Chapter 6: Jack’s Room

Jack was lucky. He had managed to get an entire room to himself in a large Edwardian house not far from Hampstead Heath. The ceiling leaked and one of the windows was cracked. He wasn’t sure how long he would be able to go on paying the rent but at least he had a door that he could close to leave himself on his own. It was better than living in one of the university hostels.

As he got through the door he noticed a letter on the mat. He was pretty sure what it would say. It could wait for a while.

He kicked off his shoe and pulled out the folded up pamphlet from where he’d hidden it. He’d had it under his foot all the way back from the bar and it was looking pretty dog-eared. He put it down on the table and tried to smooth it out to get rid of the worst of the creases.

“MANifesto” the title page read in a hand-printed headline. The words “Men organising to protect their rights.”

Jack decided that his first thoughts about how it had been produced had been correct. The pamphlet had probably been typed on an old- fashioned manual machine and then photocopied. You wouldn’t want to do this sort of thing on a computer that might be sending whatever you typed in off to who knew where. The front page article listed all the rights that the authors felt New Order had taken away from men. The wording was simple, the messages clear. There was no attempt to stir up anger, just a calm documenting of the erosion of rights that had gone on over the last few years since New Order came to power.

Inside there was a call to action. “Three steps to reclaiming your rights” the heading said before going on to call on men to resist regulation, reject sponsorship and reverse the erosion of male rights. The last one wasn’t going to be easy to achieve, Jack thought, especially since there wasn’t going to be another election for four years at best. The first two steps, though, looked like something men could get behind, and take some political action. Too many men had gone along with regulations and the sponsorship scheme without really seeing what an impact they would have on their lives. Maybe some form of civil disobedience would be enough to convince New Order to roll back some of their more oppressive ideas?

He turned over another page. On one was an announcement of a rally to protest the male segregation regulations; the rules that kept men indoors after 6:00pm, forced them on to certain buses and banned them from certain streets. It was taking place on the coming Saturday in Fitzroy Square. “In the shadow of London’s Phallic Symbol” the text said beside a drawing of the Post Office Tower that had been altered to exaggerate its similarity to the male reproductive organ. Jack smiled, he could imagine the drawing would annoy a lot of people in government. On the other hand it would appeal to just the audience it was intended to reach. On the opposite page was a picture. It was a pin-up, from the 1990’s Jack guessed, with a busty girl displaying her assets while smiling out happily at the reader. He’d had a collection of similar pictures in his teens. “Remember when this was how women looked?” the caption read, “It’s time to change the rules.” It certainly wouldn’t meet with the approval of anyone keen on New Order’s Respect Agenda but, while Jack didn’t think such images were a good idea, there was a long way from thinking that to thinking that such pictures should be banned, as they were.

Maybe he would go along to the rally, he thought. He wasn’t the sort of bloke that usually went on protests. He’d never really been very politically inclined and the haranguing that some of his female fellow students handed out to anyone that expressed an opinion out of line with New Order orthodoxy hadn’t encouraged him. Still, you couldn’t just roll over and ignore the stuff that was going on. And it might be interesting to hear what these people had to say.