“When’s International Men’s Day?” is a hardy perennial complaint heard across social media on International Women’s Day. For fourteen years, the comedian Richard Herring has spent the day replying to trollish men with the date – 19 November – and raising money for Refuge in the process. He also inevitably expanded the tradition into a book – The Problem with Men: When is it International Men’s Day? – in 2020. But while Herring’s tradition is laudable, there’s a difference between International Women’s Day and its male counterpart – the former is recognised by United Nations as part of its long slate of international days (albeit only since 1975) while the latter was conceived of in 1992.
Why do so many men not know or pretend not to know that International Men’s Day exists? There are plenty of issues that particularly affect men – among them high rates of suicide, white working class boys underperforming academically, male-on-male violence – but many aspects of culture and society still treat maleness as the default. The dominance of some men’s voices means others go unheard. There are good reasons for International Men’s Day but it’s cursed to remain a punchline.
UN claims of “awareness” prompt my inner Mandy Rice-Davies to raise an eyebrow
That’s part of a wider problem with the largely well-intentioned system of International Days. International Women’s Day shares March with observances for seagrass, zero discrimination, wildlife, disarmament and non-proliferation, women judges, combating Islamophobia, happiness, the French language, eliminating racial discrimination, poetry, Nowruz (the Persian New Year), people with Down Syndrome, forests, water, meteorology, tuberculosis, the right to truth concerning gross human rights violations and the dignity of victims, victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, detained and missing staff members, and the campaign for zero waste.
That long list could look like a cheeky means of meeting my word count but it’s worth seeing them all together. The preponderance of official days, weeks and months of awareness serves companies and politicians. Rather than engaging with a problem, there’s an opportunity to nod towards it: saying the right thing and making the appropriate gestures, genuflecting to the notion of awareness before moving on. The UN claims international days are “a powerful advocacy tool” and “promote awareness and action”, which prompts my inner Mandy Rice-Davies to raise an eyebrow: “It would say that, wouldn’t it?”
International Women’s Day’s origins are much more radical than the pink-drenched, discount deluged, commercial jamboree that it has become. It flows from National Woman’s Day, an event which took place on 28 February, 1909 in New York City, organised by the Socialist Party of America at the instigation of activist, suffragist and educator Theresa Malkiel. In an essay, “Where Do We Stand on the Woman Question?”, she wrote that “the working woman of today finds herself between two fires”. One is her “bitterest enemy”, the capitalist class, which foresees “a far-reaching danger in her emancipation”. The other is the total lack of support from fellow male workers, who “discourage her activity and are utterly listless towards the outcome of her struggle.”
Inspired by the American socialists Clara Zetkin, Käte Duncker and Paula Thiede, German delegates at the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference proposed an annual Women’s Day. Their motion was carried with a plan to promote equal rights and women’s suffrage. The following year, the first International Women’s Day was one of action across Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, with more than a million women and men marching for electoral rights and protesting against employment discrimination.
What would Malkiel, Zetkin, Duncker, and Thiede make of the top search result for International Women’s Day being InternationalWomensDay.com, a corporate website dressed in suffragette purple, hawking packs of leaflets, stickers, balloons, pens and bunting, and written in the cheerleading argot of the professional motivational speaker (“Collectively we can all #InspireInclusion… Inclusion means all IWD action is valid”)? How might their anger grow if you explained that the whole thing is the creation of Aurora Ventures, a “purpose-driven enterprise focused on social and economic change”, whose clients have included Avon, Amazon, Goldman Sachs and BAE Systems?
Tom Lehrer said that satire died the day that Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize. Reading the many bits of corporate doggerel that BAE – an arms company – pumps out on International Women’s Day is like watching satire’s grave being desecrated. “We recognise our power to make a difference,” the company’s HR director wrote last year, in a blog post including the official hashtag (#EmbraceEquity). Well, BAE’s missiles certainly don’t indulge in gender discrimination.
When the stickers peel, the balloons deflate, and the pens run low on ink, what do companies who shout so loudly about one international day or another actually do? The actions they take without fanfare, themed prosecco, or a special colour scheme are what count. International days give corporations and governments a cop out. They are a box to tick, a slot in the calendar to fill, a speaker to book, a report to shove out and forget, a special in the staff canteen, the offer of a course that your employees don’t have the time or energy to attend. If there’s a problem to solve, it matters every day.
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
