I Won't Die for Equality

摘要：The army is slammed for sexism, but do we want a Mum's Army？

軍隊因為性別歧視而受指責，但難道我們需要一支娘子軍嗎？

Seventy-five years ago all British women were finally given what all British men had been granted 10 years earlier ——the right to vote. First of f the blocks to mark the occasion has been, oddly, the Sun (that same organ, ironically, mostly 'celebrates' women's emancipation with a naked interest in their bulging breasts and shapely bums).

That no one else has yet seemed to notice reflects the fact that the winning side in the equality war doesn't want to waste precious time crowing. They want to get on with dealing the most humiliating defeat upon the remaining enemy: foes such as those employers who pay women less than comparable men; the corporations with an all-male hierarchy at the top; and of course the men who tiresomely persist in sexist words or behaviour.

Like the military. A report last week slammed the Army for sexism, complaining that women are called 'girls' ——quite different, the authors said, from referring to the troops as 'our boys'. 'Boys', it seems, is a good, encouraging, matey kind of word. 'Girls', by contrast, is derogatory and demeaning. This was only to be expected, the authors pointed out, from an institution that enjoys 'partial' exemption from equal opportunities legislation ?nbsp;and thus can exclude its 'girls' from some direct combat positions. How chauvinist can you get?

But hold on: do women really want to turn Dad's Army into Mum's Army, a posse of latter-day Amazons braving the front line, cheek by jowl with their male counterparts? We don't want to stand beside the boys and fire rifles into the whites of Iraqi eyes. Nor are we gasping for a chance to be blasted to smithereens by a cluster bomb. I may not be crazy about being called 'girl', but that doesn't mean I want to be mowed down with the 'boys' in the killing fields.

Yet this kind of job-equalising ——if Jack can do it, Jill sure as hell can do it better ——has long been cherished by social planners, feminist or not. For decades, men-only enclaves gave women their battle cry: let me in there! The xclusion zone in those days ranged from smart clubs, manual work, the Church of England and the armed forces.

Now it has shrunk to a few moth-eaten armchairs in clubland; the golfers' paradise——the Royal and Ancient Club of St Andrews; the Roman Catholic priesthood; and front-line combat.

The head of the Stock Exchange is a woman, female plumbers are growing in numbers (including that Oxford graduate, Nicola Gillison, who made headlines recently because she ditched her consultancy job for a mole wrench), and one in 12 of the Army is female. As for women lorry drivers, that should be no surprise. Women drivers have such a sterling record that insurance companies now offer cheaper premiums in return for the promise that no man will come anywhere near the four wheels of their car.