So, What's the Deal With Equality? Five Days a Month Nobody Wants to Talk About

Upward moving females - who are we kidding?

Inspired by the film Ladies First — a thought experiment about the world we already live in, just with better lighting

Sasha Baron Cohen's Ladies First drops a man into an alternative universe where women behave exactly as men have for centuries — dismissive, patronising, utterly convinced of their own superiority. It's funny, in the way that all good satire is funny: because it is also, uncomfortably, true.

What struck me wasn't the absurdity of the fictional world. It was how quickly you recognise our actual one in the mirror it holds up.

So let's talk about a few things we don't, apparently, talk about enough.

The strongest, toughest, least emotional sex... needs a sick day?

Men have historically positioned themselves as the rational ones. Steady. Stoic. Logical. The ones who built civilisations, ran companies, and decided, at some point, that crying was a character flaw.

Meanwhile, approximately half the human population spends five days out of every twenty-eight dealing with a process that, if it happened to a man — let's just say it plainly — would immediately be classified as a medical event requiring national attention, a cable news segment, and probably a telethon.

"If men bled for five days and didn't die, we would not call it inconvenient. We would call it a superpower. There would be a Netflix documentary."

Instead, women are expected to take it on the chin. Or rather, not even acknowledge that there is a chin involved. Show up to work, sit through the meeting, smile through the presentation, and under no circumstances use the word that describes what is actually happening to their body.

Question worth asking: If the "stronger sex" had to manage this monthly, how many sick days would suddenly become standard in every employment contract worldwide?

On the subject of being "emotional"

There is a recurring cultural joke — which is not actually a joke — that women are too emotional to be taken seriously in certain rooms. Boardrooms. Cabinet rooms. Rooms, apparently, that require a certain kind of temperature control.

This is interesting, given that a significant portion of recorded history consists of men declaring wars, flipping tables, invading countries, and assassinating each other over wounded pride. But sure. The emotional ones.

Question worth asking: When a man raises his voice in a meeting, it's called passion. When a woman does the same, what is it called — and why?

Question worth asking: Is it possible that labelling an entire gender "too emotional" is itself… an emotional response to the threat of competition?

What Ladies First actually asks

What Sacha Baron Cohen's film does — perhaps accidentally, perhaps very deliberately — is remove the familiarity from the injustice. When you flip the genders on all the everyday condescensions, they stop looking normal and start looking absurd. Which is, of course, what they were all along.

We don't have equality. Not yet. That's not a radical statement, it's a statistical one. We can argue about the causes and the solutions all day. But first, maybe, we should at least agree to say it out loud.

"The film asks: what if we just swapped everyone's place for a while? The answer, it turns out, is that you'd recognise the world immediately. You've been living in it."

Question worth asking: If we truly believe the strongest, most rational people should lead — and we currently don't have equal leadership — what exactly does that say about the criteria we've been using?

Question worth asking: If the arrangement we have now was designed from scratch today, with full knowledge of what we know — would anyone actually vote for it?

No conclusions. Just questions.

This isn't a manifesto. It's not even a proper argument. It's more like standing in the supermarket checkout, looking around, and going — what is going on here, exactly?

Seinfeld made a career out of that. Just noticing things. Asking why the things are the way they are. Not fixing them. Just refusing to pretend they're normal.

So: what is going on here, exactly?

We have a group of people who, for one week every month, manage considerable physical discomfort, continue working, continue parenting, continue functioning — and are simultaneously described as the fragile ones. The ones who need protecting. The ones who, historically, couldn't be trusted with a vote, a lease, a bank account, or a passport without a husband's signature.

And we have another group who, at various points throughout history, have described themselves as the stronger ones. The logical ones. The ones built for pressure.

Final question: If that's true — if strength and stoicism are the measuring stick — then why have the people demonstrating those qualities, every single month, without complaint, been the ones told to sit down and be quiet?

Just asking. Jerry Seinfeld style. What's the deal?

Satirical opinion piece. Inspired by the film Ladies First (Sacha Baron Cohen). All rhetorical questions are genuine and intended to stay that way.