So are you a man who’s happy being henpecked? #Metoo

Jonathan Brocklebank

ARE you a micromanaged male? Do you wonder if your other half thinks of you as a clueless infant incapable of choosing your own clothes or performing basic household chores without female guidance?

And is the truth of the matter that, even if you say so yourself, you are a highly functional human specimen with not inconsiderable life skills, some of them in fields where the lady in your life may have rather less to say for herself?

Me too. Or, to put it a more fashionable way, #MeToo.

Yes, I am fortunate enough to enjoy ample micro-managerial input and it is of the variety which may be familiar to head teacher Vicky Bingham, who this week accused women of ‘infantilising’ their men by assuming they are newcomers to the niceties of domesticity.

Mrs Bingham may sound like an unlikely defender of the male ego. Her all-girls school in Hampstead charges £18,000 a year to turn out the kind of confident young ladies with whom state school kids like me did not enjoy engaging in debate.

Yet she insists men’s domestic ineptitude is a myth and that women, particularly the up-to-theireyes professional variety, really must learn to trust their husbands.

She says: ‘I have listened to [friends] lament apparently having to micro-manage decisions about coats, socks, carrot batons, baths and homework on top of demanding jobs. Even if fathers are shouldering their fair share of chores, it seems that many women of my generation still carry the mental load and believe that, if they didn’t, the household would fall apart.’

There is much in what she has to say that I find hugely reassuring – and none of it has to do with the fact I may be less useless in a domestic setting than my partner imagines.

Hysteria

No, the reassurance comes from the familiarity of the portrait – the knowledge that when the head teacher talks about the infantilisation of the male partner, it is true to a greater or lesser extent to millions of couples across these isles.

Here, after endless portrayals of men as incorrigible sexual aggressors abusing their power to intimidate and subjugate the opposite sex, is a very different and, I suspect, much more recognisable picture of male and female interaction in the 21st century.

Here, lurking beneath the hysteria, is a snapshot of what modern relationships actually look like.

I say modern. As far back as the 1970s, the first decade I can remember, depictions of mild-mannered men pushed around by spirited other halves were legion on TV. George knew better than to tangle with the feisty Mildred. The Good Life’s Jerry Leadbetter versus wife Margo? Look away, children. Even Basil seemed to grasp that the real trouser wearer in Fawlty Towers was the scary one in the skirt.

There was something richly comic and blisteringly accurate about bumbling, emasculated men being chided and ridiculed by bossy other halves and, of course, we laughed like drains because it was the 1970s and we didn’t know any better.

If these sitcoms remain funny today it is because we still don’t know any better. Wives exerting power over their husbands brings smiles of recognition. Reversing those roles brings #MeToo campaigns.

The other reassuring thought about Mrs Bingham’s observation is that I see remarkably little evidence men actually mind being treated like children. Indeed, the running joke that, without her, he’d be utterly helpless is one of the chuckles of many couples’ rapport. ‘Did you remember to put sun cream on?’ I was asked several times on holiday last week.

‘Yes, thank-you. I’m not a child, you know.’

‘What about on the tops of your ears?’

‘Oh, sorry… forgot those.’

Hooey

Cue what-are-we-going-todo-with-you sigh and yet more reinforcement of the ‘mother’ and ‘child’ undercurrents with which most of us in heterosexual relationships are by now surely familiar.

‘You’re going to wear that shirt with your good trousers? Look, why don’t you put your stripy one on?’

The expert female guidance – and even the condescension – is gratefully received and, more often than not, acted on by the male of the species.

In high streets across the land ‘useless’ men are ushered by tutting spouses into clothes shops to be kitted out in togs the lady deems appropriate.

In airports one sees men manhandled by their wives, pushed towards check-in desks, told to carry this and hold on to that. Honestly, you would think they were six-year-olds.

Which brings us to perhaps the most reassuring thing of all about women’s infantilisation of their menfolk and their menfolk’s placid acceptance of it. It is quite normal and indicative of something too many of us forget as wave upon wave of politically correct hooey washes through our households – men and women’s wiring is not the same.

That is why #MeToo does not exist for the henpecked hordes smiling through every losing battle with their dominant significant other. It is why husbands do not lecture wives on unflattering dresses or offer helpful suggestions about changing their hairdresser.

We play by different rules – for the excellent reason that we really are different.

On that the micro-manager and I are agreed.