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Richard Herring: The funny thing about International Men’s Day

The comedian is a crusader for the cause. Especially on International Women’s Day

Richard Herring: “Equality works both ways”

Deirdre Falvey's face
Deirdre Falvey
Mon Nov 19 2018 - 09:13

An oddity of International Men’s Day is that people actually tweet about it most around International Women’s Day, almost nine months earlier. By 9.30am on this year’s International Women’s Day, for example, on March 8th, International Men’s Day was trending on Twitter, mentioned in more than 15,000 tweets.

One prominent tweeter each year is the comedian Richard Herring, who has made it a personal crusade to tell people about International Men's Day. This March he remarked on Twitter: "It's that time of year where my twitter timeline is 90% @Herring1967 telling men when International Men's Day is."

This was in response to outraged questions about why there wasn't an International Men's Day, too. "Yeah that was bothering me," he replied. Men should have a day too right. So I travelled back to 1992 and set one up. It's November 19th."

This year Herring came up with an idea for reducing the number of questions he needed to reply to. "Hey @realDonaldTrump," he tweeted, "can you help me out by letting your followers know that INtemational Men's Day is November 19th. Just got a feeling that if you tweet that my workload will fall by about 12000%. Cheers. I will help you out with your wall or similar impossible task in return."

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The comedian also said: “A lot of men seem to think a day that isn’t directly aimed at them is an open challenge... International Women’s Day is not against men.”

He says: “I do more than anyone to promote the day. The problem is the vast majority of men are more concerned about pointing out perceived injustices – and ignoring all the ones that make IWD so passionately supported – than doing anything on the day.”

And he does more than have a bit of crack with it. In March Herring set up a JustGiving page in aid of Refuge, the domestic-violence charity, and raised £150,000, or almost €170,000. "If you think about it, equality works both ways. So if you think men don't get equality in some areas, then striving for equality will help them too."

Richard Herring