Jim O’Brien: Men must continue to weed out their deep-rooted misogyny and sexism

How much has really changed or do guys float around in a parallel universe?

Candles and flowers left at the scene of Ashling Murphy's murder

Jim O'Brien

January 18 2022 02:30 AM

While I write this, a beautiful, talented, lovely and loved young woman lies dead in Tullamore. As a parent, I imagine that the pain of her family must have the weight of eternity.

As a father of daughters, I am only too aware of how vulnerable they are in a world where might may not be right, but often wields the upper hand.

They too are conscious of this and will often phone and stay on the phone while walking from one place to another, particularly in the evening or at night.

I was born into a man’s world. Aside from teachers and nuns, the only women in positions of power and influence were India’s Indira Gandhi, Israel’s Golda Meir and, at a later stage, Maggie Thatcher.

All the ‘serious players’ in the world were in black suits, aside from the Dalai Lama and the Pope. In the world of farming, be they in wellies or suits, at the boardroom or on the tractor, men occupied and continue to occupy the seats closest to the levers of power.

I went to an all-male boarding school, a place I remember fondly. However, in hindsight, it was not good for us young males to spend seven months of each of these formative years in an all-male environment.

Women and girls, almost by virtue of their absence, were viewed through the prism of extended pubescence as exotic, rare creatures to be wooed and won, or as objects of more base desires.

Then I went on to another all-male environment, a seminary, and from there into a church, where gender imbalance is no accident of history, but a clear and present policy.

I want to be careful not to blame these institutions for my male ills — I have to take personal responsibility. All I know is I had a lot to learn when I emerged from them.

My use of the word ‘emerged’ might lead you to believe I was locked away and sheltered from the world, but I wasn’t. I was very much at the heart of life, accompanying people through the ecstasies and agonies that go with being a human on the planet.

Ironically, one of the spiritual goals was to be ‘in the world but not of the world’. This often found people like me floating around in a parallel universe. I most certainly emerged as a man that needed a lot of work done. When I met my wife, I would say one of the first things she had to do was civilise me.

In writing this, I do not want to cast aspersions on my former colleagues — the vast majority were and are the gentlest and most lovely of men. I am talking for myself — whatever it was about me, the years in predominantly male environments left me incomplete.

Fate decided I needed to be taken in hand and it gifted me with a family of women who, I’m sad to admit, have to continue their mother’s work of reformation and transformation. This occasionally means eyeballing me to explain in simple terms how the world is different for women and often not that pleasant at all.

The reality of modern men, while it is much changed from that experienced by our fathers and forefathers, still has strong residues of what went before. Millennia of misogynism and sexism do not disappear over a few decades.

They are deeply embedded in the fibres of our culture. Even among men who might regard themselves as sophisticated, together and urbane, there are strong traces of the sins of our forefathers.

These find expression in the nods, winks and nudges that still go on between men when women are out of sight, out of earshot, and even when they are not. Potent traces are to be found in men’s social media traffic, in our emails, in the things we receive and forward.

While these might be regarded as a bit of craic, they stir up the residue of something deeper and more sinister, something that has not gone away, you know. Once stirred up, it can create the conditions for rotten things to happen.

Like every father who loves his daughters, the murder of Ashling Murphy has made me face the volatile nature of the world they live in. It has also made me ask myself how I, as a man, in thought, word or deed, contribute to this volatility and to the persistence of a culture where some men conclude they have a licence to kill.