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It's been a slow burner of a joke and over the last 8 months I've wondered if it would come off, but it was international men's day today and many of the people who I responded to on March 8th after they asked “When's International Men's Day?†got a follow up tweet informing them that it was today and asked them what they were doing to celebrate. They'd seemed so perturbed on International Women's Day, so surely they'd want to do something now they knew the day they longed for was here…..
Nothing went wrong (though there was a weird 3 hour gap with no tweets, so may have lost some) and the scheduled tweets were posted, though often the original tweet had been deleted in the mean time. I only saw one man come back to me, who had on March 8th made a long list of grievances about why men deserved a day, but today claimed that he didn't support days aimed at a specific cause. It almost held up as an argument, if you squinted at it a bit, but did more to demonstrate that the people who tweet about IMD on IWD don't really care about there being a day
All the effort that goes into asking “When's International Men's Day?†is extraordinary when you think about it. If everyone just put that effort into today or even to just donating a quid or a dollar to a men's cause then think what that energy could achieve. I decided to see if the complainers would put their money where their tweeting fingers are and offered them all the chance to donate to CALM, a terrific charity trying to prevent male suicides. Would I raise anything like the £280,000 that you've donated for Refuge over the last two years?
I was aiming for £10,000 but hoped it might be a bit more than that. But by the end of they day we'd raised a useful, but still slightly disappointing in light of previous efforts, £8000.
Anyway, although my March 8th was twice as much work as a result of this, it did mean that today was not too much hassle for me (and there was noticeably much less anger directed towards me this time, though I did see a couple of comments about me making the day about myself, thus uniting the hard-core feminists and hard-core meninists and maybe being the first thing that will bring them together).
And the incredible thing is that one day's quite intensive, but not really all that difficult work has raised £138000 this year (and slightly more last). I am ready to hang up my International Men's Day hat, but it's hard to do that when such huge sums are in the offing.
It's still a great feeling to turn something stupid and negative into something so positive. We're not in competition remember, equality works both ways and I hope that soon people will realise this and fight together, rather than bitch and moan (and then not be prepared to do anything about it).
In the meantime my job is just to get cheap laughs at the expense of people being silly, so I will carry on with that, at least as long as it makes thousands of pounds,
For true equality why not donate to both. Both terrific causes.
