ABSTRACT
The making of a ‘soft man’ One freezing evening in the winter of 1968/9, I went with a friend to see Ingmar Bergman’s film So Close to Life, which turned out to be set in a maternity ward. Because I was quite needle-phobic, and already woozy from a heavy cold, I decided I’d made the wrong decision, and got up to leave. As I did so, a group of about five women turned and looked at me, and one of them commented, ‘Typical man’. I remember feeling indignant, and quite confused by this unfamiliar experience of objectification. Such moments would become more common, and usually elicit a defensive silence or petitioning reply-‘I’m not/We’re not all like that’, or ‘We suffer too’. By the late-1970s the word ‘feminism’ had entered my vocabulary. I remember a woman friend in Manchester saying, quite pointedly, ‘Soft men are no good to us you know.’ She wanted to know whether I was assertive enough to confront other men’s sexism.
