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It’s International Men’s Day! Run your boxer shorts up the flagpole and let your balls jangle freely in the wintry breeze, for finally, after several millennia of subjugation and repression spent cowering beneath the iron fist of Woman, we can cast off our shackles and smash the glass ceiling that we’re…already…er…standing on top of.

Hmmm.

Since this testosterific event was first inaugurated over a decade ago in Trinidad & Tobago (ironically a country where men celebrating each other, at least in certain ways, is deemed immoral), it has been marked annually with the ceremonial penning of newspaper columns, all titled “Do we really need International Men’s Day?”. It’s like a global feminist trolling festival, inspiring the same sort of incredulous flabbergastery you’d get if some buffoon claimed that the super-rich were a put-upon minority who deserve the same sympathy as offered to the homeless…

However, there are at least two good reasons for IMD. Firstly, it is an overdue nod of appreciation towards men like me, who’ve utterly failed to take advantage of the institutional gender bias in order to selflessly help drive down the gender pay gap. Secondly, it provides a welcome excuse to watch ‘Witness A New Low’ by Bad Guys, without doubt the manliest video of the year. Taking time out from clay pigeon shooting with Monitors man Mat Colegate (check this impossibly entertaining interview in The Quietus), they invite us into a tumescent world where we can revel unashamedly in Men.

Men wearing leather! Men driving cars! Men scaring cats with just a steely, aviator-enhanced glare! Men washing their ample beards! Men chopping wood! Men using buzz saws! Men setting fire to things! Men drinking wine at an innappropriate hour of the afternoon! Men leaping across bedrooms in their dressing gowns like randy flying squirrels! Men growling a carnal melody in between a lady’s thighs! And that’s before we even get to the twin-necked guitars being shredded in space…

And if that, somehow, isn’t enough, just consider the fact that halfway through, frontman Stuart bellows the lyric: “No sorrow, no remorse / FOUR MEN OUT OF HELL ON A HORSE!” as the screen strobes deliriously. Men have done many terrible things throughout history. We continue to do so on a shamefully regular basis. But once the IMD celebrations are over and we’re hauled into Gender Court to face crimes against humanity, this will be the first piece of evidence in our defence, accompanied by the band’s own summation:

“There’s a global information war going on all around us and who’s going to be your guide through the micro-deceptions we face in the minutiae of the quotidian? A fucking misogynist dandy clown? A conspiracist rantman? Peep Show nob? The fucking Beeb? Might as well start a band and fly into space mate. We might not have the answers, but we have a good time. Listen right, just be nice to each other and stay away from the lizards. All our love, Bad Guys”.

Come, brothers, share out the remnants of that open bottle of Jacob’s Creek, and let’s blast into space…

Kier Wiater Carnihan