Janice Fiamengo points out that the initial loss of single-sex spaces began a long time ago and for what — at the time — seemed sensible and egalitarian reasons:
Robin Herman of the New York Times was one of the first two female reporters ever allowed into NHL dressing rooms, starting with the 1975 NHL All-Star Game in Montreal.
There has been a good deal of talk lately about women’s spaces being invaded by biologically male persons identifying as women. Some women’s campaigners claim that the trans phenomenon constitutes an attack on womanhood itself, an attempt to “erase” women and replace them with men who perform womanhood. Some even call it a new form of patriarchy.
But well before women had their single-sex spaces threatened, something similar had already happened to men. Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behavior that turned many workplaces into feminized fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to. The very idea of an exclusively male workspace or club — especially if it was a space for socializing (not so much if it was a sewer, oil field, or shop floor in which men did unpleasant, dangerous work) — came to be seen as dangerous. In light of the recent furor over single-sex spaces for women, it is useful to consider the source of some men’s justifiable apathy and resentment.
At my new academic job in the late 1990s, a woman who had been the first female historian hired into her department used to tell a story she’d had passed on to her from a male colleague. After the decision had been made to hire her, one of the historians said to another somewhat dolefully, “I guess that’s the end of our meetings in the urinal.” The joke ruefully acknowledged, and good-naturedly accepted, the end of their all-male work environment.
Though this woman didn’t have any trouble with her male colleagues, who welcomed her civilly, she told the story with an edge of contempt. Even thoroughly modern men, the story suggested, held a foolish nostalgia for pre-feminist days.
But was it foolish — or did the men recognize something real?
No one thought seriously, then, about the disappearance of men’s single-sex spaces. The idea that men and boys need places where they can be with other men (defended, for example, in Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men) would have been cause, amongst the women I knew, for scornful laughter. In 2018, anti-male assumptions had become so deeply entrenched that the female author of a Guardian article titled “Men-only clubs and menace: how the establishment maintains male power” simply could not believe that any decent man could legitimately seek out male-only company.
Under the circumstances of mixed groups of reporters crowding into team locker rooms after games, it’s rather surprising how few “towel malfunction” incidents have been reported.
