Miss Ogyny

Rarely are these columns personal, but I’m severely pissed off by a few recent incidents and it got me thinking about how I am, or was, actually part of the problem. This is my stab at pulling on a solution jersey and playing for the good guys.

I wasn’t there, but I felt the need to apologise retrospectively to my female colleagues who were left in tears a couple of weeks ago by a group of my fellow penis-bearers. More of that later.

As publicans, we have, historically, largely and collectively – turned a blind eye to bar room misogyny in the name of peacekeeping and profit. The large proportion of regular drinkers are male.  This is at odds with the industry as a whole. I’ve always been rather proud of the hospitality trade; there’s a high proportion of female publicans, bar staff and periphery workers, and there is, on the face of it, no major disparity in pay compared to other employment sectors. This is purely anecdotal of course – I have no desire to blur my rose-tinted view of hard-faced landladies ruling the roost or friendly barmaids being as abundant as Australian males being forced to wear shoes at work for the first time.

I do know for sure though that the bawdy bar stool conversations I hear as a landlord and as a customer are predominately from the male voice choir of the alpha drones. Without the reprimands of those that would be offended due to their superior decorum, lack of body hair and absence of testicles, there can be an air of almost limitless abandon.

Whilst there’s an argument to say that if there’s no women around to hear it, is it really misogyny? The only real answer to this is yes, yes it fucking is! And it’s up to us, as publicans, to try and make people realise this. It’s beneficial to society, our fellow workers and, eventually, to business: the more comfortable we make our environment to women, the more women customers we will get. In turn, the more the pendulum swings away from the perpendicular of male dominance, the less comfortable men will feel to express their fathers’ archaic views.

Let’s go back to the incident that left two of our bar staff upset:

A touring sports team came in (let’s not get into which sport it was – I’ve had similar incidents with many groups of males regardless of their reasons of congregation). After a couple of drinks they decided to loudly and confidently discus the aesthetic and sexual merits of our female staff members. Seriously, these were youngish males and would definitely know better, but they had the licence of belonging to a dominant male group and they abused it to the detriment of those that were serving them.

We can change this. Or at least we can help turn the tide. With the rest of society seeming like a strait jacket to the bigots, the freedom of a predominately white, male environment is appealing to those who would use it as a comfort blanket for their pseudo superiority.

This issue is never, ever going to be solved by women shouting down men. The only way we can save our female colleagues and customers from thinking that being belittled and undermined is the norm is for other men and licensees to call out the bigotry.

We, as gatekeepers and hosts, have the influence, power and opportunity to shape our establishments and mould them into environments that influences opinion and attitudes beyond the boundaries of our licences, and the steps we take may, in turn, help our wives, sisters, daughters and mothers have, at least, a drink in a pub without being hassled, heckled or slapped on the arse by a dickhead stranger.