Think it is crazy to ban a male choir for being men? #metoo
ELLO ’ello ’ello, have you heard the one about the police chief and the choir then? All together now ( OK I’ll stop), it goes like this. A Peter Goodman, Derbyshire’s top of the cops, wants women to sing in his force’s men-only choir. To my mind, it’s up there with ordering that Victoria’s Secret models must join the All Blacks or that Eskimo men should be picked for the Brazilian women’s beach volleyball team. It’s not even apples and pears. It manages to miss the point completely.
The chief constable announced that the Derbyshire Constabulary Male Voice Choir was no longer fit for purpose as it was – as you may have suspected – a male voice choir. This obviously won’t wash in our brave new unisex universe of #metoo and #genderpaygaps.
‘Frankly, a lot of quite old white men singing and representing Derby Constabulary is not the kind of impression I want to create,’ Goodman explained.
Mr Goodman presides over the worst gender pay gap in any police force in the country at 29 per cent, but never mind that. There is a more pressing problem to attend to on his watch.
A bunch of harmlessly bespectacled and balding old blokes (including three ex-officers) who yodel away in vintage embroidered police tunics to appreciative and paying audiences in village halls, without women in t he choral rank and file. He has ordered them to shape up or ship out.
The choir refused. As chairman Kevin Griffiths patiently explained, not only would this mean adding about 50 female voices to balance the lower-voice registers of the 35 men, they were not a mixed choir. Never had been. ‘There’s just something about a male voice choir,’ he said.
I felt pure rage when that last male white rhino died, and this rouses some of the same emotions in the breast, albeit in much milder form (even I can’t compare the middle- aged white man to an endangered species doomed by mankind to extinction).
It makes me feel protective – almost nostalgic – about the fact that nothing can be left untouched by the onward march of gender equality in the name of diversity. Not even a harmless gathering of retired blokes, smartly uniformed, belting out classical music as well as ‘an eclectic mix of hits from yesteryear’, and who rehearsed every Monday evening (and thus got out from under their wives’ feet for at least two hours a week) and have raised £750,000 since 1956 for charity. What’s the harm, where’s the conceivable offence in that? Meanwhile, there are 15 other male voice police choirs around the country – what of them? And all-male close harmonies of mining communities in Wales? Taking this intifada against single-sex institutions to its illogical conclusion, will the Women’s Institute in the end have to admit more men? Women’s refuges take in men? Sporting sides become mixed? Where will it end?
ALL I know is that it seems very stupid indeed to insist that the very quality that defines a traditional institution’s essential character and identity ( a male voice choir, a club, a team, yes even a black- tie dinner) has to be sacrificed in a Stalinist purge merely for the sake of appearance, appropriateness, or what Goodman called ‘impression’.
My beef about the #metoo movement has always been that it does not take #mentoo along with it. It literally does not permit male voices to be heard. The troubling tale of the PCs’ choir that was not PC enough could not provide a more perfect illustration of my point.