Hilary Fannin: When did masculinity get mixed up with misogyny?

The article was headlined “Five reasons to date a girl with an eating disorder”, and it popped up on my laptop screen complete with an image of a skinny girl in a red dress with her head in a toilet bowl.

I kid you not. Just what you need to brighten up a bleak November morning, eh? After the green bin has blown over in a squall and the cat has regurgitated its breakfast at the bottom of the stairs, an unpalatable nugget of online life arrives to crowd your screen.I don’t think the cat has an eating disorder, by the way. She doesn’t usually chuck up her breakfast.

I suspect she just doesn’t like the oh-so-fishy tuna chunks wrapped in seal caul and shredded non-biodegradable disposable nappy, or whatever combination of erstwhile sea life is secreted inside her overpriced pussy-dinner sachets.

As we’re on the subject of pet food (oh, were we?), I’d like to know what cats ate before the advertising industry recalibrated our maternal guilt to respond to the pitter-patter of four tiny paws and the plaintive howl of a furry carnivore stuck in its flap. It’s some trick; I practically have to remortgage when it’s time to replenish her larder.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. I’d been watching that recent YouTube clip, which has been doing the rounds, generating debate on the subject of street harassment. The clip shows a young girl walking through New York city, wearing a simple crew-neck T-shirt and a pair of jeans. During the course of her 10-hour stroll she receives more than 100 catcalls and comments from total strangers, all of which have been edited down to a short film.

Gone viral

The piece, made by an advertising agency that wants to focus public attention on the issue, has gone viral, on a new platform for a debate that feels as old and unappealing as Methuselah with a comb-over.

How representative was her experience, some ask. Others are wondering what all the fuss is about. It’s just words, yeah? If someone shouts or whistles at you on the street, because you’re a woman and you happen to be walking on it, that’s fair enough – it’s just a bit of fun, right? Nothing to get your 501s in a knot about.

Is catcalling harassment? Probably, yes. Our sensibilities are affronted when someone dumps a rusting washing machine in a place of scenic beauty. We shudder when toxic waste runs into a blue lake. So why should women have to house the untreated effluent, the crude, unreconstructed machinery of sexual aggression that flows out of the mouths of some men, any more than sightseers should have to endure a tomb of white goods scattered along a leafy road?

A la carte feminism

Having viewed the short film, I then watched a young media-savvy male pundit and blogger complain through his expensive dentistry about women dabbling in “a la carte feminism”.

“What’s your problem?” he asked. “There’s nothing you women want more than for some guy to tell you you’re beautiful.” A comment that made me feel like the cat after a bowl of decidedly fishy tuna chunks.

Anyway, a squadron of tech-savvy pixies must have been monitoring my search history, as, next morning, I awoke to further blogs from an online organisation for “heterosexual masculine men”, including the aforementioned confection, “Five Reasons to Date a Girl With an Eating Disorder”.

You can imagine the content, or maybe you can’t: variations on a theme of how pliable young women with eating disorders are, how easily exploited, vulnerable, fragile, such cheap dates, given to low self-esteem.

I saved this nugget from the article for you before I hit the delete button: "You'll be dealing with a tastefully insecure girl who's eager to please. In a world where the 'retail price' on the typical western woman continues to skyrocket – while their quality continues its precipitous decline – there are some real gems to be found in the bargain bin."

Further investigations into the site excavated this jewel: “Sadly, yesterday’s masculinity is today’s misogyny.”

Misogyny has nothing to do with masculinity though; the words shouldn’t even belong in the same sentence.

But hey, the site explicitly discourages comments on its content from women or homosexuals, and who am I raise my little head from the ironing board and throw in my tuppenny-ha’pence worth?

I’m the one, after all, down on my knees cleaning up the cat puke.

At least I now know which direction to fire it.