Colby Cosh weighs in on the private men’s club debate.

Stop me if this sounds improbable, but The Canadian Press has turned a social media furor into a news story. It’s what we do now! A Winnipeg electrician named Jodi Moskal has been belabouring the Winnipeg Squash Racquet Club ( est. 1909) for continuing, in conformity with its traditions, to exclude women from membership. Moskal succeeded in shaming the WSRC — one of a handful of surviving all- male, Victorian- style private clubs holding out in Canada against the force of social trends — by allegedly getting a representative to say, “Its your own fault if you missed out because your husband could of joined and besides theres clubs for only women” (sic).

It’s at times like this that even a cranky, morbid, reclusive journalist like me is tempted to consider a “comms” or public relations career in the event some financial meteorite finally zaps his dream job. It’s not a natural choice, but I know I could do better than that guy.

In 2017, an exclusively all- male club of any kind lacks the moral high ground by its nature. It shouldn’t be easy to lure its officers into a pointless argument about sex segregation ( rule one!), and if that happens, own goals like mentioning a “husband” should be easy to avoid (rule two!).

But someone at the WSRC has sense, and was able to locate the stock answer kept on hand for inquiries about the club’s membership policies. The club, someone mansplained on behalf of the board, “can accommodate occasional coed events,” but “we are prevented from converting this co- ed status to a permanent year- round basis ... based on the tight confines of our present location.” Go on, try disproving it!

The thing about this defence is that it has already worked, and is bound to go on working. I haven’t done a proper survey, but it seems to me that the formerly allmale clubs that had fraternal, intellectual, or explicitly economic functions have all gone co- ed. The holdouts, like the Racquet Club and the Cambridge in Toronto, can insist that they have a sports mandate and that they lack the space or the capital to facilitate all-gender participation. These clubs do tend to be in prime locations, and propaganda for the cause of unisex toilets has not proceeded to the conquest of showers — yet.

Everybody who is at all familiar with men’s clubs knows the real truth, a truth explicitly acknowledged in their heyday: they are a refuge. You can fill in “from what?” as you see fit. Certainly women have to factor in there somewhere, but the politest, most respectful way to understand an all- male club or other institution ( a floating poker game, a fantasy football league) is that men need a break, not from women, but from acting the way they act around women. Call these clubs a refuge from adulthood, or from domesticity: again, there was a time when these facts about the club man and his club were shamelessly acknowledged all around.

In an odd way such clubs may be better positioned to survive in the 21st century than they were under gender- equality pressure in the 20th. Women like Ms. Moskal want to crack open all- male clubs not because they dream of seeing vast quantities of septuagenarian testicles, but because plenty of business gets done behind those doors. Moskal says herself she is “OK with a men’s club that’s just for sports.”

This would seem to invite the sarcastic response, “Did you not notice it’s a racquet club?” — but the club’s own marketing talks about how paying members can find “new business partnership opportunities” and “job offers.” Thus is the game given away.

The WSRC could suppress that part of its public messaging, and probably will. But that won’t really solve the problem, which is that men, for now, still enjoy exclusive control of the commanding heights of most businesses and some professions. The gender equality of today, I think, is concerned with attacking the largescale problem directly rather than with chiselling away at the mere everyday means of injustice. Feminists are more willing to consider solutions they might once have considered either patronizing or overambitious, such as mandating female participation quotas on corporate boards or in political institutions.

I do not know whether this evolution is right or wrong, as a matter of strategy. But it may be more likely that feminists, as they build a parallel universe of all- female social institutions, will learn to tolerate the existing all-male ones. Ultimately the idea that men shouldn’t have their own exclusive mental or physical spaces won’t fly. What men have to learn is just thorough professionalism, for the most part: that P-word has always seemed to me to be capable of solving a lot of gender issues in the workplace. (“Should I play grab- ass with a co- worker? Y/N”)

I admit that this is easy for me to say as someone who sells only his own labour, and not even that too intelligently. But those of us who want to enjoy power and make big decisions will have to learn to consciously give women their share of the juice — by means of stupid numerical heuristics if necessary. Which, let’s face it, it probably is. If we can arrive at that day, we can probably have all the Racquet Clubs we like.