Men like Scotland's new period dignity officer need to move over

Perhaps it will fit as an episode in a series about people who find themselves famous overnight. They participate in an ordinary event in the ordinary course of their lives, go to sleep in their own bed and wake up everywhere, pieces of themselves fractured in the living rooms of strangers.

Maybe a PR expert will make a show about gross publicity failures. How on earth could Jason Grant's appointment have been signed off? Someone will laugh and a guest or two will run with slack jawed wonder down the list of all the ways in which a college's comms team comprehensively gubbed it.

On Monday of this week the Scottish Government's new Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act 2021 came into force, doing exactly as it suggests - enshrining access to period products for anyone who might need them. A world first, no less - headline grabbing stuff. Until...

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On Tuesday, the Dundee Courier ran an interview with Jason Grant, Scotland's first "period dignity officer" for colleges and local authorities in Tayside, an appointment funded by the Scottish Government but not a government appointment. This was a distinction some of the more impish coverage of the job got wrong.

By Wednesday, Mr Grant's new role was being reported on CNN and on Thursday the Washington Post picked it up.

"FFS," Judy Murray tweeted of the position, neatly encapsulating the thoughts of a great many women.

Here comes a man to mansplain periods to us. Truly the Everest of the genre.

The Daily Mail, never one to shy from an occasion, bracketed "very macho" in a headline about Mr Grant. "Meet the (very macho) new period dignity officer". What makes him very macho? He runs ultra-marathons and boxes and used to sell tobacco.

Stick a Stetson on the lad and we've got a regular Marlboro Man, down to the crimson shirt.

The Daily Mail shows pictures of Mr Grant riding a horse while bare chested, which rather makes one think of Vladimir Putin. As we're on the topic of gender equality and diversity, it's prudent to mention that assigning boxing and running to manly pursuits is the sort of sexism we can live without.

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But anyway, imagine it. You sign up for a new job, your appointment appears in the Washington Post, Martina Navratilova slags it and a newspaper columnist remarks on your likeness to the Russian president. What a week.

I'd love to know how Mr Grant feels about his newfound infamy. For now, we don't know, because he's refusing to talk publicly. Which is a shame, as the job advert for the post - salary of up to £36,000 - focuses on hiring people with good communication skills.

His recruitment to the position is one of the most interesting bits about it; there are pertinent questions to be asked about how Mr Grant found himself in this post. The woman who hired him would appear to have hired him for two previous jobs. Maybe this suggests a bias, maybe it suggests he's really good at what he does.

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The job advert was only up for a relatively short space of time and the hiring body has remained tight-lipped about the recruitment process for this publicly funded role.

"Jason," the group said, "Was the strongest candidate." The Daily Mail can only agree.

It was interesting to see how many attempted to justify the appointment by saying it was purely a managerial role and pointing out that the rest of the team is women.

How used we are to unequal numbers of men in senior posts that this was accepted as some sort of positive.

There is an immediate, visceral reaction to finding out a man has been appointed to a role in what relates to an exclusively female experience, that reaction perfectly encapsulated by Judy Murray.

The leader of Dundee's council, John Alexander, defended the appointment, saying we "don't have male and female jobs". He can tell that to the 800 women who form part of a £20 million equal pay claim against the council, underpaid because they work in job sectors dominated by women.

Mr Grant, in the statement prior to the furore, said he wanted to be viewed as a "positive male role model" and said he wanted to ensure the discussion around menstruation begins at a young age and that "boys and girls are included" in order to bust taboos.

All laudable. But who spearheaded this legislation? Women. Who championed and campaigned for it? Women. And who becomes the public face of it in a "pioneering" new role? A man.

Maybe Mr Grant's story will appear in a podcast analysing the as yet enigmatic question: what do women want?

Yes, we want the taboo around periods to end. Yes, creating the role of period dignity officer is a worthy and progressive move.

Yet, while I'm sure he's perfectly clubbable, might it have been possible for Mr Grant to think he could support the initiative - in his role as a health and wellbeing lead in a college - but didn't have to be in charge of it?

Of the lessons to be learned about this debacle, one is that men need to learn the balance between being supportive and domineering.

Whether I agree with their sentiment or not, it's perpetually amazing to me, the confidence of young men on Twitter telling women what they should think and how they should feel.

Unabashed, brazen and strident, informing women on what is right and what is wrong, despite the fact topics under discussion affect them little and affect women greatly.

I'm sure they, like Mr Grant, believe they are on the side of right but it would serve everyone far better if they shut up, moved over and listened.

"This isn't just a female topic," he said. No, it's important to educate everyone but, for one half of the population, education is for interest. For the other half, it's experience.

The chaps might like to defer to those with experience.