Nickie Muir: Manning up to chart course

Nicky Muir.

I have a confession to make. For the years I belonged to the Women's Action Group (before getting kicked out for writing a capping revue skit which apparently "perpetrated the patriarchy") and the Women's Electoral Lobby, I had a serious problem with the Ministry for Women's Affairs.

The name itself annoyed me. What really were women's affairs? Sure, pay equity and political representation were good starters but where was "community economic development"?

It didn't appear that the Ministry of Finance had half its ranks gainfully filled with women. What then was, "women's business"? It seemed Women's Affairs held the undies in the lost property portfolios of stuff that no one really wanted to own. Domestic violence. Child neglect. Rape. Endemic poverty. What was really annoying was that many of the driving factors behind these problems were, and still are, economic; growing inequality, ghettoisation of failed housing projects and a valuing by society of some types of work and not others.

At about the same time, Bob Jones, bless his cashmere socks, stood in a university lecture hall, a seasoned angler, casting for controversy. Trout fishing was never this much fun.

He picked one particularly unattractive woman in the room and, indicating another bodacious beauty, suggested that one would find an easy road in life and the other would probably have to work for a living.

Amidst the general outrage and huffy storming out, I ate my lunch (I had a 10-hour shift ahead of me) and felt he'd made a good point.

Here was, even then, an ageing man of limited physical attractiveness who seemed to attract a bevvy of blonde socialites and who'd made his way in the world trading commercial properties thereby having the means to theoretically pay less tax than the woman who cleaned them.

I would have thought he'd have got a standing ovation from the various wimmin's groups there that day. He was the way of the world they wanted to change, writ large. In the two intervening decades, it often seems like nothing much changes.

It was with amazement then I caught Kelvin Davis on TV the other night talking about the men's business of ending domestic violence.

In the year of the botched roast busters decision, the rape culture debate and the billions spent on putting patches on senseless violence, the quote of the year goes to Kelvin: "It's one thing to be born male, it's another to step up and be a man."

At last, the brothers are coming. We women know our business and we do it well.

You'll find us at the front line in A&E on a Friday night and the chalk-face teaching kids from homes with no books, to read. We pick up at women's refuge and drop off the food parcels.

We know that sure, maybe you were, Maori, Celt, Brit, all warriors, once. But long before that you were navigators, and we've been in the boat with you for a long time waiting for you to chart a course.

Because the truth is that inequality and needless violence are not just women's affairs.