Old Boys’ Club
The Camp Hill Borough Council as my dad described it in the 1970s and 1980s is now commonly and derisively known as an “old boys’ club,” something my generation and every one after it was taught to revile. When I heard the term growing up, I presumed it meant a group of mean old men who excluded women for no good reason other than the fact that they were women.
It was easy to teach young men to abhor the term, if for no other reason than that the thought of hanging out with a bunch of old guys and no girls was the last thing on the mind of a teenage boy. (In the 1980s, my friends and I used to make fun of a television ad campaign that always ended its commercials showing a bunch of guys drinking Old Milwaukee around a fire and the slogan, “It doesn’t get any better than this. . . .” To which my friends and I would always say, “Yeah it does! Where are the girls?”—not to mention better beer.)
But seriously, what a crock. What is commonly referred to as the “old boys’ club” is another term for camaraderie, and camaraderie is unique to men. Getting together to do good work around a foundation of friendship (usually involving a lot of mutual ridicule) is something men have always done. Men and women can work together, and they can even build great friendships, but a group of women will never share this camaraderie, which is peculiar to men, and a mix of men and women, no matter how dear the friendships between them, will never share it either.
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J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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