Real men fight, and other kids games.

Tonight my Mam took me out for me and a couple of my nieces out for tea, and a few tables along is this family of four, standard boring nuclear family, two parents, one girl and one boy, who is in the same class as my nine year old niece, and a we can hear the family telling him off, and there was so much wrong with this conversation that I can only give you highlights, but the long and short of it was that when people pick on him he can't get upset, and he needs to take up a sport, and stop eating so much, 'From now on you can only eat breakfast, dinner and tea, and not grown up portions' like dude, what the fuck, he's a child, and not a tall child, I'd be surprised if he can ever reach the worktops, if he's eating grown up portions it's because that's what you're feeding him.

I was just getting over this incredulous lapse of logic, when the 'man' of the family starts saying, 'you need to take up a man's sport, a real man's sport like boxing, shut up telling him to pay football, football's a man's sport, but it's not a man's man sport, boxing is a sport for real men', and that 'men watch football but they're not real men, real men box and play rugby and knock each other about', at this point his mother chips in 'yeah if you played rugby you'd be able to plough right through him', somewhere in the middle of this speech I sent my nieces to the play area while they waited for our food to come, being nine and ten I didn't want them to hear this bullshit.

'Real men knock each other about', now I know you can't judge how other people drag up bring up their kids, and that it's their own business, but who the fuck tells a little boy and girl that basically the real measure of a man is how hard he can punch something?

Now I consider myself a good Northern working class girl, granted I have a blog and a university education (almost), but I also have a 'top for best', I indulge in the occasional Snakebite, and I consider any Christmas without a bust up a dull affair, I know, in my heart, that I am a working class lady, and from my experience and from the accounts of others and through things I've learned, I know that upper class misogyny and working class misogyny are two different things, the misogynistic upper classes consider their wives to be sweet pure little things that belong to them and that can't possibly have been seen naked by another man, regardless of how many women have had his cock in their mouth, (*cough* Madonna/Whore complex *cough cough*), working class misogyny is 'real men don't hit women', women are to be protected, we need looked after, because heaven forbid a women can take care of herself.

Tonight I witnessed the newest little generation of damsels in distress looking for their hero, and big strong men looking to 'knock each other about'. Ain't life grand?