Gentlemen forsooth
One of London’s last remaining gentlemen’s clubs, the Garrick, has taken the highly unusual step of expelling a member, amid rising tensions over the club’s unwillingness to change its men-only membership rules.
Former theatre producer Colin Brough, a member for 40 years, was expelled from the club after sending a series of angry emails to fellow members expressing his conviction that women should be admitted immediately.
Gentlemen don’t display anger. It’s ungentlemanly.
The long saga of the Garrick’s refusal to admit female members attracts regular interest because its membership includes a roster of influential establishment figures and household names. Current members include actors Stephen Fry, Hugh Bonneville and Brian Cox as well as the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, and many judges, including the former president of the supreme court David Neuberger.
And you see this is why clubs of this kind shouldn’t be excluding women. They’re centers of establishment power and influence, so systematically excluding categories of people excludes those people from power and influence.
Michael Beloff KC, who had initially advised the club in 2011 that its rules prohibited female members, decided in November 2022 that he had made a mistake in his original advice and wrote new guidance concluding there was no legal justification for excluding women. He added that the club was likely to face “an expensive lawsuit” if it continued to bar women.
Beloff notified the club’s management of his error and sent them revised advice, but this guidance was not shared with members before a November 2023 poll on attitudes towards admitting women. Of those members who participated in a postal vote, 51% indicated that they were in favour of admitting women, while 44% were opposed, but the club needs a two-thirds majority to trigger a rule change.
Their hands are tied, you see. Regrettable but what can you do? Besides hiding the legal advice that is?
Brough wrote that some fellow members had admitted nervousness about the potential “reputational damage” they would face if it emerged publicly that they were members of a club that banned female members.
He quoted a supportive message from Fry, who acknowledged he felt “ashamed and mortified by the continuing exclusion of women from our club”.
Fry’s email continued: “I fear that I’ve been lax about either resigning, campaigning or making any kind of a noise about this. It’s a mixture of indolence and reluctance to get involved in fusses, allied with a natural incompetence at and fear of political infighting, committees, round robins and all the antagonism and heat they generate.”
Oh buck up Stephen. You’re a manly man in a men’s club, so you could at least skip the whining.
Previous attempts to force the club to allow women have been unsuccessful. When Joanna Lumley was proposed as a member in 2011, prompting the club to take legal advice on the issue, some members scrawled expletives on her nomination card, and one wrote: “Women aren’t allowed here and never will be.”
So don’t let them tell you it’s just tradition yadda yadda. It’s not. It’s that other thing, the m word, that we’re all so tediously familiar with. Women aren’t allowed here coz we hates’em.
I disagree with you about this, Ophelia. I wouldn’t be interested in membership, because I’m sure I’d find such a sausage-fest dead boring. Also, I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. But I believe that allowing men to have men’s-only clubs makes it more possible for women to have women’s-only clubs.
I think that, much better than trying to force the membership to accept women, the correct response would be for a woman to apply for membership on the basis that her gender identity is male. She could subsequently make a big twit-stink about being rejected, and help give these powerful geezers a lesson in what’s good for the gander.
I’m currently a member of an until-recently male-only club. I’ve asked some of the older members why they changed their rules to admit women, and one told me it was because younger men weren’t joining because their wives weren’t permitted to accompany them.
Um … I am entirely for allowing men-only clubs. Do women have experiences that men don’t share, and do they benefit from having places where they can be around only those who do share such experiences? Of course. Conversely, do men have experiences that women don’t share? Yes, and men can claim the same sort of benefit that women do.
This argument I find unconvincing as justification for inconsistently determining freedom of association. Any group can become a center of power and influence, and any group with restrictive admittance can be one that does. That includes groups whose admittance is restricted to minority or otherwise disadvantaged membership.
This is possibly the first time I’ve heard Stephen Fry described as a Manly Man. That aside, I see the argument around men’s and women’s only spaces as being non-overlapping and quite asymmetric.
In principle I think that there are things (both good and bad) that men and women generally feel better about doing or discussing out of the sight of the opposite sex. To that extent separate spaces are good, probably required. To be frank though, that’s really enormously more likely to benefit women than men. See all the perfectly good rationale for saying no to men trying to pass themselves off as women…
In actual practice, the existence of Gentlemen’s Club’s, Country Club’s that allowed only (white) men) etc, is not because the gent’s want a safe space to talk about their feeling, cars, or crack lewd jokes or light farts. Well, maybe a bit. It’s historically where meaningful business, introductions, or quiet politicking has been done. Relationships formed, strengthened, and favours traded. The old ‘smoke filled room’ if you will. Excluding women from that environment specifically disadvantaged them (and black men) from the ability to even be aware what was happening, let alone have access to the opportunity.
So, I’m not keen on gent’s only clubs of this type. I think for the other type of discussions it’s easy enough to carve out men’s only spaces that women generally very politely self exclude from.
I don’t mind it certainly, but it does undermine one’s ability to effectively campaign for women’s single-sex spaces when the gobbos are invading.
I remember Michael Beloff KC (though he wasn’t a KC, or even a QC, at the time) in my first year at Oxford (1961–1962), as one of the most eloquent frequent speakers at the Oxford Union, which I attended regularly during that year. When I joined, as a lifetime member, I thought it anomalous that women were not admitted, but Michael Beloff led a successful campaign to change the rules. Women (and I suppose also men) needed an existing member to sponsor their applications for membership, and I sponsored a woman that I had just met at a sherry party the week before the rules were changed. When she had told me over a glass of sherry that she needed a sponsor, I said that’s OK, I’ll sponsor you, so I did.
The two university magazines, Isis and Cherwell were both in the habit of sending women as their representatives at the debates, and there was no way the old guard could prevent that. The Wikipedia article about Cherwell quotes its founders (in 1920): “We were feeling for a new Oxford …. We were anti-convention, anti-Pre War values, pro-feminist. We did not mind shocking and we often did.”
@Rob, the key word in what you argue is “historically.” That history is in the past now, as shown by your repeated use of the past tense. Breaking up exclusive venues for deal-making may once have been a good reason for pushing to allow women into men’s-only clubs, but it isn’t anymore. If people want to gather powerful deal-making folks together today, in any Western country at least, they can hardly do it without women. Now the few remaining men’s clubs are kept going mostly by nostalgia. I say let the flatulent old coots have their nostalgia and cigars; it keeps them out of trouble.
I don’t think we can argue at this point that men only clubs don’t have a right to exist if we also believe that women only clubs and events do have a right to exist. The issue here is that this club, and others like it are centres of soft power in society because of the deal making and connection establishing that goes on, but compelling the club to accept women against the members will is only going to lead to bitterness on the part of many men. As much as I hate to say it we need to set up alternative sources of influence that don’t exclude anyone based on their sex, then clubs like the Garrick can be left to fade into history naturally.
PS Stephen should just leave if he feels as strongly as he claims to.
PPS Maybe they should try baby steps and let in women with penises first and see how it goes. Anyone wanna bet that’s the main motivation for wanting a policy change?
What about clubs for white people as opposed to clubs for black people?
In what sense are those discrete categories?
Ophelia #9: Yes, private clubs for [demographic subset] are permissible, regardless of what that subset is. Freedom of association is for everyone, even racists.
Nullius @11, is that the law in the USA or globally? Since the Club in question is in the UK, and since ‘we’ are spread all over the globe, that seems a relevant point.
It’s worth considering that the campaign against men (and white) only Clubs of various types was precisely because they were so widespread as centres for soft power and influence denied to all but white men. If we believe that’s a bad thing when there are tens of thousands of such clubs, why are they any less bad when there are only a few hundred. Well, we’ve closed 90% of the gas chambers, job done…
I accept that at present they may be a less important problem than previously, but the arc of history does not fly in one direction as the World currently observes from the collapse of the old rules based order.
I think protection of sex-based facilities and groups can be carved out without supporting these toxic institutions.
i. This is a false equivalence on the level of equating speech and violence.
ii. There’s a difference between the propositions “C should be closed” and “C should be shut down by legal means“. By all means, go ahead and persuade people that they shouldn’t operate or belong to a particular group. That a thing is bad, however, isn’t sufficient reason to curtail fundamental liberties. I believe communism and fascism are bad, but I’m not going to let that motivate me to prohibit the association of communists and fascists, thereby trampling on the very rights that allow me to gather with others whose ideas are deemed by those with political influence to be bad or evil, such as anti-Genderist groups. If we adopt the alternative position, and the goal really is to prevent the formation of any and all centers of “soft power”, then there’s a problem. Any gathering of people in any location can become such a center. We’re ultimately bound to constrain any degree of association, right down to regulating whom I let into my house for my D&D campaign.
iii. Lemma: I get to choose whom I allow into my house, and I get to be rational or capricious in that selection as I will.
But that’s what we’re talking about. Not getting the cops in to nail up the doors, but persuasion.
The USA has, rightly or wrongly, a very absolutist stance on free speech that the rest of the world, even the western democratic parts does not share (again, rightly or wrongly).
Even then, your argument that this is a false equivalence doesn’t hold up. SCOTUS has held that verbal and written speech, actions (flag burning – a violent act), and use of money and other such financial or physical acts constitute speech. I’m sure Nazis would have (and possibly still) argue that violence is political speech. You can’t just view this through the lens of American law and culture.
Providing a place of business that becomes a nexus for the exercise of hidden power and influence is corrosive on society.
I don’t recall saying anywhere in this discussion that I advocate using the law to close such places. Just saying. Also, see above rather peculiarly USA centric view of things.
Sure, in your house. We’re not discussing houses, and before you retort something about private property and how these Club’s are private spaces, so are supermarkets, shoe shops, buses (not City owned ones), many schools, universities, etc etc. Apply the same argument. The same principle. Are we happy to allow them to go back to banning women or minorities? That’s where this absolutist approach ends.
What I’m saying. Nullius is talking as if the story is about the government ordering the Garrick to let women join when it is in fact about members of the Garrick arguing with each other about letting women in. Nobody’s forcing the Garrick to do anything, and the quarrel is internecine.
I think there is a liberal case for allowing it. I can see the case for just flat out banning racial segregation even in voluntary orgs but most of us accept that sex segregation is an acceptable form of segregation in many areas. If someone wanted to set up a girls/womens only computer/board/wargaming group I wouldn’t object but if I accept it as valid for the girls/women I think I’d have to accept the alternative, that the boys/men should be allowed to do the same. I’d hope there’d also be a mixed club for everyone.
It’s not perfect but Liberalism can’t really promise perfection right now, it can only lay the groundwork for a future where many forms of segregation will have faded away. I think that’s what sets woke liberalism apart from it’s predecessors, it’s not willing to wait so it’s committed to reordering society by force of law and even violence if necessary, as we’ve seen from the way its adherents treat the women who dissent from it’s views about what makes a women (ie nothing, it’s all in your head).
As long as enough members are fine with the Garrick being male only I can live with it, but I won’t be rushing to join any time soon…
But, again, Liberalism doesn’t require us to live with it in the sense of not objecting to it.
Ophelia: You’ll forgive me for thinking that some are arguing for actually using some enforcement mechanism beyond disapprobation. I wasn’t the first to read it that way, for what it’s worth. And it’s also difficult to avoid that inference when people say things like, “Nullius @11, is that the law in the USA or globally? Since the Club in question is in the UK, and since ‘we’ are spread all over the globe, that seems a relevant point.,” when I was talking about freedom of association as a principle (about which Garrick members may debate) rather than as a matter of Constitutional jurisprudence.
Speaking of which …
Rob:
Maybe not, but you made it a question of law, so I related principle to law in my response.
Well, I have to say, I never expected “we should use what Nazis might argue as a serious starting point” here. In any case, whether a particular entity, governmental or otherwise, chooses to include some non-speech acts under the category of speech for certain legal purposes is utterly irrelevant to whether it’s reasonable to equate a boys’ club and godforsaken Nazi gas chambers. Distinctions of category, type, degree–they matter., and to speak is only violence metaphorically. Playing language games with metaphor isn’t a false equivalence; it’s the formal fallacy of equivocation.
Oh, stop it. It’s not the same principle, because the principle distinguishes in kind and degree. Are private social clubs supermarkets? Are private social clubs shoe shops, buses, universities, bakeries, restaurants, or Home Depot? No, they aren’t. They are a different category. They aren’t just private property; they’re private association. Am I happy to find a club to which I’m not allowed to apply? No, I’m not.
But it’s their house and their rules, because a clubhouse can be literally that: Sasha’s house, where the lower level is a full art deco bar, lounge, and wine cellar. At what point are members of the club morally required to stop meeting or to bring in particular demographics?
A step further. When do I need to stop regularly having influential people over to my house, causing it to become a center of soft power? If every such nexus is bad, and there’s no distinction between categories, then I mustn’t limit who comes into my house. Certainly not if anyone influential is there. Even more certainly not if such personages regularly make appearance. If I myself or my family are influential and powerful, then I simply must never choose whom to associate with–in my house or otherwise–because there’s no distinction in degree.
We may be approaching this question from different core assignations of value. At what point does the moral right to free association apply? Is it even possible for a unit to be small enough to allow free association in your view? Do you even think it is a moral right?
Were you? Thinking that some are arguing for actually using some enforcement mechanism beyond disapprobation? You’re the one who said, only 3 comments in, “I am entirely for allowing men-only clubs.”
Yeah, I was talking about ethical permissibility. That is, we’re ethically allowed anything that is not ethically prohibited, which distinguishes (1) ethically obligatory, (2) ethically praiseworthy, (3) ethically neutral/uncertain/variable, (4) ethically blameworthy, and (5) ethically forbidden. My statement was to the effect that men-only clubs fall at worst into category 4.
It’s a linguistic habit picked up from too many Ethics courses, I guess. Sometimes I forget which turns of phrase are also terms of art. My bad.