At some point in the fallout of Liam Payne’s tragic death, a woman will be blamed.
She will not have loved him enough, will have dumped him, or otherwise not helped a grown man whose problems, wealth and self-awareness should all have meant that it wasn’t up to her.
In Hollywood, Jen Aniston is “perennially single” while Brad Pitt is “man about town”. Must have been something wrong to drive him into Angelina Jolie’s arms, and something wrong with Angie because he didn’t stay. Brad is never spoken of as lacking something fundamental, like stamina, faithfulness, reliability. Flawed, unhappy men never are, when it can always be blamed on a woman not loving him enough.
As with celebrity, so with politics. Kamala Harris does not have enough children to be President of the United States. Kemi Badenoch has too many children to be leader of the Conservative Party. Pregnant women don’t get hired or promoted, mums who go part-time aren’t committed enough, and those who carry on after childbirth just as they did before are cold-hearted bitches. And yet no man can tell us what number of children women can have without it causing a problem.
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We likewise have not been provided with the answer to how many is the optimum number of boyfriends or girlfriends; the number of opinions that can be held; or the tipping point at which equality seems, to a man, to become unequal, although all the evidence points to it being around 30%.
We DO know that, if a woman capable of generating billions of pounds in spending, donates to more than 1,000 foodbanks and has so many fans that their dancing registers on the Richter scale, is targeted by terrorists, that it is enough for her to get a police escort in Scotland under a Tory government in June, but not enough for a police escort in England under a Labour administration in August.
Presumably, if Taylor Swift had cancelled her Wembley gigs, the fact it would have deprived the Treasury of millions in revenue, harmed business, and made Britain look like heartless bar stewards on the world stage, it would have been Yvette Cooper’s fault for having short hair and being no fun.
Other things women may not do: write the Budget. Have your hair done during cancer treatment. Enter an Ibiza DJ booth. Be too fat. Be too thin. Marry a prince.
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A woman may not point out that Mrs Brown’s Boys was offensive sh**e long before Brendan O’Carroll muttered racial slurs in rehearsals. A woman may not say she’s fine with trans people, nor that she’d also like to have spaces for biological females only. She certainly can’t say that gender-neutral toilets are rank AF, and all people who don’t leave the cubicle as they found it should be taken outside and shot, because men would call her cisphobic, transphobic, and an misandrist homicidal maniac, all at the same time.
There is a simple way out of this, which is just to be honest. Say that Keir Starmer can have as many freebie tickets to see Black Sabbath as he likes, but not TayTay, because he cannot be in thrall to a female. To say that JD Vance is right, and crazy childless cat ladies are definitely the problem, and if she’s got a wart on her nose too then fetch me the matches, it’s time for a burning.
To say that any woman who thinks about children, or doesn’t think about children, or who in fact thinks, or wants a man to think about something, should probably have her lips stapled shut. And while you’re at it, doc, lift those boobs, tighten those flaps, and do something about the attitude.
Only to do that would make men sound…. unreasonable. Over-emotional. Hysterical, even. Definitely a bit self-obsessed, cliquey, focussed too much on self-image and not enough on self-worth.
We might even say that not being honest about their thoughts and feelings is what leads men to think that masculinity is about not having emotion, not admitting to imperfections, not discussing the problems with a modern world which was mostly molded in your image yet doesn’t quite work for you any more than it does for women. Men having to look a certain way, earn a certain amount, be married, leads to misery, domestic abuse, bullying, addiction, suicides, and mental illness in all walks of life. You can see it in the street you live in, just as clearly as from a Buenos Aires balcony.
No-one has yet accused a woman of being behind the Ukraine invasion, or the Israel-Hamas war. But I suspect eventually Putin’s mum will cop the flak, or Yahya Sinwar’s missus. In the same way that the wives were at fault, not Henry VIII, and it was Eve who ate the apple, never mind that Adam has been rather enthusiastic about sin ever since.
Everyone needs to remember one essential truth: the long list of things women may not do without causing men a problem is incomplete, and is always being added to. Some smart Alec will probably add in the comments that she can’t write columns like this one, either. Because if there’s one thing a woman can have all of, it’s the blame.
Men: stop beating yourselves up. And while you’re at it, stop beating women up. But never forget, whatever you give a woman she can increase. If you give her love she may give you a family; if you give her a house she’ll make you a home; but if you give her any crap…