reform, to the detriment of men and boys.
The UK is not a society that wholesale advantages men over women.
And those who claim it does are guilty not only of this ignorance, but of perpetrating a false narrative that is actively harming men and boys.
Is it you?
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ONS, Life Expectancy: https://tinyurl.com/4tuzsssb
ONS, UK Death Data: tinyurl.com/y7v5nvvf
ONS, Suicides England and Wales https://tinyurl.com/2p8282p8
Nature, COVID ICU https://tinyurl.com/yamv8fts
Images by Nasa Image Library, and Anirudh from Unsplash