Men will still want a Jolly Boys' Outing when the girls can join The Garrick

Demanding that a club admits women doesn’t stop men from meeting to talk shit about football, organise a golf trip or tell bad jokes while getting a bit drunk

I am like most of you in that I’ve never been inside a grand London private members club and don’t anticipate doing so at any point in the foreseeable future. I am a member of a private members club but it is the altogether less fancy and lah-di-dah Cullingworth Conservative Club. I doubt that, for all that my club is a fine old institution selling decent beer in a convivial atmosphere, much shady deal-making or convenient back scratching takes place in its hallowed halls on Station Road.

I am, however, curious about the strange obsession of the media and media-grifting politicians with grand London clubs and, specifically, one called The Garrick:

“For too long, the Garrick Club has stood as a symbol of exclusivity, a bastion of power maintained by the privileged few – predominantly white men who hold sway over the decisions affecting our society, our political system, our justice system, our media, and arts and culture.”

So wrote a bunch of those media-grifting politicians and activists as they complained that it is a terrible scandal that a private members club exists that doesn’t allow women to be members. You would think that, in the Garrick’s posh corridors, secret deals and plots to exclude women are hatched. I’ve a suspicion that far from this sort of sinister activity, much of what goes on is far more prosaic and that, were women to be admitted, they would quickly find the Garrick a place of banal conversation over not especially good dinners.

The criticism of The Garrick mostly focuses on the fact that grand and rich women can’t join rather than the wider criticism of clubs as places where the great and good meet to shaft the rest of us. It is quite funny to see proposed lists of women who The Garrick should admit, a splendid mix of politics, media, law and luvvies designed to show those men that women also want an exclusive place where they can meet with their exclusive pals.

What is never answered, is why we should be bothered by a private club’s membership policy? Or why we should be worried by the fact that some men want to spend time in an exclusively male environment? We are told by the protesters that “...members network and establish relationships that extend into their professional lives while socialising and dining in halls and at tables from which women are excluded…”. But I don’t need a private club to do that, I just book a table at a decent restaurant and invite whomever I choose. And if I only invite men, that is none of anyone else’s business. I might ask one of those invited to talk to us about his work or to present his thoughts on an issue of the day, which might interest the other decision-makers around the table.

All of this reflects the idea that government and its agents in the media want to make everything legible to them:

“...state capacity depends in part on “legibility”—the breadth and depth of the state’s knowledge about its citizens and their activities—and that legibility is crucial to effective, centralized governance.”

In a modern technological state legibility extends beyond the convenience of land registers, voter lists, surnames and uniform standards of measurement, and begins to encompass ever more intrusive demands for identification and the wider collection of personal data. For much of the last 200 years, we have (at least in the UK) been able to go about our lives without people demanding identification or collecting, with or without our knowledge, data on our activity. This no longer applies and each extension of legibility (from paper to photo to biometric, for example) is sold to us as a benefit, as making us safer or our lives more convenient.

But the state does not simply want us to be legible so as to perform its services better, it wants also to use this knowledge to impose its ideology of behaviour. The Garrick Club and other exclusively male spaces contradict the dominant ideology of behaviour which demands that male only spaces are, by definition, against the interests of society, especially when those spaces are used by men seen as rich and powerful. By contrast there is (outwith the debates around transwomen) no such expectation around exclusively female spaces:

“If you’re on the hunt for a female private members club that’ll see you networking and making lasting relationships, all while having fun in the process, we’ve rounded up London’s six very best at the top of their game. From AllBright to the University Women’s Club, these are the ones to join.”

The Garrick Club must be forced to accept women because our increasingly feminised culture demands that men not meet in exclusively male environments. No such expectation applies to women because women meeting and excluding men is empowering to women and allows them to escape the patriarchal expectations of mixed society. AllBright was even launched on International Women’s Day to stress the feminist rightness of an exclusively female club.

The result of this inconsistency (and something of a change to the way in which men socialise) is that men create ‘illegible’ institutions in order to sustain the men-only environment. American writer, Aaron Renn noted the emergence of informal men’s groups in the USA:

“What’s more, even if an all male organization managed to exist, becoming a member of it could be hazardous to your health, so to speak, if the media decided to make an issue of it, as they’ve been known to do.

What I’ve seen developing organically in response to this is groups of men creating informal men’s retreats. These are not formally organized institutions or networks. Rather, they are friends or birds of a feather who get together for a “guy’s weekend” that is social, but critically also has some professional purpose such as having speakers giving talks on leadership or particular industries.

Because these groups are not incorporated, don’t have official membership lists, and may not even have a name, they are far less legible to society at large. It’s hard to tell men they can’t get together for a weekend with their buddies to drink beer and shoot guns, for example.”

What we see here is a prohibition effect. Just as bans on alcohol or tobacco create a black market, societal or state suppression of a form of social activity (the all male group) creates an illegible version of the thing society has suppressed. Demanding that a club admits women doesn’t stop men from meeting to talk shit about football, organise a golf trip or tell bad jokes while getting a bit drunk. And because it is how the world works, sometimes those men will talk business in between more important conversations about football or gangster movies.

While it is of no consequence if The Garrick does or doesn’t admit women as members, the effect of so doing will only mean men opt for less formal ways of enjoying the company of other men. There will be little dining clubs and groups of Arsenal season ticket holders meeting before a home game because that is what men -at least some of them - want to do. Put more bluntly, even if (as some would want) you ban clubs altogether, all you would get is a less obvious set of networks, meetings and gatherings performing the same function as those clubs.

Much of the criticism we see directed at The Garrick is, of course, merely performance designed to get media attention. Labour MPs like Liam Byrne choose to use parliamentary time to ask the UK’s Cabinet Secretary about his membership of a private club rather than about his actual job as the country’s top civil servant. Byrne and others do this not because they care anything about Case’s membership but because the media, with its preference for gossip over news, will lap up such petty nonsense. And because the resulting pressure on the club may get that institution to admit women making for a great victory in the battle against the patriarchy (or something). Meanwhile men will continue, on occasion, to prefer a jolly boys’ outing without women, with banter, and in the company of mates.