Boys in skirts? What next? Maybe they’ll start talking!

IT WASN’T exactly standing in front of a tank, waving a hanky in Tiananmen Square, but boy, those lads in Devon were brave. Dozens of male pupils at the Is ca Academy in Exeter, after suffering in long trousers on the hottest June day since 1976, and told they must not wear shorts, turned up the next morning in regulation tartan skirts, borrowed from friends, sisters, girlfriends.

You have to love them, saying that wearing a skirt was ‘quite refreshing’. They have done more for equal rights than every episode of Woman’s Hour, than all those whinging, feminist columnists in the Left-wing press clamouring for genderneutral lavatories ad nauseam.

These lads didn’t moan – they just had a bit of mischievous fun. They made their point, even if one particularly tall boy was told he was showing too much hairy leg.

It was a refreshing change, too, as it’s always girls who garner our sympathy. Endless, and quite understandable, handwringing over their self-esteem, eating habits, confidence, safety, propensity to self-harm, future salaries.

I think part of why this is so is because the people who agonise so loudly in the mainstream media are female journalists and broadcasters, who are required to trawl their psyche, their school days, teenage years, health, motherhood and marriages for trauma and intrigue: the more tortured and unhappy, the better.

Male writers, on the other hand, are rarely asked to navelgaze. They don’t offer up their stories either, thinking to do so would weaken them.

Working on a daily newspaper, it was six years before I found out that one of the male feature writers had a wife with breast cancer, and four years before I found out the man who sat opposite me for 14 hours a day – the paper’s political editor – had two young children; the first I knew he was even vaguely tired was when he keeled over, toppling like a felled tree.

I spent over a decade working with a young man whose one mission in life was to conceal the fact he was gay; any hint he might want to write about his sexual orientation was met with horror, whereas me, his boss, would blithely and willingly tell the world of her anorexia, plastic surgery and lack of sex.

It seemed natural, as a writer, to want to expose my fleshy underbelly; male writers prefer only to show the shell.

That generation of men was never allowed to wear skirts, real or metaphorical. They weren’t allowed to have feelings, foibles or flaws. They were supposed to get on with stuff.

SO, WE’VE never heard that much from boys. I can only imagine what it’s like to be one. God, they have to put up with us, for starters. Make the first move, worry about acne, about providing, about having their sperm stolen, or their children taken away from them in a divorce. Worry about being accused of sexual assault or rape.

I remember a couple of years ago being at a dinner at the Oxford Union, when I was sitting next to the male president of t he debating s ociety. I expected him to be witty, bright and entertaining. He was so rude, monosyllabic and devoid of conversation I wrote a piece a few days later, bemoaning the characterless, anecdote-free, badly brought up, welded-totheir- smartphone generation of intelligent young men who just don’t measure up to us, the loquacious, entertaining, funny females seated on their right. I found out later he had just been (wrongly) accused of rape.

Over dinner, seated next to the most rapacious writer of them all (me), he had managed to keep valiantly schtum.

Anyone else would have named their price. Most women in his position would have been on t he This Morning sofa, smartish, sobbing.

I wish I’d been at school with boys who decided to wear skirts in protest at injustice. It would have broken the ice, at least. It would have meant I saw them as just like me, only hairier.

I had an elder brother who not only never spoke to anyone about his disappointment when he didn’t manage to get his novel published, or make it into the album charts, he also went off and got married without telling anyone – not even his parents. I never did find out what finally killed him.

He was one huge, suffering-in-silence enigma. Only at his funeral did a couple of his former bandmates tell me that, far from being uncaring and aloof, he had secretly sold his last guitar to help pay for our dad’s funeral. You see? I’d have liked to have known that while he was still alive. I would have liked to have said thanks.