Anika Wells, Australia’s Sports Minister, has come out swinging her heaviest club, opening a new front on the war against ‘the patriarchy’ by wanting to ‘see more women playing golf’ in Australia.
She appears to have been motivated by a recent staging of some ‘patriarchal’ guerilla theatre at a prestigious (and expensive) golf club in Victoria where a male club member dressed up in skirt and blonde wig to inquire at reception whether, because he self-identified as a woman, he could access the offer of cheaper membership fees for women which the club had recently made to try and boost the proportion of female golfers on is fairways and greens from its current 18 per cent.
The male trio involved in staging and recording the stunt were having a laugh, whilst making a principled point, but the golf club’s po-faced management were not amused and expelled the three malefactors for two months for protesting the unequal, but perfectly Woke, treatment of men by the club.
Said one of the jokesters:
‘I understand we want to grow the game, and we want more women and whatever they can do to get more women to play, we’re all for that, but this is not the right way to go about it.
‘I think what most other clubs … right around Victoria do, is offer a discount on a joining fee for junior memberships and that’s certainly a way to get to get more participants, but to isolate one section with a special membership is just totally unfair and probably not thought through because there’s a lot of people that financially find it difficult to pay their subs each year.’
James Sutherland, head of Golf Australia, backed club management. ‘Diversity’ and ‘inclusion’, of course, are wonderful causes which require that ‘people who protest, harass or campaign against efforts to correct historical under-representation in our sport’ must be cancelled with misandrist fervour. Amongst the double standards of righteous wokeness, discrimination against men, and ‘affirmative action’ in favour of women, is near-mandatory.
Women have had to struggle for equal rights, in many fields from voting (achieved over a century ago) to golfing (the last of the exclusively male golf clubs, St Andrews in 2014 and Augusta in 2016, flew the white flag a decade ago) but with equal treatment comes equal obligations as well, such as paying the same fees as men. Women use the golf links, and make divots in so doing, so paying the same as men for their maintenance, and for club facilities, is similarly only fair.
When it comes to golf, as my one round three decades ago cruelly revealed, I am with Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw or any of the quotable suspects who said it first, that ‘golf is a good walk spoiled’ and it seems like most women are of similar mind because only some ten of the female sex had taken up the cheap rates, so perhaps a lot more women than men don’t actually fancy playing golf all that much. All the special appeals about the ‘structural barriers’ to women’s participation (unpopular access times, equipment designed for men, the ‘male golfer’s gaze’, etc.) can not hide a basic sex difference in proclivity to play the game.
Either that or most women have taken the principled position that unequal fees are condescending to women and discriminatory towards men, and they don’t mind paying mates’ rates. They do object to being especially privileged because of their sex. Only the indefatigable feminist patriarchy-hunters appear to be agitated by this latest affair, backed by their virtue-signalling allies across the sex divide, and by Labor ministers in full finger-wagging mode – Anika Wells is the Minister who has also recently enforced equal representation of men and women on all professional sporting organisation boards from 2027, or risk having their government funding withheld.
The feminist ‘bitter-enders’, so adept at finding fresh outrage over stale causes, are still intent on fighting old battles long since won and righting old sexist wrongs by instituting thoroughly modern sexist wrongs – par for the Woke world, you could say.
