A Reminder That International Men’s Day Exists, And It Falls On The UN’s Day Of The Toilet

November 19 is International Men’s Day, the day when opportunities for thoughtful discussion about genuinely serious men’s issues are hijacked by keyboard warriors shrieking about how feminism is on a search-and-destroy mission against the world’s testicles.

If you’re brave or foolhardy enough to venture onto Twitter on November 19, you’ll get a good idea of the conundrum this day routinely embodies. On the one hand, the #InternationalMensDay hashtag is full of conversations about mental health, liver disease, cancer, and empowering the marginalised voices of LGBTI men and men of colour. On the other hand, it’s also filled with rants about the evils of feminism and trailers for MRA documentaries, so there you go.

Thursday is #InternationalMensDay & we’re asking people to park the small talk & discuss #BiggerIssues. Join us: https://t.co/h50Iwf2ZdG

— CALM (@theCALMzone) November 16, 2015

International Men’s Day has an unfortunate habit of attracting people who loudly bemoan feminism “silencing” discussion around issues like male sexual violence, mental health and identity, but who conveniently ignore those same issues 364 days out of 365. Google Trends shows that searches for “International Men’s Day” in November are historically rather small compared to those done in March — the time of year, coincidentally, when International Women’s Day takes place, suggesting that lazy What About The Mens complaints dominate the conversation around IMD far more than any valuable examination of health, wellbeing and gender relations from a male perspective.

Hovering over all this is the fact that International Men’s Day is kind of tone-deaf, given that men in the aggregate enjoy far more economic, political, social, cultural and legal capital in most societies than women do. Ben Pobjie did a pretty excellent round-up of why the men’s rights movement harms far more than it helps for Junkee back in April, and this motion moved last IMD in NSW Parliament by Greens Upper House MP Mehreen Faruqi raises some fairly salient points as well.

(While we’re on the topic, that old chestnut about family courts being biased against fathers in custody disputes? Total garbage. In an investigation for November’s issue of The Monthly, journalist Jess Hill explored the horrifying extent to which Australian family courts are awarding sole custody to fathers with proven histories of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, out of a desire to counter a perception of decisions being unfairly weighed in favour of mothers. Read that article.)

All of which makes International Men’s Day a pretty unenjoyable time for everybody, which is why it’s oddly fitting that it just so happens to fall on the official United Nations World Toilet Day.

For those playing at home, World Toilet Day aims to promote the fight for clean sanitation and drinking water in developing countries, where millions of people die each year from diseases associated with unsanitary environments like diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid. It’s also worth noting that, according to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, “women in particular bear the direct brunt” of inadequate access to basic hygiene and sanitary services, as well as an increased threat of rape and abuse due to the lack of privacy that toilets provide.

In fairness to International Men’s Day, the UN only mandated (heh) November 19 as World Toilet Day in 2001, whereas IMD was first commemorated in 1992. Unhappy coincidence? Perhaps. Evidence that the global misandrist conspiracy has infiltrated the United Nations to bring about a New World Order of feminist tyranny? JET FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL FEDORAS, PEOPLE.

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Tip of the fedora to Osman Faruqi for pointing this out on Twitter.