Shocking news for older men

The world is cruel to older men. It gives them embarrassing medical matters to contend with, just as they’re losing other cherished symbols of potency, like authority in the workplace, as they retire. Nothing is the same once you lose your desk and your subordinates, always watching your moods and, unknown to you, communicating with each other in code when you’re truly appalling.

Men who used to feel important make pests of themselves as they adjust, interrogating weary wives over the cost of lamb chops, and whether makeup remover, which costs more than a dollar, can really be called essential.

I’ve seen their lips moving as they check supermarket dockets. It’s busy work.

To their annoyance, older men often discover that women – wives – have friends they’ve never met, interests they’ve never been curious about, and have become briskly independent. This is unexpected and unwelcome.

Hope lies in joining organisations like Grey Power, where it’s possible to replicate the hierarchy older men once inhabited. I commend it. It’s a useful lobby group.

But women who are neither wives nor subordinates also join, and there lies a problem. They’re possibly the generation of 70s women who took to feminism and danced naked singing IAm Woman at secret meetings of their covens.

OK, not naked.

A clash of genders at the Grey Power annual meeting in Wellington in May, reported this week, illustrated misunderstandings I suspect are common among an older male generation. Dr Lisa Wildmo-Seerup wanted to speak, though a remit had been put on how many people could comment on remits, we’re told. She insisted, grabbed the mike, the president’s order was given, and three men wrested it off her. Other women have described ungainly incidents.

Former Grey Power federation president Tom O’Connor says such clashes of opinion among members are common. The role of president, he said, is very demanding, ‘‘unless you’ve had some military training’’. Feel free to laugh a carefree girlish laugh at that.

It’s not just older men. The behaviour of men of all ages toward women fills the courts, where at least there’s a framework to deal with it. It crops up in workplaces, even in the Labour Party.

Similar undesirable behaviour surfaced at Wellington law firm Russell McVeagh, criticised in hindsight last year for a boozy culture that may partly have explained inappropriate sexual contact between young female law clerks and male partners. Dame Margaret Bazley’s damning report hopefully warned off imitators.

That women don’t like being mauled, manhandled, groped, ordered about and ridiculed has come as news to some, particularly men perceived by women to be powerful enough to affect their hiring and promotion prospects.

That makes for an ugly dilemma, as described by several women connected to Labour, as I understand it, who were driven to confiding in National deputy leader Paula Bennett, to her evident delight, making the matter political.

Labour mishandled this, as it mishandled earlier claims at a Young Labour event, but it seems it had no template for dealing with what until recently was tolerated behaviour.

Few women take sexual complaints to court for the good reason that they seldom result in a conviction, and the process itself is seen as demeaning. There has to be a better way.

In this case both the Labour man and the party president have resigned. Bennett has seldom looked so energised, but I doubt there’ll be a kill.