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I don't have a lot of time for men. Men scare me with their football and their Chris Ryan novels and their understanding what the numbers in the names of car models mean.
Masculinity and I have never been that familiar with one another. To me, your average rugby international does not look like an impressively honed specimen of maleness, he looks like someone who stole everything out of a butcher's window and draped it around a pylon.
Nonetheless, I feel the unusual need to come to the defence of what most doctors would insist is technically my sex over a great disservice being done them.
A number of men's groups have been set up at British universities recently with the aim of providing young men with somewhere to go to explore issues of what it means to be a man in the modern world.
You may scoff (you probably will - after all, that's what we do when anyone suggests discussing anything) but there is a serious point here. It's hard being young, as you may remember, not least because you have to work out who you are.
And for young men, under pressure these days somehow to be both steel-sinewed SAS killers and the kind of sensitive souls who would weep at the sight of a rainbow and reach for their Moleskine notebooks with a view to jotting down a few ideas for poems, that task is harder than ever.
Which makes it all the sadder that the reaction to these societies' inception has been so negative.
Olivia Bailey, NUS national women's officer, responded as follows: "Discrimination against men on the basis of gender is so unusual as to be non-existent, so what exactly will a men's society do? To suggest that men need a specific space to be 'men' is ludicrous, when everywhere you turn you will find male-dominated spaces."
You certainly will: you only have to look at the fact that the BBC continues to employ Nick Knowles over any living female member of the species to see the truth of that.
But it doesn't mean that Bailey's response isn't a depressing intellectual and emotional failure to understand the needs of other human beings.
I can understand the confusion. As they always have, most men's clubs prop up the male-dominated world and keep women out.
Even today, for example, Manchester United have very few female players. But these societies aren't about that. They're about emotional support. Even if you conceive everything in the world as being riven by sexual politics, surely you can see the difference?
There are very few self-generated support networks for young men. Well, ones that don't involve paintballing or at the very least wearing identical, specially printed T-shirts in the bar. Why on earth, then, would you be opposed to some being set up?
Depression is an acknowledged problem among the group they are trying to help. Suicide accounts for 20 per cent of all deaths among men aged 15-24.
Opposing societies whose stated aim is to help young men find their way seems to me to be dereliction of care on the part of an officer of the union that purports to represent them.
It's a scientific discovery with a sting in the tail
I don't like wasps. I'm not prejudiced or anything, I just don't like them. They're aggressive, they're intrusive and I find their black-and-yellow stripes to be a little too Eighties for my taste.
I have been known to spend well over half a picnic leaping up and running about like Norman Wisdom on a bed of hot coals.
So it is with trepidation that I read that scientists have discovered a wasp that can cover 100 miles in two days.
This raises the prospect of picnics that begin in Hyde Park and end in Leicester. I used to think those 12ft long sub sandwiches you can get from party companies were just a gimmick. Now I think they may not be long enough.
Putting Mrs T in the picture may not have been wise
Margaret Thatcher was allowed to go back to 10 Downing Street this week for the unveiling of her portrait there. This, it seems to me, was a colossal risk on the part of Gordon Brown.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the politician formerly known as Mrs T (now Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven and The Miami Sound Machine) has never really grasped that she is no longer Prime Minister.
Who knows what she might have done while she was in there? We should send someone round to Manufacturing Infrastructure's house just to check she hasn't destroyed it again. Old habits and all that...
Reader views (2)
Excellent. Amusing and thoughtful. Thanks Chris.
- N O'S, Kentish Town, 25/11/2009 23:59
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Excellent ! at last a genuinely witty columnist.
- Squiz, Islington, 25/11/2009 12:22
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