the universal female eye roll at *that* Saoirse Ronan moment

on the realities of being a woman, and the new requirements of being a nice guy

You’ve probably seen it already. That clip of four men laughing at a joke while a woman tries, and fails, to interject with her own lived perspective as to why actually, it’s not really a laughing matter. Maybe you haven’t seen the clip. Maybe you just recognise that scene as something that’s played out in your own life before.

The clip I’m talking about went a little something like this. Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, Eddie Redmayne and Saoirse Ronan are sat on Graham Norton’s chat show sofa, as Eddie Redmayne is telling a story about the self-defence training he had to do for his recent TV series, Day of the Jackal. He goes on to say that in one part of his training, he was shown how to use his phone as a weapon if attacked. The response from Graham Norton, Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal is that of ridicule and hilarity, with Mescal interjecting to jump off the story and into an impromptu bit of his own, asking the sofa, ‘Who’s actually going to do that, though?’ Norton joins in, Washington laughs along. Saoirse Ronan, however, is not laughing.

As Ronan attempts to interject, she’s talked over, laughed over and ignored, as the men continue to joke about other possible self-defence tactics. After a while, she raises her voice and cuts through with. ‘That’s what girls have to think about all the time.’ Mescal reacts with a little shrug that says, ‘Oh. Well. Ok.’ The men fall into awkward silence, as they’re either embarrassed by their own ignorance or simply, don’t know what to say. Unsurprisingly, the onus of lifting said awkward silence falls on the woman. Ronan lifts it and puts the men ease again with a lighthearted call to arms from the audience, ‘Am I right, ladies?’ Yes, yes she is.

This prompts a huge applause from the audience, and has received the online equivalent, too. In just a few seconds, Saoirse Ronan summed up a universal female experience: that if the thing that happened to you didn’t happen to a man, he’s not really going to take it seriously.

And as demonstrated by the calibre of the men on that sofa who forgot to check their privilege, (or ignored it for the sake of landing a joke as part of a ‘bit’), even the the nicest of guys can be short-sighted and ignorant. After all, she was with some of Hollywood’s most unproblematic, universally loved men. Men who we look at and assume probably ‘get it’ more than most.

But even the nicest of guys don’t get it. The nicest of guys still don’t have a clue about the reality of navigating life as a woman. The mental gymnastics we have to just to leave our homes. To not wear heels that clip clop too loudly. To not wear anything that’ll draw too much attention. To keep our keys in our pockets, in case we need to use them. To keep our headphones in our ears so we don’t invite unwanted conversation, but to not be playing anything through them so we can still hear everything around us to stay vigilant. To share our locations with our loved ones on Find My Friends – just in case.

And it’s the ‘just in case’ that gets me. Because it’s no longer only, 'just in case someone abducts me on the way home’. It’s also, ‘just in case I my mother and I get stabbed in Leicester Square in broad daylight’. It’s, ‘just in case I get found dead with multiple injuries in my own home.’ It’s, ‘just in case I’m coerced into a car and raped by two men’. It’s, ‘just in case my husband of over 50 years drugs me, rapes me and advertises me on the internet for over 50 men (some of them, I know) to come to my home and rape me while I am unconscious’.

The men on that sofa all thought the concept of having to think about using a phone as a self-defence object was hilarious. But this is prime example of, ‘just because you’re not part of the problem, you’re not automatically part of the solution’. The nicest of guys will listen to all the examples of when you, as a woman, have experienced violence towards you because of your gender and they’ll say, ‘Wow, that’s mad. I can’t believe that happened to you. I didn’t know that was something women had to think about.’ Well now you do. So what are you going to do about it?