It’s the hot new dad-brag and all the best men are using it: I don’t change nappies. You want to know what I do? Diddly-squat, that’s what. “It is all right, I have lots of help – hot and cold running staff,” Robbie Williams told the US show Access Hollywood, speaking of the birth of his fourth child. So that’s all right then. His wife, Ayda Field, may not have a hands-on husband, but he knows how to raise a smile with a cheeky metaphor likening his economic inferiors to household plumbing. That’s a keeper.
This dad-as-50s-throwback routine last took a parade with Russell Brand, who admitted last year that nobody would really trust him to look after his own children for 24 hours. That isn’t really what a father is any more, we cried in dismay – like a babysitter, only grumpier and less competent. That’s not really what domestic intimacy and respect is about. But Jacob Rees-Mogg had already effortlessly scooped the title of Worst Dad, In Every Way, two years before, when he said that he had had six children and never changed a nappy.
Let’s not dwell on how annoying this is, since you can quickly become drained. What are they trying to say with this nappy-fixation, and what masculinist narrative do they think it serves? Plainly, first of all, they are saying: fine minds and/or rebellious spirits don’t concern themselves with excrement. Someone has to, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to.
The not-exactly-subsonic murmur is that women are better suited to the world of poo, being – it would be ungentlemanly to delve – somehow closer to its essence.
Just in the shamelessness of the announcement (none of these people would ever say, “I’ve never made my mother a cup of tea”, even though I’m thinking the likelihood is that they haven’t), they are signalling something else: that real men can speak real truths, and any man who can’t say: “Woman, you’re better at this than I am,” in his own home is some kind of husk.
That is what they intend to convey, anyway: an overall impression of superiority rooted in faeces and the avoidance thereof. What the world actually hears is the sound of an identity hastily constructed out of cliche and bits of old pipe, which is rather tinny and not masculine at all.
